Auld Lang Syne

And resume. Happy New Year, kinder! So, that was a long vacation, and I'm sorry. I have successfully navigated some claims on my time, and now we’re back: in the spirit of backness, I'm officially turning the page on Pnin (sorry, Pnin) and declaring a new book...at the bottom of this post (surely you all remember the heady early days of this blog in which I communicated mainly by e-mails that had 800 words of throat-clearing followed by the book pick at the end; and here we are again). Before I get to that, I want to say some things about another one that got away: our old pal Henry James.

Not the real Henry James, but David Lodge's Henry James, the fussy old failed playwright who is the going concern of Author, Author, a book of which I claimed that it was thin on top, and which I held out hopes that it would get portly in the middle. These are some hilarious jokes when one remembers that Henry James himself was both of those things, and because I am actually laughing right now as I type them for the second time, I can see why I am often lonely. Anyway, I read the rest of that book, along with most of Kafka's short stories, on a trip to visit my grandmother in Florida a few months ago, but only remembered to tell you more about them until just now. Oh well.

One of the reasons that I was originally fascinated by the idea of this book was because I liked Henry James and because I liked the sort of decoupage idea that a successful and established writer would want to plaster a different successful and established writer all over one of her novels. To this end, I bought Author Author and The Master of Petersburg and decided to get cracking. And then, best laid plans as you know, of course, and I wound up not reading them for a while. So here, belatedly, is what we have to say about: the Purloined Author.

Though, before going on, this is what C. Auguste Dupin has to say about a method for finding a purloined letter: “When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is anyone, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart as if to match or correspond with the expression.” That’s what Dupin learned from a schoolboy who hustled for marbles, and it set me to imagining Lodge fashioning the expression of James’s face, or the lightly bearded Coetzee fashioning the expression of the massively bearded Dostoevsky. But none of that happened in these books I read; the Master of Petersburg reads an awful lot like Disgrace, and Author, Author looks an awful lot like Changing Places. Neither book knocked my socks off; I don’t know if they would have, had one sounded more like Crime and Punishment and the other more like the Ambassadors. That may have been worse, actually, netting us a kind of limp parody or, god help us, something like the Oxen of the Sun chapter from Ulysses.

The Lodge book had a few moments that seemed like the explanations to jokes; at one point, his Henry tells his friend du Maurier that his cousin Minny, for whom he had stilted romantic feelings, had “a burning desire to do something great with her life.” Du Maurier responds: “Like Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady?” I cannot imagine a circumstance in which Henry James would ever need reminding whence Isabel Archer, and I cannot imagine a friend of his thinking that he needed such reminding. That is the problem with this guy, the protagonist of Author, Author: we frequently are reminded that he is Great Novelist Henry James, which gets irksome. It is as if people kept asking Hamlet if he felt melancholily Danish; to be part of a believable universe, it is better if that sort of tag is just assumed. This is not to say that the book is irrevocably scuttled; just occasionally bothersome. In fact, I enjoyed greatly the section in which James’s play opens miserably; its panoramic view (of other notables sitting in the audience) and its lack of Henry James proselytizing (all he does is fidget) made it an interesting portrait of an artist as his play flops.

The Dostoevsky of the Master of Petersburg is not constantly reminded of his Dostoevskiness, which is slightly odd given that unlike the events of Author, Author, the plot to which he’s purloined is almost entirely made up. It is built up out of some facts about a historical nihilist named Nechaev, some from Coetzee’s biography, and some from a suppressed chapter of Dostoevsky’s Demons. Out of this stew we get a peripatetic author, who gads about Petersburg thinking Dostoevsky things (beauty will save the world, gambling is great) in Coetzee’s short, present tense sentences. (For some reason, I can’t imagine the actual Dostoevsky abiding the historical present tense, by the way.) In both books, I found myself consistently wondering just why these authors had been impressed into protagonist duty, and unable to come up with much. Michiko Kakutani finished the Master of Petersburg “marveling at the waste of Mr. Coetzee’s copious talents on such an odd and unsatisfying enterprise.” I’m with her. Like the letter in Poe’s story, Dostoevsky seems to just sit available in the open – in his own writing – while Coetzee dismantles the tables all around him, searching for what’s really going on.

I don’t know if this spells the end for these other-writer books with which I thought I’d be so delighted; I’ll hold out hope for Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun, about Shakespeare. But! In book club news, here we shift back to the safer territory of books about thinly disguised versions of their own authors, with: the Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano, a book that the part of me that pretends that I have Janet Maslin’s cell is shocked I haven’t read already. I have actually started it; it is fabulous. Expect fuller updates later in the week, as we begin a new and newly committed year of unpacking my library.