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July 23, 2004

SHITFUCK

Will we never learn? The early bird, and all that. Sloth and distraction have ruined us as TLS joins the growing list of those who have beaten us to the punch comparing James Wood and Dale Peck. (Although Peck is summarily dispatched and the piece becomes a love letter to Wood.)

There are, it is true, moments when one admires Peck’s directness: the short shrift he gives to so-called “identity fiction”, for instance, or his peerless definition of bad postmodern prose as “a footnote that doesn’t know when to stop”. The recurrent problem with Peck’s denunciations of bad writing, however, is that they are themselves badly written. He excels at the metaphoric mix-up. In an aggressive essay on Sven Birkerts he warns that “a critic whose own hands are stained with so much carelessly spilled ink ought to be more careful about the mud he flings”. Just so. In a self-justifying afterword concerning his critical belligerence, he observes that: “My sharpest barbs tend to be directed at writers I genuinely admire, or in whom I see genuine, wasted talent. This is because I think of myself as kind of mother hen, not so much of writers, but of the novel itself. Fiction is like dance: it’s susceptible to the egos of its practitioners”. Faced with this paragraph – moving as it does with such spellbinding clumsiness between harpooning, poultry and dance – one might conclude that Dale Peck is not a man to trust on matters of literary tone.


Like Dale Peck, James Wood has little fondness for the late-twentieth-century novel, though Wood’s fastidious and mandarin utterances on the subject could not be further removed from Peck’s bullishness. Writing on Iris Murdoch’s philosophical essays in 1998, Wood noted, with a characteristic flourish of simile, that Murdoch “returns fondly to Shakespeare and Tolstoy, like someone returning to the city of her honeymoon”. The city of Wood’s own honeymoon is, unmistakably, Henry James, though he also appears to have holidayed happily in the work of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Knut Hamsun and Joseph Roth. It is from James that Wood derives his tenet that good fiction must contain “characters of free and serious depth”. It is from James that he derives his belief in the unique capacity of the novel form not only to describe human morality in action, but also to reach out and act on the moralities of its readers. And it is from James, too, that he derives the title of his astringently brilliant new collection of essays, The Irresponsible Self.

Hey, next time we have something resembling a good idea, will you guys please make sure that we actually do it??

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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