84
PARTISAN REVIEW
rage in some unexpected places.
The Wall Street Journal
was shocked that a
book "Tolstoyan in its breadth of sympathy and humanity" could be
passed over, and
The Economist
thundered that the committee 's decision
"is almost beyond comprehension. ... Not only is
[A Suitable Boy]
supe–
rior to any novel in contention for the Booker this year; it is also superior
to most past winners. . .. " (These included A. S. Byatt's ingenious
Possession
and Michael Ondaatje's radiant
The English Patient,
both fer–
vently praised by most critics.)
To be fair: Seth's novel does have a few inspired episodes; the most
memorable, excerpted in
The New Yorker,
is a horrifying account of a re–
ligious festival on the banks of the Ganges that turns into a nightmare
when hundreds of pilgrims are crushed to death on rickety, grossly over–
crowded bridges. But too much of
A Suitable Boy
tried my patience as it
meanders and winds and wanders. Obviously one reader's tedium is
another reader's humanity. Yet if one believes that novelists need to have
some controlling sense of selection and discrimination, neither of which is
evident in
A Suitable Boy,
we must remain skeptical about its achievement
as literature. And one can't help wondering how many of Seth's admirers
read every word.
About three decades ago, Frank Conroy, then thirty-one years old,
published an autobiography,
Stop- Time,
that with astringent freshness and
candor portrayed the perils and wonders of boyhood. The book's eccen–
tric intelligence, the confident and jaunty authority of Conroy's prose,
marked the exhilarating start of an exciting career. But aside from
Midair,
a volume of competent but largely unremarkable stories published in
1985, the big, important novel one assumed Conroy would produce was
not forthcoming until now.
Body and Soul
is big all right, but it is not im–
portant. And its shortcomings stem in large part from the novelist's unfor–
tunate choice of a musical genius as his central character.
Novels about great musicians are usually more flat than sharp. Words
somehow resist an earnest attempt to render, in a lexical context, the ex–
act nature of our response to a pianist's or violinist's prodigious virtuosity.
A music critic appraising a particular performance can fix our attention by
concentrating on technical matters, missed notes, right or wrong tempos,
a conductor's or soloist's specific interpretation of a musical composition.
But novelists are concerned with a different task - how to represent mu–
sic, and the emotions it arouses, in words. And the words the writer
chooses are, almost of necessity, inadequate and unconvincing.
Years ago there was a vogue for movies about famous composers in
which, say "Beethoven" wrote the "Moonlight Sonata" on a sheet of
music paper and proceeded to play a heart-throbbing rendition of the
