The Elegant Variation

UNSUSPECTED COMMONALITIES

I've had my issues with Leon Wieseltier - haven't we all? - but this, I thought, from today's review of the Bellow letters, was excellent:

Metaphor is the juxtaposition of disparate elements of the world in which an unsuspected commonality, an illuminating partial likeness, has been discovered, and the more unlikely the juxtaposition, the greater the consequent sensation of the unifying of the world; and so the range of a writer’s metaphor is a measure of the range of his cognition. 

I'll share that one with my students tomorrow night.

I've been quiet the last few days - work on the novel has resumed with real purpose, churning out my own metaphors.  I'm bearing down hard on finishing up Part One (there are two parts), and so I will close up shop here a bit early as I travel east for the holidays. But I'll be back around December 1, talking about my latest obsession - Tony Judt's almost unbearably lovely The Memory Chalet.  Until then, cook the stuffing outside the turkey, friends.  

 

HEBREW HARRY AND NOVEL III

It's been a while since I posted a new Harry cover here, though they do keep coming.  But the latest arrival, the Hebrew edition of Harry, Revised, is too good not to share with you, so here it is:

MOTEV will kvell.  Such naches.

Also wanted to alert you that registration is now open for my UCLA Novel Writing III class, and it is filling up quickly, like its predecessors.  The required text will be Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, and after that I'm taking a semester's hiatus, so if you are interested, do sign up.

ENFIN

Houellebecq wins his Goncourt.

“Michel Houellebecq, at last!” declared Le Monde after the chairman of the Goncourt committee stood before a crush of journalists outside the Restaurant Drouant in Paris to confirm Houellebecq’s triumph for his latest novel.

The publication of a new Houellebecq title is a box-office event in France, and La Carte et Le Territoire , his quietest, least provocative novel, has been glowingly reviewed since it appeared in September.

Previously at TEV:  Textually Transmissible. 

ONE MINUTE WITH JOHN BANVILLE

One minute with John Banville, courtesy of the Independent.

Which fictional character most resembles you?

Phoebe Griffin in my Benjamin Black novels, particularly the latest, 'Elegy for April', in which she becomes really interesting. My agent Ed Victor says I am in love with her, but I think I am her.

 

I AM FUNNY

James Wood takes the recent Booker Prize winner, The Finkler Question, to considerable task in the New Yorker this week.  (Subscription required.)

The novel’s prose may be calm enough, but the novel’s form will seem exaggerated, because it is monochromatically devoted to funniness, as a fever is devoted to heat. Howard Jacobon’s “The Finkler Question” is an English Comic Novel, in this sense. It is always shouting, “I am funny.” Jacobson has a weakness for breaking into one-line paragraphs, so as to nudge the punch line on us. The effect is bullying, and, worse, bathetic: we have probably already predicted the joke by the time we reach its italicization. There is a delicious quality of overstatement in P. G. Wodehouse that Jacobson may be searching for, but Wodehouse’s exaggerations are sublime in part because they constitute a magical and separate universe that has its own laws and “codes.” Julian Treslove, the novel’s sad-sack hero, a forty-nine-year-old nebbish Gentile, suffers from a “sense of loss,” which is that all he has really wanted, all along, is to be a Jew. There is a secondhand quality to Jacobson’s portraiture: the outlines are garish rather than vivid. And Treslove’s admiring stupidity constantly pushes the representation of Jews and Jewishness toward caricature. This vision, in which Jews are God-like, and non-Jews must inevitably become either God-lovers or God-haters, has the functional utility of interpreting anti-Semitism as a twisted form of love, while by the same token suggesting that philo-Semitism is a twisted form of hate. The novel is ultimately politically fatalistic in similar ways. Needless to say, this is a decisively male and modern version of Jewishness, much influenced by the historic pugilism of Philip Roth’s weaker novels. It also appears to be Jacobson’s preferred version of both Jewishness and Jewish comic fiction. Forced down the funnel of a reductive brand of English comic writing, this vision issues in caricature.

Now you all know I revere Wood; and I have not yet read The Finkler Question, though I plan to.  (It's here on my desk as I type this.)  And Wood frames the problems in the context of a certain kind of English comic novel.  But his objections reminded me very much of his response to Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, a response I disagreed with here, and it does leave me wondering if he has a blind spot regarding certain types of (admittedly broad) Jewish humor.  From the new review:

I found that I was regularly writing in the margin of The Finkler Question, after a statement such as, "Whereupon he stormed out of the house," the quiet objection, "No, he didn't."

From the Krauss:

Repeatedly, the reader comes to the end of passages in this book and intones to himself (in Alma-ish block capitals): I DON’T BELIEVE YOU.

His review approvingly cites Bellow and Svevo, but Finkler and History are books that sing in a different key and it sometimes seems Wood won't acknowledge that distinction.  As I said, I haven't read Finkler, so mostly I'm just thinking out aloud as the weekend settles upon us ... 

HARRY MULISCH DIES

Harry Mulisch, the great Dutch novelist, has died at 83.

The Assault brought Mulisch to the attention of the English-speaking world, but it was not until the publication of The Discovery of Heaven, in 1992, that Mulisch's international reputation was secured. A 900-page saga of divine intervention in which an angel-like being is given the task of returning to heaven the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, the book was an extended mediation on topics ranging from astronomy to philology, theology and architecture. In a poll published in 2007 Dutch readers voted it the best Dutch novel ever written.

For those new to Mulisch, check out his NLPVF page and his page at the Complete Review.

PULLING NO PUNCHES

Saul Bellow was "possibly at his most Jewish" in his letters, according to Jonathan Wilson.

Saul Bellow’s letters, the last reproduced in the newly-released Saul Bellow: Letters written in February 2004, a year before his death, already have an antique flavor. They are beautifully wrought dusty figures in the carpet before the avalanche of emails and tweets that await us. Which is not to say that the letters aren’t vital and combative, no punches pulled from beginning to end. He starts early on in adult life bashing Mary McCarthy, and at 83 he’s still got the balls to let Philip Roth know what’s wrong with I Married a Communist. But honesty for Bellow is almost always a measure of friendship. And if you dish it out you have to be ready to take it; and take it he does. Sadly, we can’t get his correspondents’ p.o.v., but we deduce from Bellow’s replies who’s swinging for him and who isn’t.