New Fiction
from The Reader, TRoL # 16

To start on a personal note: Luckily, though I often have panic attacks when I think I'm running short of good books, literature turns out to be-despite all the attacks it suffers and the widespread view that the 'book' is about to die-all but inexhaustible. But for the Reader (as for the writer), the difficulty lies elsewhere. How are we to know what's good and what isn't? Good books may make their way through word of mouth, and for decades, Saul and I would exchange postcards, letters and talk with this introductory line: have you read…? Nothing gave us more pleasure than recommending a writer one of us thought the other should read. But word of mouth is not enough. It presumes literary friendships and the regular exchange of information.

At one time, matters were otherwise ordered. People visited one another and stayed, in those more leisurely days, for a weekend or more. A good host left carefully selected books on the night-table. By the time that life had disappeared (c. 1945), bookshops had taken the place of hosts. These were not emporia like Barnes & Ignoble, where publishers paid for display, but places like John Sandoe in London, where the staff were themselves all readers, each with his particular enthusiasm, and often some knowledge of one's taste in books. But this was a phenomenon largely limited to major cities. That left the general Reader, by the 1990s, with few trustworthy places that might recommend good books. By then it was a matter of magazines that carefully reviewed new books. These, today, have shrunk to a handful. By the time I had finished university, in America, the New York Times Book Review was already in steep decline, a decline that has continued-with the occasional blip-to the present. The New Yorker still had reviewers of prestige (Edmund Wilson was a pretty reliable guide) but that too has since fallen off sharply. The New York Review of (Each Other's) Books started out brilliantly, but fiction-my true love-gave way steadily to polemical politics. Leaving what? Well, the one indispensable review, The Times Literary Supplement and, I would like to think, Other Readers.

I am one of these. The readership of this magazine is supposedly made up of Other Readers who are, God knows, few in number. But in a country of 250 million, Saul and I hoped that a portion of one percent of one percent of that number (twenty-five thousand) might be attuned to the same literatures as ourselves. We didn't think we should dash bad books but instead point out some of the high points of our own reading.

As it happens, the books that have appeared since our last issue are ample proof that good books still exist; they just have to find their readers. Here are some of them. (One of the best, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, is reviewed elsewhere.)

Stefan Chwin, Death in Danzig, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm (New York, Harcourt, $24.00)
One of the marks of a real writer is that he makes sure that no part of reality ever disappears entirely. Historians may perform this service, but it takes real writers to make such events vivid, to imprint them on our collective memory. I vaguely knew, for instance, that among the many victims of the Second World War were the Germans expelled from East Prussia-in the case of Danzig (now Gdansk) an exodus that is meticulously recreated by Stefan Chwin's Death in Danzig. And like all such good novels, Chwin's account is understated and richly embedded in topography and the details of daily life. Danzig, of course, is Günter Grass territory. Chwin is a very different sort of writer from Grass. He sees no need to mythologize. He observes richly, mysteriously, combining the histories of many Danzigers into a seamless tale of disaster with a background of hope and humanity.

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York, Back Bay, $13.95)
A tot vanishes on a hot morning, a lawyer sees his much-loved daughter killed, a struggling neo-Hippie mother loses her temper and axes her husband. These are the interconnected elements of a very noir, disturbing novel that is deeply based on the powerful presence of trivial effigies (a lost doll) and tragic human situations. Atkinson is a writer formidable on details and straightforward narrative, and the result is a bleak view of contemporary Britain, its civility lost, its fictions (such as perfect childhoods and caring parents) still believed despite the evidence to the contrary.

Gert Hofmann, Luck, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (New York, New Directions, $23.99)
This beautiful and remarkable story of a father and mother, daughter and son, taking place on a single day on which the father, a failed writer, decides to move out, is an absolute miracle of bravura story telling, with not a word too many or too few, with everything seen and heard but not psychologized or explained. The father is cursed with romance and failure, his wife with practicality, their daughter with a need to question the reality of every statement and the son with events that are beyond his comprehension. The prose is limpid to the point of extreme understatement and the whole novel is infused with a mixture of poetry and humor. A gem, superbly translated by the author's son, Michael Hofmann.

Jane Miller, Relations (London, Jonathan Cape, $30.15)
It took me some time to realize that the Jane Miller who wrote this family history that spans several generations in discrete chapters was the same lovely lady who, married to the critic Karl Miller, had served me many a Saturday tea on the way back from Chelsea football games. She has written a beautiful, reverent book-brilliant about sibling relationships and their jealousies-that teeters over, occasionally, into excessive psychological analysis, but is nonetheless representative of a kind of modesty, earnestness and self-doubt that is rare today. Seldom has the intellectually enterprising cast of mind of the Victorian family, its concern with religion, politics and general uprightness, especially by its women, been so well or so economically and sharply perceived.

Richard Stern, Almonds to Zhoof: Collected Stories (Chicago, Triquarterly, $29.95)
This thick volume of forty-nine stories, for which the enterprising publisher is to be congratulated, confirms something real readers have long known: wordy sometimes, coy at others, always clever, insightful and a brilliant stylist in a dozen veins, each voice unique, Stern can sit happily alongside Bellow as a teller of tales. He has the kinds of thoughts, ordinary and extraordinary, that mark the true writer from the false, and sets them down in dazzling sentences. "Gaps," for instance, trumps every story ever told about falling in love in middle age and the relations between grown man (and father) and nubile girl (his daughter). It's full of sententiae from which we can all learn: 'Beyond human contrivance lay terrible blanks,' says its hero, William, 'a man out of sympathy with the times.' 'The world's vacancies had to be stuffed with bilge. The human job was to see bilge as itself, not wisdom.' Amen. For sheer variety, for language-energy, for voice, for control, Stern makes his younger successors pale, but have readers still the patience to enter his lofty, super-intelligent world? He makes it easy by writing so well, but who's going to get him his readers, those happy few? The thought makes me sad.

Jeremy Treglown, V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life (New York, Random House, $25.95)
Treglown's Pritchett is everything a writer's biography should be. V.S. was cocky, ambitious and lacked a proper background for a literary career in the 1920s. As a result he became a professional writer of great skill and penetration, as good at belles-lettres and literary criticism (sans theory) as he was at the short story. 'Works of art,' he once wrote, 'are written because something is lost or finished. They are like memorials' He was moral, upright, distinctive and, in this instance, dead right. He was also lucky, in his last marriage, and a prodigious worker. Treglown captures him and the shackles of the Grub Street that was, that awful sense of being chained to words, with calm skill. But then V.S. was the last of his kind. He worked for his living. Today's hot shots, who can't touch him for perception, for his ability to listen, seldom rise above flaunting for theirs.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (New York, Knopf, $24.00)
This story of human clones trained, educated and poeticized to become available body parts, really never gets to grips with the moral questions with which it flirts in so pedestrian a way. While it is a compulsive read and contains more than a few traces of those rather ordinary human relations such as love and loss, it is devoid of the very 'soul' that its characters search for. I have always distrusted Ishiguro's impasto of prosaic detail, his sheer, deliberate monotony; here, he carries it even further, and the science-fiction overtones don't help him out of the slog. This is not to say this is a bad book or unworthy of attention. It is neither. But I suspect that most readers, while interested, will ask more questions than Ishiguro provides answers for.

Sybille Bedford, Quicksands: A Memoir (New York, Counterpoint Press, $24.95)
When I was a very young writer I received, quite out of the blue, a wonderful letter from Sybille Bedford, whom I knew then only as the author of that magical, pre-war evoking book, A Legacy. Quirky, discreet, complex, sybilline (the right word, despite the pun), I thought then, and think now, that she had the art of describing lives minimally and obliquely: that is, letting a conversation, an expression, a brief scene tell us more about the character than an acreage of words. I never wanted to know what toothbrush LaGuardia used or what Henry James was up to on a given Wednesday. I love my John Aubrey and his almost mediaeval reduction of the people he knew to their humors and their illnesses. Sybille Bedford, now in her late nineties, is our Aubrey. She says what she chooses to say, and says it very well and very vividly, but she is a minimalist, an anti-bulimic, and will never, I suspect, make it big on TV's confessional shows. You can imagine what they would make of this (typical) passage, in which Mrs. Bedford speaks of her mother's most recent lover:

He wanted permanence; she was facing that perennial question: how far am I from forty? On such lines actions evolved. In phases. They met, face to face, she with requests, not lies. Be patient, please. He was patient; as well as tolerant, unreproachful, good-tempered. He must have been a man without much vanity, or very sure of himself, that phantom stepfather-to-be. (I never got a glimpse of him in person.) They met more than once, at pleasant places; she still liked him, his company, the subjects they were able to talk about, yet she longed to be elsewhere. He did not prevent her departures, asked no questions, only refused almost serenely to take the fling as anything more than that. 'Tout passe: we have yet a future to live.'

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Sightseeing (New York, Grove Press, $22.00)
This collection reveals a young writer-Chicago-born and Bangkok-educated-of considerable and marketable talent. The stories, exotic background, mysterious (to us) family relations, curiosity-driven sex and all are well-written, engaging and… There begins the problem. Are they attractive because we learn in them about how a Thai adolescent, besotted by things American, gets himself formed? Or because they show the true writer's gift for human stories in which 'setting' is only incidental? One can't tell yet is the answer. There's still too much of the creative writing class in here. A little bit of preciousness goes a long way. They have appeared in all the expected places, Granta, Zoetrope and such. No doubt The New Yorker will follow. But I missed a strong auctorial voice: anything, in fact, that might command my attention.

Richard Wollheim, Germs: A Memoir of Childhood (Dufour Editions, $24.77)
If ever there was a book condemned to be overlooked by the Common Reader, this posthumous memoir by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Richard Wollheim is it. That it exists at all is as an act of piety. That it has its defects as a memoir-it is over-verbal, often hysterically accurate, and often hyper-explanatory-is obvious. But I would hope that some readers will want to explore this dense, memory-clogged and enormously interesting book. The easiest way to describe it is as a sort of Bildungs-essay, an examination of growing up in two (or more) cultures. More accurate would be to call it an essay on the formation of a fine, perhaps overly-sensitive mind. The reason for reading it lies in the fact that Wollheim was an outstanding representative of a generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals transplanted into the Anglo-Saxon world, a member of a generation whose father was a friend of Diaghilev's and who transformed himself into a typically self-tormenting yet generous member of the academic upper classes. From intense self-scrutiny much can be learned, and this memoir, which extends from childhood into Wollheim's first acquaintances with art, has much to offer. It is the tone that may keep the unwary reader away. Not everyone today would write, 'It was many years after those visits back-stage with my father that I first brushed against a woman's body.' What is riveting here is Wollheim's sense-appetite, the way he perceives light, sound and shapes, colors and human beings, everything as seen through eyes and ears that must have been analytical at birth to have learned so much.

Ingrid Mann, The Danube Testament (London, Elliot & Thompson, $21.95)
This distinctly weird novel, winner of the Sagittarius Prize for a first novel by a writer past sixty, reminded me most of the case-studies of madness published by late-nineteenth-century alienists. It has an interesting history in that its original publisher, having sent out review copies, folded; the bankruptcy receivers then pulped all the remaining copies, considering it unsaleable. They may be right. But like many books I would not otherwise have read, this one reached me by way of recommendation (from the recondite Johnny de Falbe of John Sandoe Books.) It is not a terribly 'good' book, in the sense that an editor could have done much to loosen the inflexibility of the writing (which is more than half Viennese), but it is a highly interesting one in which the narrator, S., is a schizophrenic who was captured by the Russians toward the end of the war, and whose Nazi parents both killed themselves. Hopelessly obsessive, his joint sickness and health-he functions in the real world and yet knows he is deeply sick-is held up to the light by the visit of his Aunt Mia from New York, accompanied by her granddaughter Amy, who on arrival gives birth to a baby 'fatally marred.' S. feels compelled to murder the monstrous child. As my film-producer friend, John Houseman, used to say of some dubious scripts he read, Ça ne promet pas. And I wouldn't try to pitch this book to any producer now living. But the analysis of these complex Austro-American connections, and particularly of S.'s appalling fate-to be so completely lucid and yet so sick-is deeply moving. Suffering always is.

Peter Carey, Wrong About Japan (New York, Knopf, $17.95)
Carey's latest book, a scatter-brained (that's what comics do to you) trip through Japan with his fetishistic son, is yet another Carey tour de force. He could be ironizing, but I doubt it. The Japanese (at least their authors) pride themselves on their difference. Like the English, they are islanders and entitled to be eccentric-when they are not, as in businessmen and eager-to-get-ahead students, being simply tediously wed to shopping and cell-phones. A recent trip persuaded me that the country of Kawabata and Mishima was going nuts, but then I feel that when I visit England, too. I also admit the world of comics is extremely alien to me. Especially when, unlike Blondie, its heroes are bloodthirsty and definitely unrelated to anything I know. But I also admit to being a great admirer of how Carey, in person so affable, writes in so many different voices. It takes a half-hour to read, you'll learn a lot about the comic-book world (more than you may want to know), and Carey is relentlessly lucid as a reporter.

I will close with two books that I think relate to the dilemma in which contemporary literature finds itself. On the one side are the highbrows (a minority within the minority of educated readers). They occasion me the greatest anguish, and I shall never forget, or forgive, the very highbrow (and brilliant) critic who chastised Mr. Bellow and myself for publishing a (contemptuous expression) 'Lady writer' whom he thought beneath his dignity. On the other side are the lowbrows (the vast majority, from Kirkus reviewers to the metropolitan book sections) who actually don't know how to read anymore and who think literature (for which read, books) is just another commodity that, if packaged and marketed successfully, can turn a profit. These two sets of folks just don't talk to one another, and the one who gets left out in the cold spaces between them is the common reader.

Jane Gardam, Old Filth (London, Chatto & Windus, £10.99)
Jane Gardam is one of those writers of whose talents I'd heard nothing whatever, though she has published fourteen novels, and if any of them are half as good as this one, I shall be reading her whole. (I claim to be the only man who has read all of the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould's novels!) Old Filth relies on a joke, Filth standing for 'Failed in London, try Hong Kong'. It is about a crusty lawyer looking back at a long and successful career spent mainly in the Far East where, indeed, he was born, and orphaned. It is definitely not a heart-warming book. Filth is not only hugely witty, he is also totally in command of his wits, though at eighty, he is crotchety and liable to forgetfulness. It is written with high art-the sort aspired to by writers who are generally considered more acceptable to the bookish, say Julian Barnes-and crackles with deadly lines and improbable characters that would be ready-made for satire had not Mrs. Gardam had a heart bigger than a house and had she not infused every page of this book with feeling and understanding.

Manuel Vázquez Montalban, The Buenos Aires Quintet, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor (London, Serpent's Tail, $16.00)
This, the last of Vázquez Montalban's fictions featuring the fastidious gastronome Pepe Carvalho, presents itself as a series of five interlocking detective stories whose common origins lie in the 'disappeared' years of the Argentine dictatorship. As such, they are excellent and true to the form. But the form cannot contain the overspill of ideas, poems and desperate characters, past and present, from Borges to Peron, which the author has made his own. The writer is idiosyncratic to the point of being frequently elliptical, sometimes lyrical, and always, stylistically, in a league quite his own. Tabucchi and Camilleri may be good in the same genre, Sciascia was excellent, but Vázquez Montalban, let loose on Argentine territory, that most advanced and yet traditional outpost of the avant-garde, is spectacularly brilliant: so terse that whole pages and chapters have to be read with the same attention one devotes to 'serious' writers. Does this mean that he mucks up his plots or his characters, or that he's somehow not serious? No, he was an immaculate writer on all accounts, and his genre-which after all includes Conrad, Kipling, Simenon, Maugham and Greene-is one that carries as much, if not more, 'intelligence' about our times than do many writers treated as 'literary' successes. No names need be mentioned. Edmund Wilson was right to ask 'Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?' in regard to the classical mysteries of his day (Mignon Eberhardt, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Ngaio Marsh) but wrong not to foresee that if ten of the fifteen current best-sellers are based on crime or espionage, it is because those books, however poorly written, retain and renew the classic foundations of the novel itself: they earn their money the right way, by making narrative and character real and sustaining.