Hollinghurst and Henry

Henry James, that is. I wonder if it's possible properly to appreciate The Line of Beauty without some sense of James's novels.

Have a look at this very interesting review essay from The New England Quarterly [78:4 (Dec., 2005), pp. 631-642], Michael Moon's 'Burn Me at the Stake Always', which covers the odd little rash of contemporary novels 'dealing' in some sense with Henry James that appeared in 2004. Moon covers The Master by Colm Toíbín (a beautifully written novel, that; and also Booker shortlisted); Author, Author by David Lodge; The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and a couple of non-ficton titles (Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James's Letters to Younger Men edited by Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe; and Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899-1915 by Henry James, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi).

The real question: why did everybody suddenly think that writing about Henry James was the thing to do? What was it about 2004 that made it so Jamesian a year for fiction?

Amazon reviews

Like many, and perhaps most, writers I have a problematic relationship with amazon, and especially with amazon reader reviews, in which fans, as many idiots as clever people preserve their considered, or unconsidered, reactions to the books they have just read. I thought I'd take a look at the page for The Line of Beauty.

There are ninety customer reviews listed, with a preponderance very impressed with the novel and with Hollinghurst's style in particular: 'this is the finest prose since Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited". Elegant and evocative English, shimmering phrases' according to Septimus; 'this book is superbly written and impressive' (Phil Shanklin). In fact, many reviewers go over similar ground to the mainstream newspaper reviews (the links to whom are in the main post on the novel): the shallowness of the characters, the effectiveness or otherwise of the satire, the treatment of AIDS.

The negative reviews are in the minority, but are in some ways more interesting. Several toot the 'boredom' horn (Mr Crow: 'it just d-r-a-g-g-e-d along...'; Ventura Angelo: 'Yawn ... absolutely boring'), which is a pretty lazy critical response -- and one banned on this course, incidentally. But some make the point that beautiful writing about (morally) ugly people can be as wearing to read as ugly writing about beautiful people.

'Pen ultmate' gives the book one-star, attacking it in terms that (I'd guess) would actually bring a blush of pleasure of Hollinghurst's brow. This, despite its hostile intention, is actually a pretty good account of the Henry James aesthetic that Line of Beauty follows:

This story reads as if it was written by someone with no personality of their own, just a lot of unexpressed mundane thoughts about the world which he's now using the excuse of a novel to finally dribble out, unfortunately. There are endless descriptions of how a character thinks he might react to something that's just been said, but decides not to, and why he decides not to, and how his non-reaction might affect the speaker differently to how he'd be affected if he had actually said what he nearly said but didn't.

It's exactly James's ability to explore that aspect of human interaction, delicately and subtly but with great penetration, that makes so many people fall in love with him as a novelist. Of course, you need to believe that what people feel but don't or can't say is a major part of human life. Similarly, some of these readers come over as, er, foolish. Here's A Customer's one-star review:

When I read the first page I thought i was reading a typical Jeffrey Archer. i have never been so dissapointed in a book.

On the upside, none of the amazon reviewers appeared phased by the detailed depictions of homosexuality as such, which perhaps suggests that homophobia is less a feature of culture today than it was in the 80s: which would be heartening if true. And some of the reports (check out this, different 'A Customer' for instance) are pretty insightful.

Hollinghurst's Beautiful Lines

WEEK 7. ALAN HOLLINGHURST, THE LINE OF BEAUTY (2004)

‘A winning novel that is exciting, brilliantly written and gets deep under the skin of the Thatcherite Eighties’ – Chris Smith, chair of the judges, 19th October 2004

‘Booker Won by Gay Sex’ – Daily Express headline, 20th October 2004

Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud and spent thirteen years on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement. He had previously been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. Andrew Davies’s adaptation of The Line of Beauty was broadcast by the BBC in 2006.

Editions:

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, (London: Picador, 2004).

2004 Shortlist:

Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit
Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Colm Tóibín, The Master
Gerard Woodward, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon

2004 Judges:

Chris Smith MP (chair), Tibor Fischer, Robert Macfarlane, Rowan Pelling, Fiammetta Rocco

Topics:

• Sexuality and the Modern Novel.
• Tapping in to the Past: Henry James and the 1980s.
• The Luxury of Style and the Lowest Common Denominator.

Reviews:

Geoff Dyer, ‘The Last Summer’, The Sunday Telegraph, (28 March 2004).
Andrew Crumey, ‘Marque of the Master Craftsman’, Scotland on Sunday, (4 April 2004)
Alfred Hickling, ‘Between the Lines’, The Guardian, (10 April 2004)
Peter Conradi, ‘Art and the Cruelty that Goes with It’, The Independent on Sunday, (11 April 2004)
Gregory Woods, ‘Love, Loss and the Tory Story’, The Independent, (16 April 2004)
Thomas Jones, ‘Welly-Whanging’, London Review of Books, (6 May 2004)

Criticism:

There's little of this, especially for Hollinghurst's later books. Take a look at this brief entry by Nick Rennison in the Routledge Contemporary British Novelists volume for instance.

DBC Pierre

Some links on Vernon God Little, for those interested in writing about this novel.

First, as the lecture stresses, this book is so thoroughly a 21st-century remix of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951) that you'll need to read that novel -- if you haven't already done so (and if you haven't already done so then ... why on earth not?)

One angle I'd like to discuss has to do with narrative voice, and the notion of character as performance. And talking of that, by way of overcoming my natural hesitation at straying from proper lit-crit into biography, to what extent do you think the novel's success had to do with Pierre's creation of a media-friendly authorial 'persona' or 'character'? Have a look at this for instance; and this, and see what you think.

On the subject of making comedy out of the Columbine School Massacre: do you think this is funny? How does it compare to Pierre's approach?

Vernon God Little

WEEK 5. D.B.C. PIERRE, VERNON GOD LITTLE (2003)

‘The winner was the Mexican-Australian first-time novelist Peter Finlay: a man who, we learned at the weekend, enjoyed a past life as gambling-addicted junkie con-artist who sold his best friend’s house and fled with the cash. (This is a charge levelled insufficiently often, for my tastes, against Anita Brookner)’ – Sam Leith
D.B.C. Pierre (a.k.a. Peter Finlay) was born in Australia to English parents, has lived in Mexico and the United States and was resident in Ireland when he won the Booker. Vernon God Little was his first novel. His second, Ludmila’s Broken English, was published in 2006.

Editions:

D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little, (London: Faber and Faber, 2003).

2003 Shortlist:

Monica Ali, Brick Lane
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor
Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal
Clare Morrall, Astonishing Splashes of Colour
D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little

2003 Judges:

John Carey (chair), D.J. Taylor, Rebecca Stephens, Francine Stock, A.C. Grayling

Topics:

• A Taste for Scandal.
• Ventriloquy and Originality.
• The Non-American American Novel.

Reviews:

Carrie O’Grady, ‘Lone Star’, The Guardian, (18 January 2003).
Jonathan Heawood, ‘Growing Up With Jesus’, The Observer, (19 January 2003).
Sam Leith, ‘Springer’s America’, The Daily Telegraph, (25 January 2003).
Marianne Brace, ‘A Huckleberry Finn for the Eminem Generation’, Independent, (3 February 2003).
David Robson, ‘Who Dies? You Decide’, The Sunday Telegraph, (23 February 2003).
M. Kakutani, ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas (Via Australia)’, New York Times, (5 November 2003).
Sam Sifton, ‘Holden Caulfield on Ritalin’, New York Times Book Review, (9 November 2003).
James Wood, ‘The Lie-World’, London Review of Books, (20 November 2003).
Chris Lehmann, ‘Dumb and Dumber’, Washington Post, (2 December 2003).
Theodore Dalrymple, 'Escape from Barbarity' The Spectator (3 Jan 2004).

Note: there are some interesting things in several of these reviews, but the meatiest and most useful is the James Wood LRB piece, linked above.

Essay

Your non-assessed course essay is due in by Tuesday of week 7 (check Turnitun and you'll see).

I'm not going to distribute essay questions for this project -- if you're interested as to what the final assessed essay questions look like, I've stuck last year's paper on Moodle: you'll see it there as a Word file at the top.

What I'd like you to do is write a 1000-1500 word essay or review about any of the novels on the course. The only constraint upon you is that you must contextualise the novel. You may choose to do this in a number of ways:

(a) you could write an essay on any of the novels contextualising it in terms of the other shortlisted titles for that year's prize: comparing and contrastng it with the other fiction published that year.

(b) you could contextualise your novel in terms of a theoretical or critical approach, discourse or genre: connect The White Tiger to postcolonial theory, for instance; read The Blind Assassin in the context of misery memoirs, or science fiction.

(c) or you could contextualise with respect to the Booker itself, take your chosen novel as a starting point for an analysis of the cultural or social significance of the prize, or prize culture more generally.

Martel Links

Rather thin on the ground, these. Start with the reviews in the previous post.

Here's one interesting article: June Dwyer, 'Yann Martel's Life of Pi and the Evolution of the Shipwreck Narrative', Modern Language Studies (35:2, 2005), pp. 9-21

James Mensch, 'The Intertwining of Incommensurables: Martel's Life of Pi', in Corinne Painter and Christian Lotz (eds), Phenomenology and the Non-human Animal: at the Limits of Experience (Volume 56 of Contributions to phenomenology; Springer 2007). This is an interesting essay, but be warned: it's hard philosophy rather than literary criticism (the book's blurb: 'The question of the relation between human and non-human animals in theoretical, ethical and political regards has become a prominent topic within the philosophical debates of the last two decades. This volume explores in substantial ways how phenomenology can contribute to these debates. It offers specific insights into the description and interpretation of the experience of the non-human animal, the relation between phenomenology and anthropology, the relation between phenomenology and psychology, as well as ethical considerations')

Most of Christine Lorre's essay on the novel is available on google books.

You might enjoy Merritt Moseley's overview of 'The Booker Prizes for 2001 and 2002: Cool Young Authors and Old Codgers' The Sewanee Review (111:1 2003), pp. 157-169

Also: I mention in lecture the plagiarism row that flared after Martel won the prize: the accusation being that he had lifted important elements straight from the Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scliar's novel Max and the Cats. You can read more about that here, and here. Scliar's prior novel is about a young boy stranded in a lifeboat with a panther, you know. Martel's own account 'How I Wrote Life of Pi' isn't very forthcoming on this topic. On the other hand, this Library Journal article is rather forgiving to Martel. Some interesting questions about plagiary raised here, I'd say: relevant to the novel (but also to students writing essays and so on)

One final link: as I mention in the lecture, animal fables have a long history in human culture. Probably the best book on the way 'beasts' have signified in human culture and self-image is by the philosopher Mary Midgeley: it is called Beast and Man: the Roots of Human Nature (1978; rev; ed., Routledge 2002), is in the library, but is also available (or at least, a good chunk of it is) free to read on Google Books.