The 10 best Neglected Literary Classics

South Riding is not the only lost novel worthy of a BBC1 slot

 

Rachel Cooke – The Observer, 27 February 2011

The Real Charlotte

Somerville and Ross (1894)

Somerville and Ross (the pen names of Edith Somerville and her second cousin, Violet Martin) are best known for their comic stories, Some Experiences of an Irish RM. But their masterpiece is the chilling The Real Charlotte, in which our antiheroine reveals her terrible nature when her marriage plans for her orphaned and beautiful cousin, Francie, go badly wrong. Insanity, sexual jealousy and a decaying Anglo-Irish country estate: the novel has them all. Truly creepy, it will be republished by Capuchin Classics, with a new foreword by Colm Tóibín, next month

 

 

The Vet’s Daughter

Barbara Comyns (1959)

Everyone should read Barbara Comyns. Graham Greene was a fan and so is Alan Hollinghurst. Plus, there is no one to beat her when it comes to the uncanny. The Vet’s Daughter tells the story of 17-year-old Alice, who lives with her savage veterinary father (a “terrible genie” in a waxed moustache and yellow gloves) in a horrible south London suburb. When she escapes his tyranny – she moves to the country, where she discovers a peculiar talent – Alice’s life seems to be improving. But it can’t last. A return to Daddy and his new wife and things grow nastier than ever. Nightmarish

The Rector’s Daughter

FM Mayor (1924)

The Rector’s Daughter is heartbreaking – not a term I use lightly. Mary lives in a decaying village rectory with her father, Canon Jocelyn, a fussy and distant old man. Having nursed her invalid sister until her recent death, Mary has given up on the things other women might take for granted – love, marriage, a happier home elsewhere. Until, that is, the arrival of Mr Herbert, for whom Mary conceives a passion. The Rector’s Daughter is the story of how she endures this ill-fated love, rescued by such unfashionable qualities as dignity, stoicism and duty

School for Love

Olivia Manning (1951)

In spite of the efforts of the BBC, which turned her Balkan and Levant trilogies into Fortunes of War, starring Kenneth Branagh and a cute pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, Olivia Manning remains one of the 20th-century’s most-neglected writers. But she is so good! School for Love tells the story of Felix Latimer, a young orphan who is marooned in wartime Jerusalem, alongside other flotsam and jetsam, in lodgings belonging to the repulsive Miss Bohun. A tremendous book about the way in which war makes adults of children – and avarice monsters of us all

 

The Wife

Meg Wolitzer (2003)

The Wife was published less than a decade ago, but I say it is already a classic – and I have no idea why its author remains so less well known than her US compatriots, Alison Lurie and Lorrie Moore. A postmortem of an ossified marriage, the novel is narrated by Joan Castleman, who has been married to Joe – a great American writer – for 45 years. Not for much longer, though; as soon as he receives his Helsinki prize (the Nobel by any other name), she’ll be off. A brilliantly funny novel about how women facilitate the lives of men, Wolitzer imbues Joan’s story with an invigorating seam of barely suppressed rage

A Way of Life, Like Any Other

Darcy O’Brien (1977)

The bastard child – if you can imagine it – of Slim Aarons and JD Salinger, A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a coming-of-age story like no other. Set in 50s Hollywood, the novel is narrated by a teenager called Salty, whose father once starred in westerns and whose mother was a goddess of the silver screen. In the old days, they enjoyed the high life, but now their careers have crashed, their marriage is broken, and the only way is down. Stylish, hilarious and touching, Salty is every bit as deadly (and as deadpan) a narrator as Holden Caulfield before him

The Odd Women

George Gissing (1893)

I love all these books, but The Odd Women is the one I wish everyone would read. Virginia and Alice Madden, impoverished by the death of their father, are growing old together in a genteel boarding house, a fate their younger sister, Monica, has been spared thanks to a loveless marriage. All are desperate. But then the Maddens meet daring feminist Rhoda Nunn. Will her example encourage the Maddens to escape their rhetorical and emotional prisons, or is Rhoda, having fallen suddenly in love, soon to bow out of the great struggle herself?

The Blank Wall

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (1947)

The Blank Wall has been filmed twice – as The Reckless Moment in 1949, and as The Deep End in 2001 – and its author was admired by Raymond Chandler. But does it hold up today? Oh, yes. Lucia Holley is a suburban housewife coping alone while her husband serves in the Pacific. Then, one morning, she finds the body of her teenage daughter’s dubious lover and, desperate to protect her family, rapidly becomes implicated in his murder. Will she keep her cool? Atmospheric and difficult to put down, Sanxay Holding is as clinical and as clever as Patricia Highsmith

Ann Veronica

HG Wells (1909)

Ann Veronica – aka Vee – is 21 and lives in a dull commuter suburb of London with her father. Tired both of his inability to understand her, and the stream of dreary suitors he parades before her, she runs off to Bloomsbury where she meets bohemians, suffragettes and other dangerous modern types. But she also falls in love – with Capes, who has, alas, already been married. The adulterous Wells was rather a naughty man and Ann Veronica, with its advocacy of free love – not to mention a heroine who goes climbing in knickerbockers – caused outrage when it was first published

The Victorian Chaise-Longue

Marghanita Laski (1953)

Melanie Langdon, spoilt and sickly and recovering from TB, lies down on her antique chaise-longue one afternoon in 1953 and wakes up trapped inside the body of a young Victorian woman called Milly. Is she dreaming? No. Melanie really is marooned in a claustrophobic world that stinks of stale clothes, rancid butter and hypocrisy (judging by the whispers of the servants, Milly has been involved in some kind of scandal). More terrifyingly, the body Melanie inhabits is far frailer than her

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2011/feb/27/ten-best-neglected-literary-classics#/?picture=372052096&index=0

 

 

Twelve of the best new novelists

To find the most promising new writers John Mullan and a panel of judges read piles of debut novels. What did they discover about the state of British literary fiction today?

 

John Mullan – guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 February 2011

 

 

The books dozen (standing, from left): David Abbott, Deborah Kay Davies, Eleanor Thom, Adam Haslett, Evie Wyld, Rebecca Hunt, Jim Powell; (seated, from left): Samantha Harvey, Stephen Kelman, Ned Beauman, Jenn Ashworth, Anna Richards Photograph: BBC

The growth of British literary fiction has been one of the most extraordinary publishing phenomena of recent decades. Not everyone has been pleased. The label “literary fiction” is often used disparagingly, as if “literary” were synonymous with “pretentious” or “plot-free”. “The two most depressing words in the English language are ‘literary fiction’,” declared David Hare recently in this newspaper. Some like to say that there is no such thing: there are only good novels and bad novels. Yet authors and publishers and readers recognise that literary fiction exists and offers its own particular pleasures. Its surprising commercial health has given would-be novelists the confidence to experiment, to trust they can find readers interested in the new shapes fiction can take.

I was recently asked by BBC2′s The Culture Show to chair a panel of five judges in an effort to identify promising debut novelists. Publishers submitted their outstanding first novels of the past couple of years, and we had to choose the 12 “best”. What we got were examples of what we have come to call “literary fiction”. We found our dozen, and in the course of reading 57 novels I got a picture of the state of British literary fiction. Reading all these first-time authors you could see the representative habits and ambitions of the would-be literary novelist, and see, sometimes all too clearly, the influences of established literary fiction.

What is literary fiction? It is not genre fiction. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a historical novel. Kazuo Ishiguro‘s Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, the leading British prize for science fiction. Yet you only have to think about these two examples to see how they escape their genres. Mantel’s novel revisits the favourite stamping ground of historical fiction – Henry VIII and his wives – in order to rethink what it might be to see events filtered through the consciousness of a person from a distant age. Ishiguro takes a dystopian hypothesis – human clones being bred for their organs – and then declines to put in place any of the sci-fi framework that would allow us to understand how this could be. Indeed, the whole interest of his story is in the limits placed upon its narrator. These are both “literary” novels because they ask us to attend to the manner of their telling. And, despite their narrative demands, they have both found hundreds of thousands of readers willing to do so.

People have been talking of “literary fiction” (a phrase still unrecognised by the Oxford English Dictionary) since the 1960s, but it was in the early 80s that it became established. There were earlier progenitors, such as John Fowles, whose novels combined dark or misdirected sexual passion with an obstinate bookishness – and showed that you could be self-consciously literary and make money. Clearly, The French Lieutenant’s Woman lies behind some of the more playfully erudite English novels of later decades, notably AS Byatt‘s Possession. It is no accident that Fowles’s publisher was Tom Maschler, who was instrumental in establishing the Booker prize in 1969.

The key date was 1981, when Salman Rushdie‘s Midnight’s Children won the Booker prize. The Booker had already begun to acquire notoriety – the year before had seen a much publicised run-off between William Golding and an entertainingly grumpy Anthony Burgess – but now it seemed to be revealing something new. Rushdie was an unknown, discovered by the judges, and Midnight’s Children seemed like nothing in the English novel before. For the first time the prize ceremony was televised.

Interviewed for our programme, Ishiguro recalled this moment being “absolutely pivotal” for young writers attempting to stretch the bounds of the English novel. “I think people are right to think of it as an iconic book that ushered in a new sort of attention for literary writing.” It was unparochial not only because of its subject matter and its Indian narrator, but because of its formal ebullience. It owed more to Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez than to the modern masters of English fiction (although its literariness included a kinship with Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century classic Tristram Shandy).

Ishiguro is convinced that if his own first novel, A Pale View of Hills, had been published five years earlier it would have disappeared without trace. Formally divided between two narrative sections and two countries – England and Japan – it arrived just as readers and critics were embracing, even looking for, narrative experiment. The appetite for such fiction made it rapidly newsworthy, and younger novelists became celebrities. In 1982 the first branches of Waterstone’s opened. Any book lover now middle-aged will recall how those first stores made novels, in particular, look like alluring commodities. Also interviewed for our programme, former Granta editor Ian Jack remembers how “the book became a fashionable object, the novel became a fashionable object in the 1980s”. In 1983, Granta published its list of “The Best of Young British Novelists” in an issue that included excerpts from such writers as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. The cover, featuring an exploding pen and a union flag, shouted that British fiction was the new thing. The first extract was the opening of Amis’s as yet unpublished Money, bursting on the reader with a linguistic verve and lexical daring that seemed almost un-English. Now even sentences could be exciting.

As a marketing exercise, it worked. Novelists began featuring in newspapers and magazines; new novels – and the advances that novelists had received – became news items. The Booker prize became a passport to commercial success. “Literary novelist” started to look like a rewarding career path, not an after-hours occupation. Prizes and lists were ways on to this path. Jack, himself responsible for the 2003 Granta list, is blunt: “Literary novels really depend on prizes, and they depend on lists.” Partly it is just a matter of needing maps. The territory is thronged. Those Waterstone’s tables may be already highly selective, but they are still crowded. We all need signs. But it is also a matter of perceived critical judgment. Literary fiction seems to invite discrimination.

This is because such fiction calls attention to form. Once this was the property of avant-garde fiction; in recent years it has become a tendency in fiction that appeals to a mass readership. A leading case is David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas. This has a narrative structure unimaginable in a bestseller 20 years ago. Its author describes it as a “russian doll”: six separate narratives, one inside another, set in six different times (ranging from the 19th century to some distant, post-apocalyptic future) and written in six different genres. Each narrative appears as some material remnant in the subsequent narrative.

The formal playfulness is elaborate, yet it was not just shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, but was also selected as the Richard and Judy Book Club book of the year. Similarly, when Sarah Waters’s 2006 novel The Night Watch employed a reverse chronology, it did not stop it being Radio 4′s Book at Bedtime – or reaching a large reading public. Narrated in three sections, dated 1947, 1944 and 1941, it has multiple plots that require us to discover the causes of effects that we have already witnessed. It is the kind of narrative sophistication that ordinary readers now take in their stride.

In the press and on radio and TV, discussion of new fiction is frequent but is almost all about its content. In fact it is formal restiveness, even tricksiness, that has distinguished much of the literary fiction of the past couple of decades. When I talked recently to a novelist of my interest in the “tricks” of contemporary fiction, he objected to that word. To him it implied formal gimmickry – a substitution of devices for narrative skill or literary depth. Yet this need not be the implication of detecting the tricks of contemporary fiction. Think of this moment in one of the best-selling and most widely admired literary novels of the 21st century:

She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin.

BT

London 1999

This is the mock-ending of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which looks as if it is signing off (that tell-tale reversion to the novel’s title) but in fact comes with a thickness of pages still remaining. It is a trick, certainly. The first time you read the novel you are almost certainly taken aback – until you realise that BT are the initials of the protagonist, Briony Tallis, and that what you have been reading is her story, not McEwan’s. The trick is deeply satisfying, for it enacts what it reveals: that fiction might be a way of making up for reality. The atonement mentioned in the last sentence is not the subject of the story – it is the narrative itself. You can tell that the trick is not shallow, because when you read the novel again, it still works. You know that the story is being made up by one of the characters, yet it is impossible not to believe it.

Narative tricks were certainly in evidence among the first-time novelists we read, sometimes announcing a literary ambition that was unsupported by gifts for characterisation or consistent plotting. Many novels were divided between different narrative voices or different tenses, or both. Several were made up of alternating narratives set in the present day and then in some distant historical period. First-person narration, which predominated, was often characterised by some expressive impediment. It was as if debut novelists had been reading The Remains of the Day or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and thought of new ways in which they could fashion narrators with cruelly constrained powers of expression. There was also a fair amount of what Dr Johnson would have called “fine writing” – sentences designed to call attention to their style. Dimly some recalled that literary novelists did not use sentences just to get from A to B.

Yet among our dozen, there were one or two who seemed wonderfully oblivious to formal trickery. I remember beginning Jim Powell’s The Breaking of Eggs and experiencing an unusual narrative voice that was neither inadequate nor self-consciously stylish, and a story that proceeded in traditional Greene-ian fashion, from self-delusion to disillusion. The narrator is a man in his 60s, living in Paris and subsisting on the travel guide to eastern Europe which, because of his communist sympathies, he has been editing for most of his adult life. With the collapse of communism, and a visit to his long-lost brother in the hated United States, his ideological convictions begin to crumble. Powell was one of our two chosen novelists over the age of 60 – like his protagonist. The fashion for literary showiness seemed to have passed him by.

The pressure for narrative playfulness does not just come from other books. There is also the influence of film and TV narrative. A novelist such as Andrea Levy uses complicated patterns of flashback and multiple viewpoints that derive from the screen rather than the page. The debt of fiction to film and TV narrative has not been fully measured by critics, though readers now take it for granted. You could often see this in our debut novels, particularly in the readiness to cut rapidly and without explanation from one carefully described scene to another, making narrative out of montage. Rose Tremain, the representative on our programme of the original 1983 Granta list, thinks that the influence of film distinguishes post-70s fiction. “I think that the other thing that perhaps affected my generation is that we had all seen an awful lot of cinema, we were all great cineastes. And I think cinema, and the swiftness of cinema, and the conciseness of imagery in cinema can inform fiction marvellously well.”

The new force is creative writing. Of the 57 novels submitted to our panel, almost a third were by graduates of creative writing courses. Invariably, writers who have been on such courses announce the fact in the information printed below the author’s photograph on the dustjacket of their first novel. It is as if graduation from such a programme is a further recommendation to the potential reader. When Manchester University hooked Amis to teach creative writing, it confirmed the status of an academic subject now able to recruit the biggest beasts of contemporary fiction. Here was the scourge of cliché and flabby thinking announcing his desire to give seminar-room guidance on how to write. A still young subject seemed vindicated.

Like many academic critics, I fancied myself resistant to the wiles of the creative writing graduates. Yet, disconcertingly, I noticed some of the debut novels that I most admired were by authors who were the products of such courses. Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness, for instance, sounds in outline like a creative writing exercise. It is the story of Jake, an architect who, it slowly becomes clear, is suffering from the first stages of Alzheimer’s. Narrated in the third person, it follows the glitches and gaps in his own recollections. Like many literary novels now, it is narrated in the present tense, but with the irresistible purpose of inhabiting his experience. Sections in the past tense revisit islands of memory, allowing the reader to piece together the story of his adult life. Yet I found myself both seized and intrigued by its method, which allows the reader to inhabit the escalating errors of the protagonist.

I wonder if the growth of creative writing is a symptom as much as a cause, profiting from an increased interest among readers – as well as writers – in formal experiment in narrative. It was not just what the novels were about, but the way they got written, that became more various and unpredictable. And what has driven this has surely been academic, too. During the 1980s and 90s, academic literary criticism sealed itself off from the general reader. What went on in seminar rooms and academic books became remote from the world outside. Yet many – probably the majority – of successful literary novelists had taken English literature degrees. Everyone knows that McEwan and Ishiguro did the MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, but both of them already had English degrees from other universities. Some novelists (Graham Swift, Alan Hollinghurst, William Boyd, Waters) had been Eng lit postgraduates.

While pretending hieratical removal from the world of ordinary readers, literary academics were shaping the novel because they were teaching the novelists-to-be. Some successful novelists have been explicit about how the study of fiction inspired their own writing. I remember Louis de Bernières telling an audience of his readers that an MA course had helped him to discover the multi-narrator form that made Captain Corelli’s Mandolin a literary bestseller. Mitchell has recalled in an article how Cloud Atlas had its origins in his study of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller during his MA in comparative literature at the University of Kent. Calvino’s novel is composed of a sequence of interrupted narratives, inspiring Mitchell to pursue the conceit: “How many narratives deep could I go? Four? Six? Nine? Italo Calvino got to 12 in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, but he never ‘came back’ to recontinue his interruptions. Could a novel boomerang back through the sequence, picking up where narratives C, B and A had left off, in reverse order? The problems would be knotty, but knottiness encourages original escapology.”

So another kind of a literary novel is one that has a close relationship with classic literary works – and that expects readers who can recognise the kinship. Thus the opening sentence of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty:

One may as well begin with Jerome’s e-mails to his father.

You are supposed to recognise, of course, the mock-insouciant opening sentence of EM Forster’s Howards End:

One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.

But it is not just an opening sentence. The reader of On Beauty who has read Howards End will get things that other readers miss, for Smith imitates and wryly updates the main episodes of her original. It is all, we might say, a joke on her own characters, who think that they are making their own story but are comically doomed to imitate the story of others. Waters, another novelist who has studied literature as well as read it, offers delicious surprises to those who have done likewise. Fingersmith, her version of a Victorian sensation novel, has a plot twist that is all the more stunning if you think you have been cleverly recognising the plot of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.

Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Man Booker winner The Line of Beauty does not just feature a protagonist, Nick Guest, who is researching a PhD on style in Henry James: it also holds out special pleasures for readers who are themselves familiar with James’s fiction. Hollinghurst became renowned for introducing a middlebrow readership to explicit gay sex, but the commercial success of his deeply literary narrative inventions is more significant. The minutely discriminating, free, indirect style of The Line of Beauty, following the patterns of Nick’s own thoughts, is a kind of homage to the style of “the Master”, with its small qualifications and quizzical inferences. If, like author and character, you relish James, you will relish the novel the better.

There are more graduates from literature, especially English literature, degrees than ever. And there are all those book groups, dedicated to the critical discussion of novels. Literary fiction is not the invention of marketers; it answers the interests of readers. We have become so used to the thought that any higher literacy is in retreat before the forces of electronic media and consumer idiotism, that perhaps to imagine the opposite has become impossible. Perhaps the simple truth is that literary fiction has flourished because there are more literary readers than ever.

The panelists explain their choices

Sam Leith, journalist and novelist

•Ned Beauman‘s Boxer Beetle (Sceptre) is a piece of staggeringly energetic intellectual slapstick featuring collectors of Nazi memorabilia, gun-toting occultists with Welsh accents, vicious six-legged hardnuts, a country house murder mystery and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark ending. It’s crammed with strange, funny and interesting things.

•Adam Haslett‘s Union Atlantic (Tuskar Rock) is a big muscular American state-of-the-nation novel in the grand tradition: alive to the cross-currents of class and money, it’s a deft psychological study of big-business hubris. Accomplished and gripping.

•Set in backwoods Australia, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld (Vintage) is intricately patterned and fastidiously written novel looks at what it means to be isolated, how men find a place in the world and how we struggle to avoid repeating our fathers’ mistakes. It is rich, ambitious, and touched with sinister magic.

Helen Oyeyemi, novelist

•David Abbott‘s The Upright Piano Player (MacLehose Press) is not unlike a nocturne in its tone and mood; it is a melancholy and evocative treatment of a man’s post-retirement crisis. Henry Cage is sketched with just enough subtlety, and allowed just enough sympathy – no more, no less – to make his failings devastatingly real.

•Rebecca Hunt‘s Mr Chartwell (Fig Tree), the original Black Dog, is just delightful in his blithe audacity – and that’s how I think of her as a writer – she’s got swagger. She took Churchill’s term for his clinical depression – “the black dog”, hyper-realised it and placed the result right in the centre of a story about grief.

•Anna Richards and Little Gods (Picador) – I warn you that from the first chapter you’ll be swept up into a sort of struggling ball of poignant hilarity and will emerge hundreds of pages later laughing and saying “ouch”, with an extraordinary giantess on your mind and in your heart.

Janet Lee, editor of The Culture Show

•A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth (Bliss) is laugh-out-loud funny and completely compelling. The protagonist Annie is obese, unloved and deluded. In fact she misreads every situation she’s in and from this disjuncture comes the comedy. It’s a dark, dark tale, but a tale for today.

•Deborah Kay Davies‘s True Things About Me (Canongate) is a brutal story in brutal prose. The unnamed narrator works in a benefit office, a criminal walks in and literally claims her. Desire is portrayed here as a kind of breakdown – everything is wrecked in its pursuit.

•In The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (Vintage) a man with Alzheimer’s questions the very nature of self-hood. Beautifully written with recurring motifs it represents the disorientation of Alzheimer’s better than any factual piece I’ve ever read.

Alex Clark, critic and broadcaster

•I was completely engaged by Stephen Kelman‘s Pigeon English (Bloomsbury), the story of Harrison, an 11-year-old Ghanaian boy who has come to live in London. One of the hardest things in fiction is to write from a child’s point of view – Kelman does it brilliantly.

•The Breaking of Eggs by Jim Powell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) piques the interest from the first page. Its narrator is a 61-year-old Pole who has lived in Paris for most of his life, devoting himself to updating a guidebook to the communist countries of Europe. The novel moves cleverly between the comic, the serious and the terribly painful.

•In The Tin-Kin by Eleanor Thom (Gerald Duckworth) a present-day discovery unlocks a previously hidden history – to create a vivid portrait of a Traveller community in the 1950s. Both the contemporary and the historical stories are compelling, and there’s a very skilfully handled tension as the links between the two slowly emerge. She is also extremely talented at drawing big, memorable characters.

New Novelists: 12 of the Best, a Culture Show special, is on BBC2 at 9pm on 5 March and is part of Books on the BBC 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/seasons/books

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/25/literary-fiction-twelve-best-new-novelists

John Stammers’s top 10 love poems

…the poet considers the literature of desire, from Marvell’s coy mistress to John Betjeman’s lovelorn subaltern

“If ever two were made for each other surely it is love and poetry: the infinite variety of love meeting the boundless capacity of poetry to embrace it. There is something both sweet and intense about all aspects of romantic love, a combination that is ideally suited to poetry’s marriage of the music of speech with compressed content. This is true from love’s first blush through to its heady consummation.

“It is a surprise, however, to find that the straightforward romantic paean is comparatively rare amongst great love poems. Perhaps this is because the self-satisfied I’m-so-happy-now-we-twain-are-one approach can cloy. For the most part, great love poems are either ones of wily courtship, unrequited love, or the bitterest regret. There is something delicious about these marginal states in which Desire (for it is he) is constantly unsatisfied, confounded or denied. I would hazard a shaft that it is just this strange quality of desire to persist in the face of its own negation that we find compelling. With that in mind, and with the exception of the Shakespeare (he seems to be able to carry it off), all the poems I’ve chosen, in no particular order, are of this type. “

1. To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

A romantic take on Horace’s Carpe Diem in which the suitor desires to seize rather more than simply the day. This poem contains many of the cleverest metaphysical conceits: witness “our vegetable love” or those trying worms.

2. The Love-Song of J Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot

This is a truly subversive poem, whose first three lines signal the arrival of literary modernism and which can be practically read as its credo. Prufrock is a miscast troubadour of the Edwardian drawing room who fails to raise his lute or his voice due to simple lack of courage. The poem is an anthem for all those who have failed through inaction, which probably includes us all at some time, and which no doubt is what provides it with its great poignancy.

3. Arracombe Wood by Charlotte Mew

The saddest poem ever written. All the back-story is supplied by the reader as the death of a solitary old man is reported by a younger one.

4. A Subaltern’s Love Song by John Betjeman

A latter-day warrior is beguiled to his inevitable fate by, as her name suggests, a temptress in the mythic tradition. The quiet stroke of brilliance in this poem is just that fact that Betjeman makes the narrator a soldier, trained to repel any military assault no doubt, but defenceless in the face of “strenuous singles” with the athletic young Joan Hunter Dunn. She runs out the “victor”, not only in the tennis, but in all regards. A caveat on the hazards of mixing hormones with physical activity.

5. Whoso List to Hunt by Thomas Wyatt

When Henry VIII announced that he intended to marry Anne Boleyn, Wyatt wrote to the king in an effort to dissuade him, saying he himself had had knowledge of her. This poem portrays a hind that the speaker and others pursue vainly and which wears a necklace of jewels that spell out “Noli me tangere [Do not touch me], for Caesar’s I am.” In the event, Henry took no notice of the letter, thinking perhaps that Wyatt had written it out of jealously. The rest is monumental history.

6. The Flea by John Donne

If there are a number of great conceits in the Marvell, then there is a single one in this, at first sight tasteless masterpiece. Almost, one feels, as an exercise in virtuosity, Donne turns a human flea into a persuasive romantic symbol. Said flea has just bitten both himself and the object of his attentions and so becomes an improbable erotic crucible: Donne argues disingenuously that, as the two of them are now conjoined in the flea, they might just as well get on with the grosser physical details.

7. Badly-Chosen Lover by Rosemary Tonks

A poem of bitter ruefulness with the ex lover addressed as “Criminal”. This is an exuberant rehearsal of various curses around the thief-of-the-heart motif. It knowingly protests too much, however, which is what lends it its great charm.

8. Methought I Saw My Late Espousèd Saint by John Milton

The unusual thing about this poem is that it is contextualised externally: the reader needs to know that, by the time of writing, Milton is blind. There is one place he can still see however: in dream. This paradox is used to provide the poem with a truly devastating denouement.

9. A Private Bottling by Don Paterson

The end of many a relationship has left a sour taste in the mouth; in this case it is that of single-malt whiskys. Our insomniac narrator sets a fairy ring of nips about a room and the sad circle begins where it ends via unfulfilled potential and sorry recollection blended with acid judgment of the betrayer. It concludes with as bitter a toast to a woman as was ever offered by man.

10. Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

In this staple of wedding ceremonies, “mind” probably means something nearer to what we mean by the word “spirit”. Or we have a more modern term that covers it: “soul-mate”. From this poem we can, as is so often the case, give the last word to Shakespeare, a succinct characterisation of the wish for enduring love: “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds.”

• John Stammers - guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 February 2011

John Stammers is a poet and creative writing teacher. His first collection, Panoramic Lounge-Bar, won the Forward prize for best first collection in 2001 and was shortlisted for the Whitbread poetry award. His second collection, Stolen Love Behaviour, was a Poetry Book Society Choice. In a review for the Guardian, Charles Bainbridge wrote that it explored “the shady areas of libido and guilt, of bars, boudoirs and basements, the fragile underbelly of the hip and sophisticated.” He is the editor of the Picador Book of Love Poems.

The Picador Book of Love Poems

 

100 Notable Books of 2010 (NYTimes)

FICTION & POETRY

AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE. By David Goodwillie. (Scribner, $25.) A bombing unites a blogger and a beautiful eco-terrorist in this literary thriller, an exploration of what motivates radicalism in an age of disillusion.

ANGELOLOGY. By Danielle Trussoni. (Viking, $27.95.) With a smitten art historian at her side, the young nun at the center of this rousing first novel is drawn into an ancient struggle against the Nephilim, hybrid offspring of humans and heavenly beings.

THE ASK. By Sam Lipsyte. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A deeply cynical academic fund-raiser fighting for his job is the protagonist of this darkly humorous satire, a witty paean to white-collar loserdom.

BOUND. By Antonya Nelson. (Bloomsbury, $25.) For Nelson’s complacent heroine, the death of an estranged friend elicits memories of their reckless youth.

COMEDY IN A MINOR KEY. By Hans Keilson. Translated by Damion Searls. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) Set in Nazi-occupied Europe, this novel, appearing only now in English, is a mid-century masterpiece by the centenarian Keilson, who served in the Dutch resistance.

DOUBLE HAPPINESS: Stories. By Mary-Beth Hughes. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) Hughes likes to juxtapose her characters’ relative passivity with the knife edge of evil within or, more often, outside them.

FOREIGN BODIES. By Cynthia Ozick. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) This nimble, entertaining homage to Henry James’s late work “The Ambassadors,” in which an American heads to Paris to retrieve a wayward son, brilliantly upends the theme, meaning and stylistic manner of its revered precursor.

FREEDOM. By Jonathan Franzen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Like Franzen’s previous novel, “The Corrections,” this is a masterly portrait of a nuclear family in turmoil, with an intricately ordered narrative and a majestic sweep that seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.

FUN WITH PROBLEMS: Stories. By Robert Stone. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.) Our enduring central struggle — the battle between the head and the heart — is enacted again and again in Stone’s collection.

GIRL BY THE ROAD AT NIGHT: A Novel of Vietnam. By David Rabe. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) In this tale of war and eros, two young people from opposite ends of the earth are caught up in events far beyond their control.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST. By Stieg Larsson. (Knopf, $27.95.) In the third installment of the pulse-racing trilogy featuring Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the pair are threatened by an adversary from deep within the very government that should be protecting them.

GREAT HOUSE. By Nicole Krauss. (Norton, $24.95.) In this tragic vision of a novel, Nadia, a writer in New York, faces a wrenching parting when a girl shows up to claim an enormous desk that has been in her safekeeping for decades.

HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE. By Charles Yu. (Pantheon, $24.) Yu wraps his lonely story of a time machine repairman in layers of gorgeous meta-science-fiction.

HOW TO READ THE AIR. By Dinaw Mengestu. (Riverhead, $25.95.) Mengestu’s own origins inform this tale of an Ethiopian-American tracing the uncertain road once taken by his parents.

I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME. By Per Petterson. Translated by Charlotte Barslund with Per Petterson. (Graywolf, $23.) This novel’s lonely Scandinavian protagonist grapples with divorce, death and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

ILUSTRADO. By Miguel Syjuco. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) A murder mystery punctuated with serious philosophical musings, this novel traces 150 years of Filipino history, posing questions about identity and art, exile and duty.

THE IMPERFECTIONISTS. By Tom Rachman. (Dial, $25.) This intricate novel is built around the personal stories of staff members at an improbable English-language newspaper in Rome, and of the family who founded it in the 1950s.

THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE. By Julie Orringer. (Knopf, $26.95.) Orringer’s protagonist is a Jewish architecture student in late-1930s Paris forced to return home to Hungary ahead of the Nazi invasion there.

LISA ROBERTSON’S MAGENTA SOUL WHIP. By Lisa Robertson. (Coach House, paper, $14.95.) In these intellectual poems, the experimental curtains suddenly part to reveal clear, durable truth.

THE LIVING FIRE: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2010. By Edward Hirsch. (Knopf, $27.) Hirsch’s “living fire” is an irrational counterforce with which he balances his dignified quotidian.

THE LONG SONG. By Andrea Levy. (Frances Coady/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Levy’s high-spirited, ambitious heroine works on a plantation in the final days of slavery in Jamaica.

THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY. By Zachary Mason. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The conceit behind the multiple Odysseuses here (comic, dead, doubled, amnesiac) is that this is a translation of an ancient papyrus, a collection of variations on the myth.

THE LOTUS EATERS. By Tatjana Soli. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) The photojournalist heroine of Soli’s Vietnam War novel ponders whether those who represent war merely replicate its violence.

MATTERHORN: A Novel of the Vietnam War. By Karl Marlantes. (El León Literary Arts/Atlantic Monthly, $24.95.) In this tale, 30 years in the creation, bloody folly envelops a Marine company’s construction, abandonment and retaking of a remote hilltop outpost.

MEMORY WALL: Stories. By Anthony Doerr. (Scribner, $24.) These strange, beautiful stories all ask: What, if anything, will be spared time’s depredations?

MR. PEANUT. By Adam Ross. (Knopf, $25.95.) In this daring first novel, a computer game designer suspected of murdering his obese wife is investigated by two marriage-savvy detectives, one of whom is Dr. Sam Sheppard.

THE NEAREST EXIT. By Olen Steinhauer. (Minotaur, $25.99.) The C.I.A. spy in this thriller is sick of his trade’s duplicity, amorality and rootlessness.

THE NEW YORKER STORIES. By Ann Beattie. (Scribner, $30.) This collection of tales dating back to 1974 lets readers imagine their way into a New Yorker fiction editor’s moment of discovery.

ONE DAY. By David Nicholls. (Vintage, paper, $14.95.) Nicholls’s nostalgic novel checks in year by year on the halting romance of two children of the ’80s, she an outspoken lefty, he an apolitical toff.

THE PRIVILEGES. By Jonathan Dee. (Random House, $25.) In this contemporary morality tale, a family stumbles along, rich and dysfunctional, without ethical or moral responsibility.

ROOM. By Emma Donoghue. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) Donoghue’s remarkable novel is narrated by a 5-year-old boy, whose entire world is the 11-by-11-foot room in which his mother is being held against her will.

THE SAME RIVER TWICE. By Ted Mooney. (Knopf, $26.95.) In this nuanced literary thriller, a deal to acquire Soviet-era cultural artifacts puts a Parisian clothing designer and her filmmaker husband in peril.

SELECTED STORIES. By William Trevor. (Viking, $35.) These stories, gathered from Trevor’s last four collections, are frequently melancholy, concerned with loss and disappointment, but warmed with radiant moments of grace or acceptance.

SHADOW TAG. By Louise Erdrich. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Erdrich’s portrait of a marriage on its way to dissolution appears to be seeded with deliberate allusions to her own relationship with the writer Michael Dorris.

SOLAR. By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.) In McEwan’s funniest novel yet, a self-deluding physicist cheats on his wives, sends an innocent man to jail and tries to cash in on another scientist’s plans against global warming.

SOMETHING RED. By Jennifer Gilmore. (Scribner, $25.) Gilmore’s contemplative second novel explores the lost ideals and lingering illusions of a family once politically committed to bettering the world.

SOURLAND: Stories. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Oates explores the idea that the bereaved wife is a kind of guilty party who deserves everything — most of it violent — that comes her way.

THE SPOT: Stories. By David Means. (Faber & Faber, $23.) Like Beckett, Means reveals a God-like inclination to see his characters as forsaken case studies.

SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY. By Gary Shteyngart. (Random House, $26.) Exhilarating prose illuminates the horrors of a future America in this satire.

THE SURRENDERED. By Chang-rae Lee. (Riverhead, $26.95.) As death draws near, Lee’s heroine, a Korean War orphan now living in New York, sets off for Europe to look for her estranged son.

THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET. By David Mitchell. (Random House, $26.) Mitchell’s historical novel about a young Dutchman in Edo-era Japan is an achingly romantic story of forbidden love and something of an adventurous rescue tale.

THE THREE WEISSMANNS OF WESTPORT. By Cathleen Schine. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Two Manhattan sisters, one wildly emotional, one smartly sensible, come to the aid of their beloved aging mother.

TO THE END OF THE LAND. By David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen. (Knopf, $26.95.) Two friends are deeply involved with the same woman in this somber, haunting novel of love and loyalty in time of conflict, set in Israel between 1967 and 2000.

VIDA. By Patricia Engel. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) Engel’s understated stories are told from the perspective of a daughter of Colombian immigrants.

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. By Jennifer Egan. (Knopf, $25.95.) In her centrifugal, unclassifiably elaborate narrative, Egan creates a set of characters with assorted links to the music business and lets time have its way with them.

WHAT BECOMES: Stories. By A. L. Kennedy. (Knopf, $24.95.) Though the characters in her harrowing fourth collection buckle under the weight of misfortune, Kennedy can go from darkness to humor in a heartbeat.

WHITE EGRETS: Poems. By Derek Walcott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The Nobel Prize winner’s latest collection is intensely personal, an old man’s book, craving one more day of light and warmth.

WILD CHILD: Stories. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $25.95.) In these tales, Boyle continues his career-long interest in man’s vexed tussles with nature.

NONFICTION

ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. By Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. (Portfolio/Penguin, $32.95.) More than offering a backward look, this account of the disaster of 2008 helps explain today’s troubling headlines and might help predict tomorrow’s.

APOLLO’S ANGELS: A History of Ballet. By Jennifer Homans. (Random House, $35.) The question of classical ballet’s very survival lies at the heart of this eloquent, truly definitive history, which traces dance across four centuries of wars and revolutions, both artistic and political.

BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women. By Rebecca Traister. (Free Press, $26.) A colorful, emotional argument that 2008 gave feminism a thrilling “new life.”

THE BOOK IN THE RENAISSANCE. By Andrew Pettegree. (Yale University, $40.) A thought-provoking revisionist history of the early years of printing.

THE BRIDGE: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. By David Remnick. (Knopf, $29.95.) This study of Obama before he became president, by the editor of The New Yorker, has many important additions and corrections to make to our reading of “Dreams From My Father.”

CHANGING MY MIND: Occasional Essays. By Zadie Smith. (Penguin Press, $26.95.) The quirky pleasures here are due in part to Smith’s inspired cultural references, from Simone Weil to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

CHARLIE CHAN: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History. By Yunte Huang. (Norton, $26.95.) The urbane presentation of Earl Derr Biggers’s fictional Chinese sleuth, in print and in film, ran counter to the racism of his era.

CHRISTIANITY: The First Three Thousand Years. By Diarmaid MacCulloch. (Viking, $45.) MacCulloch traces the faith’s history through classical philosophy and Jewish tradition, fantastical visions and cold calculations, loving sacrifices and imperial ambitions.

CLEOPATRA: A Life. By Stacy Schiff. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) It’s dizzying to contemplate the ancient thicket of personalities and propaganda Schiff penetrates to show the Macedonian-Egyptian queen in all her ambition, audacity and formidable intelligence.

COLONEL ROOSEVELT. By Edmund Morris. (Random House, $35.) The final volume of Morris’s monumental life of Theodore Roosevelt vividly covers the eventful nine years after he left office.

COMMON AS AIR: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. By Lewis Hyde. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Hyde draws on the American founders for arguments against the privatization of knowledge.

CONTESTED WILL: Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James Shapiro. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) Shapiro is particularly interested in what “the authorship question” says about successive generations of readers.

COUNTRY DRIVING: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory. By Peter Hessler. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Hessler chronicles the effects of an expanding road network on the rapidly changing lives of individual Chinese.

THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES: A Biography of Cancer. By Siddhartha Mukherjee. (Scribner, $30.) Mukherjee’s powerful and ambitious history of cancer and its treatment is an epic story he seems compelled to tell, like a young priest writing a biography of Satan.

EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. By S. C. Gwynne. (Scribner, $27.50.) The story of the last and greatest chief of the tribe that once ruled the Great Plains.

ENCOUNTER. By Milan Kundera. Translated by Linda Asher. (Harper/HarperCollins, $23.99.) Illuminating essays on the arts in the context of a “post art” era.

THE FIERY TRIAL: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. By Eric Foner. (Norton, $29.95.) Foner tackles what would seem an obvious topic, Lincoln and slavery, and sheds new light on it.

FINISHING THE HAT: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. By Stephen Sondheim. (Knopf, $39.95.) Sondheim’s analysis of his songs and those of others is both stinging and insightful.

FOUR FISH: The Future of the Last Wild Food. By Paul Greenberg. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Even as Greenberg lays out the grim and complicated facts about the ravaging of our seas, he manages to sound some hopeful notes about the ultimate fate of fish.

HITCH-22: A Memoir. By Christopher Hitchens. (Twelve, $26.99.) When the colorful, prolific journalist shares a tender memory, he quickly converts it into a larger observation about politics, always for him the most crucial sphere of moral and intellectual life.

THE HONOR CODE: How Moral Revolutions Happen. By Kwame Anthony Appiah. (Norton, $25.95.) A philosopher traces the demise of dueling and slavery among the British and of foot-binding in China, and suggests how a fourth horrific practice — honor killings in today’s Pakistan — might someday meet its end.

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS. By Rebecca Skloot. (Crown, $26.) Skloot untangles the ethical issues in the case of a woman who unknowingly donated cancer cells that have been the basis for a vast amount of research.

INSECTOPEDIA. By Hugh Raffles. (Pantheon, $29.95.) In this beautifully written, slyly humorous encyclopedia, Raffles seeks to redress the speciesism that has cast insects as creatures to be regarded with distrust and disgust.

KOESTLER: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. By Michael Scammell. (Random House, $35.) Scammell wants to put the complex intelligence of Koestler (“Darkness at Noon”) back on display and to explain his shifting preoccupations.

THE LAST BOY: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood. By Jane Leavy. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Many biographies of Mantle have been written, but Leavy connects the dots in new and disturbing ways.

LAST CALL: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. By Daniel Okrent. (Scribner, $30.) A remarkably original account of the 14-year orgy of lawbreaking that transformed American social life.

THE LAST HERO: A Life of Henry Aaron. By Howard Bryant. (Pantheon, $29.95.) Amid all the racism, Aaron approached his pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record more as grim chore than joyous mission.

THE LAST STAND: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. By Nathaniel Philbrick. (Viking, $30.) The author of “Mayflower” gives appropriate space to Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and others who fought that day, but Custer steals the show.

LIFE. By Keith Richards with James Fox. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) Reading Richards’s autobiography is like getting to corner him in a room to ask everything you always wanted to know about the Rolling Stones.

LONG FOR THIS WORLD: The Strange Science of Immortality. By Jonathan Weiner. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) The English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a proselytizer for radical life extension, is the main figure in this engaging study.

THE MIND’S EYE. By Oliver Sacks. (Knopf, $26.95.) In these graceful essays, the neurologist explores how his patients compensate for the abilities they have lost, and confronts his own ocular cancer.

OPERATION MINCEMEAT: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory. By Ben Macintyre. (Harmony, $25.99.) An entertaining spy tale about the British ruse that employed a corpse to cover up the invasion of Sicily.

ORIGINS: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. By Annie Murphy Paul. (Free Press, $26.) Paul’s balanced, common-sense inquiry into the emerging field of fetal origins research is structured around her own pregnancy.

PARISIANS: An Adventure History of Paris. By Graham Robb. (Norton, $28.95.) This series of character studies — some of familiar figures, some not — is arranged to give meaning to a volatile, complicated city.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA: Journey to “The Good Earth.” By Hilary Spurling. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) The vast historical backdrop of this biography informs but never overwhelms its remarkable, elusive subject.

POPS: A Life of Louis Armstrong. By Terry Teachout. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) This biography maintains that discomfort with Armstrong’s public persona has led detractors to minimize his enormous contributions to music and to civilization.

THE POSSESSED: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. By Elif Batuman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $15.) An entertaining memoir-cum-travelogue of a graduate student’s improbable education in Russian language and literature.

THE PRICE OF ALTRUISM: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness. By Oren Harman. (Norton, $27.95.) Harman surveys 150 years of scientific history to examine the theoretical problem at the core of behavioral biology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Why do organisms sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others?

THE PROMISE: President Obama, Year One. By Jonathan Alter. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) This appraisal by a Newsweek columnist is mercifully free of the sensationalistic tone of other recent campaign books.

THE PUBLISHER: Henry Luce and His American Century. By Alan Brinkley. (Knopf, $35.) The creator of Time and Life used his magazines to advance political favorites, paint an uplifting portrait of the middle class and promote American intervention in the world.

RATIFICATION: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788. By Pauline Maier. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Maier’s history lays out the major issues, the arguments, the local context, the major and minor players, and lots of political rough stuff.

THE SABBATH WORLD: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. By Judith Shulevitz. (Random House, $26.) This wide-ranging meditation is part spiritual memoir, part religious history, part literary exegesis.

SCORPIONS: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices. By Noah Feldman. (Twelve, $30.) A group portrait of Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas.

SECRET HISTORIAN: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. By Justin Spring. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $32.50.) A sad, dangerous, astonishingly eccentric 20th-century life, recounted in absorbing detail.

SUPREME POWER: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court. By Jeff Shesol. (Norton, $27.95.) Contention over Roosevelt’s proposal to transform the court nearly paralyzed his administration for over a year and severely damaged fragile Democratic unity.

THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. By Joan Schenkar. (St. Martin’s, $40.) A witty biography of the manipulative, secretive and obsessive creator of Tom Ripley, a character who was a version of Highsmith herself.

THE TENTH PARALLEL: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. By Eliza Griswold. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A journey along a latitude line where two religions meet and often clash.

TRAVELS IN SIBERIA. By Ian Frazier. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) Dubious meals, vehicle malfunctions and relics of the Gulag fill Frazier’s uproarious, sometimes dark account of his wanderings.

THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. By Isabel Wilkerson. (Random House, $30.) This consummate account of the exodus of blacks from the South between 1915 and 1970 explores parallels with earlier European immigration.

WASHINGTON: A Life. By Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press, $40.) Chernow brings his considerable literary talent to bear on the continued hunger of many Americans for more tales of the first president’s exploits.

THE WAVE: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean. By Susan Casey. (Doubleday, $27.95.) Brainy scientists, extreme surfers and mountains of water mix it up in Casey’s vivid, kinetic narrative.

WILLIE MAYS: The Life, the Legend. By James S. Hirsch. (Scribner, $30.) In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch concentrates mostly on the baseball brilliance, reminding us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy.

November 24, 2010 New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/books/review/100-notable-books-2010.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=books

The Big Show: Franzen, Goodman, and ‘The Great American Novel’

GABRIEL BROWNSTEIN – 9 Feb 2011

 

The summer of 2010:  Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, and The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman.

Both are comic-realist novels about recent history, family stories and love stories with subplots about technology and the environment.  Both are ambitious books that attempt to examine the struggles of contemporary America, and both writers model their novels on great 19th Century realist fiction.  While Franzen invokes Tolstoy, Goodman (without ever announcing it) structures her book loosely around Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.

Both books are concerned with authenticity, and both books’ protagonists are obsessed with environmental preservation.  In Freedom, Walter Berglund wants to protect songbirds.  In The Cookbook Collector, Jessamine Bach wants to save redwood trees.  In both, the main character’s environmentalism is posed against a second major character’s struggle with aesthetics and materialism.  Both Freedom’s Richard Katz (a musician) and The Cookbook Collector’s George Friedman (an antiquarian) make long speeches about the commodification of beauty.  And in both books, there’s a subplot concerning a dickish and acquisitive young man, aggressive and faux-heroic, who gets into some morally disreputable W. Bush-related business by going after money:  in Freedom it’s war profiteering and contracting, in The Cookbook Collector it’s Internet invasion of privacy and eventually government surveillance.  As Freedom gets much of its ripped-from-the-headlines feel from subplots about the Iraq war, so The Cookbook Collector with the boom and bust of the Internet era.

Both are loose, baggy novels that move from character to character and year to year, with great big imaginative sweeps. Both books center around a family (the Berglunds, the Bachs), both books climax with a love triangle and a trip to a place of environmental crisis, and conclude with a violent death and the consolation of marriage.  Both novels have big canvases that the writers attack with comic gusto.  (The Cookbook Collector moves from boardrooms in Boston to communal houses in Berkeley; it makes you cry about 9/11 and makes you think about David Hume and culinary history.)  Both novels are really books about value, both material and moral.  These are serious books that question value in American life in light of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the Iraq war.

Both are addictive reading. I couldn’t put either one down. And both books were well received.   Reviewers really liked The Cookbook Collector.  They marveled at its intelligence and grace.  It was called “a feast of love;” critics said that Goodman “makes us care,” and that her books was “enchanting and sensuous,” and “flush with warmth and color.”  Critics were somewhat more divided over Freedom, but those who liked it liked it a lot:  “A masterpiece of American fiction,” said Sam Tanenhaus in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, “an indelible portrait of our times,” said Michiko Kakutani in the daily.  And this difference in response mimicked the gap between the two books’ pre-publication hype.  Franzen’s was sold as “The Great American Novel” (that’s what Esquire called it), while The Cookbook Collector was (I guess) just another good book by Allegra Goodman.

Why such a big gap?

I’m sure that a lot of the hype probably has to do with vagaries of the publishing marketplace, mysterious stuff that I can’t speak to. (Like, how’d they get Obama to buy it?)  A lot of the gap in expectations also has to do with the relative success of the authors’ previous books—on the one hand, there was that long wait after Franzen’s mega big hit The Corrections, on the other, a shorter wait after Goodman’s well-regarded Intuition.  (I, for one, sort of expect that every few years Allegra Goodman will give me another terrific novel to read.)  I’m sure part of the wide gap in response has to do with the genders of the authors.   It’s as impossible to imagine Goodman on the cover of Time magazine as it is impossible to imagine Jonathan Franzen getting called “warm and sensuous.”  (There’s a subtext to the praise of The Cookbook Collector that I quoted above, and it’s: Allegra writes like a girl.)  But the difference also is in the books themselves, in the way they approach their readers and their subjects.  As a hundred critics before me have argued, Franzen’s book swaggered out and demanded the response it achieved.  Its title, its 561 pages, and its sweep boldly proclaimed it a Major Novel and critics had to deal with this claim to Majorness.  If you didn’t compare it to The Great Gatsby or Moby-Dick, that was almost a diss.

Freedom got more negative press than did The Cookbook Collector, but that hardly means it’s a weaker book:  it just got more press period, and probably much of the nastier criticism was just counterreaction to all the noise around the novel’s release.  But the book was part of that noise.  Freedom is a terrific performance, but it also sometimes feels like a guy at a dinner party who’s talking very, very loudly.  It mentions War and Peace so many times you’d have to be a dolt not to get the Tolstoyan ambitions.  And some of the book’s weaknesses are part of its terrible roar.  As Charles Baxter wrote in The New York Review of Books, “Freedom’s ambition is to be the sort of novel that sums up an age and that gets everything into it, a heroic and desperate project. The author all but comes out and says so.”  And Franzen’s characters’ actions are sometimes presented with such broad irony that they better serve his point than his plot.  As a result the characters can seem dimwitted; as Baxter put it, “almost every reader of Freedom will be more worldly than its protagonist and will have anticipated several of its key moments many pages before they arrive.”

Meanwhile, for all its sweep and ambition, The Cookbook Collector comes on quite modestly.  As Ron Charles said in The Washington Post: “Goodman is a fantastically fluid writer, and yet for all her skill, she’s a humble, transparent one who stays out of the way, never drawing attention to her style or cleverness.”  Goodman’s gaze is always on her subjects, and she handles her big themes lightly, submerging them in the lives of the books’ characters.  The Cookbook Collector’s literary elegance is part of what made the book invisible to a broad public, while Franzen’s roaring crassness is part of what made his book such a smash.  He’s just a lot louder than she is.

Which is not to say there aren’t lots of ways in which I prefer Franzen to Goodman.  He’s much more interested in the dark side of life than she is.  He writes with sympathy and intelligence about addictions and failed marriages, career failures, and failures in raising children—almost everyone in Freedom is some kind of anxious wreck.  Meanwhile The Cookbook Collector has a pretty uniformly well-adjusted, privileged cast (that’s what you get for following Jane Austen, the lives of the smartest rich girls in the county), most of whom are either making a mint in computers or are enjoying tenure at MIT.  The exception is Goodman’s heroine, Jessamine, the family flake, a confused grad student at Berkeley (egads!), but by the time the novel is done she’s found love, money, and has embarked on a promising academic career.

When people have sex in Freedom, heads bang on walls.  In The Cookbook Collector it’s a finger on the chest and then fade out.  (Goodman does write a very sexy scene of a girl eating a peach.) There are gorgeous flights of imagination in The Cookbook Collector—like the scene where George stumbles upon the collection of its title, 17th Century manuscripts stored in the cabinets and ovens of a musty Bay Area kitchen:

For a moment, he thought she was searching for the iodine, and then he saw them.  Leather-bound, cloth-bound, quartos and folios, books of every size.  The cabinets were stocked with books.  Not a dish or cup in sight.  Only books.  Sandra bent and opened the lower cabinets.  Not a single pot or pan.  Just books.  She stood on a chair to reach the cabinet above the refrigerator.  Books there as well.

George stepped away from the sink without noticing that he had left the water running.  Injury forgotten, he gazed in awe.  He leaned against the counter and stared at bindings of hooped leather, red morocco, black and gold.  Sandra opened a drawer and there lay Le Livre de Cuisine. She opened the drawer below and took out The Accomplisht Cook: or, The Art and Mystery of Cookery.  He opened the book at random:  Section XIII: The First Section for dressing of fish, Shewing divers ways, and the most excellent, for dressing Carps, either Boiled, Stewed, Broiled, Roasted, or Baked, &c.  He had never tried to roast a carp.

But there’s nothing in The Cookbook Collector like the scene in Freedom where a young adulterous husband digs through his own shit for the wedding ring he has swallowed:

He knelt on the cool floor and peered into the bowl at the four large turds afloat in it, hoping to see the glint of gold immediately.  The oldest turd was dark and firm and noduled, the ones from deeper inside him were paler and already dissolving a little.  Although he, like all people, secretly enjoyed the smell of his own farts, the smell of his shit was something else.  It was so bad as to seem evil in a moral way.  He poked one of the softer turds with a fork, trying to rotate it and examine its underside, but it bent and began to crumble, clouding the water brown, and he saw that this business of the fork had been a wishful fantasy.  The water would soon be too turbid to see a ring through, and if the ring broke free of its enveloping matter it would sink to the bottom and possibly go down the drain.  He had no choice but to lift out each turd and run it through fingers, and he had to do this quickly, before things got too waterlogged.  Holding his breath, his eyes watering furiously, he grasped the most promising turd and let go of his most recent fantasy, which was that one hand would suffice.  He had to use both hands, one to hold the shit, and the other to pick through it.  He retched once, drily, and got to work, pushing his fingers into the soft and body-warm and surprisingly lightweight log of excrement.

Goodman glides through her fiction, while with Franzen, it’s always a triple lutz with a camel.  When Jessamine Bach joins an environmental group it’s the prosaically named Save the Trees, and like a real environmentalist, she sits in a treetop canopy to preserve the redwood from loggers.  (That scene in the redwood is beautifully turned.)  When Walter Berglund starts an environmental group, it’s called the Cerulean Warbler Mountain Trust, and Walter’s got a scheme wherein he’ll give over some pristine wilderness to a coal company and then after they’ve removed the mountaintops and fouled the groundwater, he’ll replant the place as a songbird preserve.

Franzen has written a lot about his break from difficult, satiric post-modernism.  In his essay “Mr. Difficult,” he pronounced his split from his one-time hero William Gaddis.  He doesn’t want to write really, really hard intellectual books anymore.  Thing is, Franzen’s over-the-top satire and his pressing of his characters’ faces into humiliation and into the meaningless void—these things really do derive in Franzen from Gaddis, from a dire, post-Beckett aesthetic.  Part of what makes Franzen so exciting to his admirers and so frustrating to his critics is his attempt to wed whacked-out and dark postmodern irony to sympathetic humanist realism.  And in this unlikely marriage problems do arise.  In a crazy-ass postmodern spoof, you can have a character dig through his shit or have an environmentalist join up with a coal company, and this can be part of the cold icy whacky comic mayhem (like in Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, a novel about a set of interrelated lawsuits, where the cars are called Isuyu and Sosume).  But in a realist novel, this kind of irony can shade into something ugly, can make characters seem plastic and thin and (as Charles Baxter argued) a little stupid.  Franzen’s willingness to abase his characters often reads as if he holds them in contempt.

Part of the difference in reception of the novels might actually have something to do with the two books’ Jewishness—and here we come to another one of the weird parallels between the books.  Both of these are very Jewish novels, and their subplots about Jewishness mirror each other.  In both books, mothers hide their Jewishness from their children, children discover their secret family histories, and these discoveries of secret histories coincide with violent global convulsions.

In Freedom, Patty Berglund, Walter’s wife, keeps her Jewish identity a secret from her kids, and her son Joey (the one who digs through his own shit, the one who gets mixed up in phony arms deals in the Iraq war) discovers his Jewishness late in the novel.  After he makes this discovery of his identity, Joey gets involved with in a scary Jewish family—one that might be modeled on the Kristols or the Wolfowitzes, rich Jews whose interest in Joey’s Jewishness is almost as creepy as their interest in right wing politics, Jews who distribute false information that leads to war.

In The Cookbook Collector, Jessamine and Emily Bach’s mother is dead, but her Jewishness is similarly locked away from them, kept hidden from the girls by their father.  They both learn about their Jewishness at a post-9/11 memorial service—the Bach sisters are related not to assimilated or political Jews, but to Hassidic Jews, in fact to the Bialostoker Rebbe himself.  Goodman’s treatment of Jewishness has a completely different purpose than does Franzen’s.  For Franzen, Jewishness marks another opportunity to explore self-loathing and to memorialize the times—here, to skewer neo-conservatives.  In The Cookbook Collector, the presence of Jews—of rabbis—allows the novel to contemplate value in a whole new light.  Religious value is a central value for Goodman, and one that underpins the whole of her work.  In this book, it is contemplated alongside other human values—material, aesthetic, filial, and romantic.  And all of these things, in Goodman’s eyes, have worth.

Twenty years ago, David Foster Wallace wrote an essay called “E Unibus Plurum: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in which he worried that the irony of his favorite post-moderns (Pynchon, Delillo, Gaddis, Barth) had been co-opted in his generation of post-modernists’ lives by television, in particular leering, cynical “I know this is just an ad” kind of TV ads.  Wallace worried that his generation of post-modernists had fallen into a trap, a reflexive, cold irony he called “televisual,” and he described this irony’s gaze as “the girl who’s dancing with you but who would rather be dancing with someone else.”  Allegra Goodman, of course, is in no danger of falling into this trap.  At the end of The Cookbook Collector, Jessamine Bach’s newly discovered uncle, Rabbi Helfgott, presides over her and George Friedman’s marriage, and it’s clear that the book believes in God and in love, and that Goodman’s fiction exists in a stable, meaningful, social world.  Her subtle literary ironies are of a piece with this large-hearted view.

Meanwhile Franzen’s novel—his whole career, really—is a struggle with this postmodern ironical trap, a struggle to inhabit it and get out of it, to be humane and to be ironic.  At the end of Freedom, when the Berglunds, Walter and Patty, huddle together after 500-plus pages of humiliations, affairs, failures, and addictions, and in the ruins of their marriage find some comfort from the horrid world all around—well, it’s proof (if proof was ever needed) of Franzen’s extraordinary gifts.  This final section succeeds movingly.

But he never can quite turn it off, and you feel it, the televisual irony, all throughout the course of Freedom.  Franzen is dancing with you, sure, and with Walter and Patty as well, and his moves are wild and Tony Manero dazzling—but he’s not wholeheartedly on the floor with his partners.  Allegra Goodman loves her characters—they absorb her attention as if she could wish for nothing more, and she offers them intimately to her readers, so much so that the author herself all but vanishes.  Franzen’s characters meanwhile exist somewhere beneath the glory of his prose.  His book is not so much addressed to the intimate reader, it’s addressed to the judges and the crowds.  His characters are anxious, but he is supremely confident.  He has managed to shuck the difficulties of postmodern fiction while retaining much of its cool and distant pose.

David Foster Wallace had lots of moral and aesthetic problems with televisual irony—he ends that essay about it with an interesting call for earnestness—but he also noted how well it sells.  Half a year after its release, The Cookbook Collector, full of earnestness and love, is between hardcover and paperback editions, and it’s hard to find at your local bookstore. Meanwhile, cool and calculating Freedom sits high on the bestseller list, alone among its literary contemporaries.  That’s some kind of triumph.

http://www.themillions.com/2011/02/the-big-show-franzen-goodman-and-the-great-american-novel.html

Best Romantic Line in English literature?

Britons have chosen a line from Emily Bronte’s novel “Wuthering Heights” as the most romantic in English literature — just in time for Valentine’s Day.

A poll of 2,000 adults commissioned by Warner Home Video to mark the DVD release of the romantic comedy “Going the Distance” showed 20 per cent of respondents chose the line: “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

Fictional character Catherine Earnshaw’s comment on her love for Heathcliff was followed by Winnie-The-Pooh, the fictional bear created by English writer AA Milne: “If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus one day, so I never have to live without you.”

England’s most famous playwright, William Shakespeare, came third with a line from his play about star-crossed lovers “Romeo and Juliet”: “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun.”

A list of quotes and their ranking by respondents follows:

1.” Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” – Emily Bronte

2. “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you” – A A Milne

3.”But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun” – Shakespeare “Romeo and Juliet”

4. “He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong” – W.H. Auden

5. “You know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams” – Dr. Seuss

6.” When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part” – “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”

7. “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be” – Robert Browning

8.”For you see, each day I love you more. Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow” – Rosemonde Gerard

9. “But to see her was to love her, love but her, and love her forever” – Robert Burns

10. “I hope before long to press you in my arms and shall shower on you a million burning kisses as under the Equator” – Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1796 dispatch to wife Josephine.

© Copyright (c) Postmedia News

Reuters Feb 11, 2o11

http://www.vancouversun.com/Emily+Bronte+words+about+love+voted+best+romantic+line+English+literature/4266024/story.html

Is the age of the critic over?

 

Critics reflect on how social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and myDigg, fit into the perennial debate on cultural elitism

 

The Observer, Sunday 30 January 2011

 

Miranda Sawyer, broadcaster and Observer radio critic: ‘Twitter has made it easier for critics to hear other people’s opinions. Even then, though, you tend to hear similar views to your own’

When I was writing for the Face, during the 1990s, I went to interview some boy racers: young lads who spent all their money souping up their cars in order to screech around mini roundabouts or rev their engines in supermarket car parks until their tyres smoked. The kids asked me who I was writing for. When I said the Face – a magazine that prided itself on representing all aspects of British youth interests – every single one of them replied: “Never heard of it.”

The point is that most people – especially those outside the high-culture capital of London – are involved in culture of their own choice, often of their own making. Professional critics spend their time whizzing between private screenings and secret gigs, opening nights and exclusive playbacks. Everyone else just does stuff they like, with people who like it too. We naturally gravitate to others who share our interests, whether we spend our time collecting first editions, following Stockport County, yomping up mountains or watching three series of Breaking Bad all in one go. Our interests – our personal cultural choices – are what define a good part of our identity.

And mostly, those choices are ignored by the mainstream media. It was only during the 90s that newspapers began to cover pop music in a serious way; only very recently that computer games were deemed worthy of mention. There is still a hierarchy of culture in the media. On The Culture Show or The Review Show, for instance, contemporary art will always trump standup comedy. As a radio critic, I know full well that my reviews will never get the space of those that discuss TV or film. (Sport is even worse: if you’re interested in any sport other than football, cricket, rugby or tennis, forget it.)

The reason why professional critics agree a lot is that they tend to be of a type. They’ve often had a go at what they’re reviewing (they went to art school or were in a rubbish band or tried acting), they like writing and they’re a product of their age. I often find myself nodding along with the Guardian‘s Alexis Petridis, Lynn Gardner and Grace Dent, with Laura Cumming or Kitty Empire from this paper or Caitlin Moran of the Times. But that’s because we all want our culture to do the same things. We have similar taste.

The big difference Facebook and, especially, Twitter has made is that it is easier for critics to hear other people’s opinions. Even then, though, you tend to hear similar views to your own; after all, if you follow someone on Twitter it’s because something about them appeals to you. I tweeted about PJ Harvey’s new album the other day. The excited response I got from followers was amazing. But then, what did I expect? I wasn’t talking to fans of Justin Bieber. We don’t really connect.

Jessa Crispin, editor-in-chief of Bookslut: ‘The tussle, the argument, the fun of criticism is now online’

Whenever people start talking about the death of the critic, the health of criticism is measured in dollars. As in, how much money did the movie that all the critics loved so much make? How many books sold? If every critic in the western world loved Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom but it has only been on the US bestseller list for 17 weeks, well, then the critic must be dead.

What we take away from this argument, then, is that the role of the critic is to sell product. She is simply an extension of the marketing department. Indeed, many of the reviews of Freedom were written in the breathless prose of an artful press release.

One of the great powers of the internet community is its ability to shame the bombast, the overblown, the unquestioning. The focus isn’t merely the work of art itself but the culture that produces and lauds it. Recently there was an open letter posted on various blogs railing against the New Yorker‘s shortage of female feature writers, as well as a relentless campaign at The Awl to highlight the factual inaccuracies in The Social Network and explain why they matter. When Franzen’s glasses were stolen during a book release party, blogs such as Moby Lives pointed out the absurdity of sending helicopters after the thief, as well as the desperate grovelling of the publishing industry at the feet of Franzen, as if he had returned to save literary fiction itself.

More than shame, though, the internet’s greatest strength is enthusiasm. The tussle, the argument, the fun of criticism has moved online. While mainstream critics have narrowed their focus to a handful of novels, movies, and television programmes, the field has never been wider. The same few dozen books might be reviewed in every print publication but meanwhile hundreds of thousands are published every year. In literary criticism there are huge gaps in what gets written about in print: books by women, translated fiction, comic books, books released by small presses, science fiction… Online, though, every niche has its community of producers, critics, and readers, and it’s fed by passion and dedication.

Criticism isn’t about units sold, it’s about the conversation. The fact that Freedom briefly dropped off the bestseller list to me isn’t a mark that criticism is dead – it’s proof it’s still alive, skewering this idea of the objective opinion and rejecting the critics’ insistence that this is a flawless work that everyone must read. If the print media isn’t having the conversation the reader wants, it’s no wonder the listeners have migrated to a place that is.

See www.bookslut.com

Philip French, Observer film critic: ‘It could be that bad criticism might drive out serious writing’

Neal Gabler rightly notes the continuing contest between elitists and populists for a commanding position as opinion-makers in the United States. There’s also been a competition between supporters of respectable and disreputable culture, the former traditionally dominated by the churches and middle-class women whose genteel ambitions have shaped society through an opposition to gambling, sexual freedom and drinking, and their support of censorship.

The spread of the world wide web, which is now transforming our culture, allows anyone with a computer to set himself up as a reviewer, a participant in a critical discourse and a potential legislator. This is a positive tendency as well as an inevitable one, if more a cacophony than a civilised discourse, though back in the good old days the Edinburgh Review and Leavis’s Scrutiny also had their in-house bruisers. We must be aware, however, that the decline of print journalism and the ubiquity of the web may produce a cultural Gresham’s law. Gresham declared that bad money drives good money out of circulation. It could be that bad criticism might have a similar effect on serious, considered writing.

By setting up supposedly elitist critics against what he calls “ordinary people” or “ordinary folk”, Gabler does more justice to the former (a motley crew, at least in the world of film reviewing) and less than justice to those not professionally employed in what TS Eliot (that lover of music hall and the Marx brothers) called “the common pursuit of true judgment”. A harsher distinction – between the ignorant and the well informed, the insensitive and the aesthetically or morally responsive – would find adherents on both sides of this false divide. Will cyberspace produce its Samuel Johnson, its Edmund Wilson, its Lionel Trilling?

The established critics have frequently stumbled in recognising significantly innovative or original work. Michael Cimino’s flawed masterpiece Heaven’s Gate (1980) was lynched by American critics hunting as a pack, influencing the producers without giving the public a chance. It was then too late for European writers to rectify their judgment. Could bloggers have made a difference? Are they now attempting to?

Gabler goes along too readily with the anti-intellectual practice of using “critic” as a pejorative term. This isn’t new. Back in 1972 when I was devising a new arts programme for BBC radio, the then controller of Radio 4 said to me: “I don’t care what you call it as long as ‘art’ or ‘critic’ isn’t in the title.” In Waiting for Godot “critic” is the ultimate insult exchanged between Vladimir and Estragon, but Beckett intended it as a joke.

Hari Kunzru, novelist: ‘Critics praise work that doesn’t upset them. So much looks like art but just tastes of cardboard’

In America, cultural elitism has little to do with the arts. In the virulent debate between Jacksonian populists and whoever they’ve got in their gunsights/surveyor’s symbols this week, “culture” largely refers to values – belief in God, patriotism, the nuclear family and so forth. The idea of an artistic “critical elite” usually only turns up in cases such as the recent controversy at the Smithsonian over the removal of a 1987 video by artist David Wojnarowicz, after complaints by Republican congressmen that the work was offensive to Christians.

Aesthetics is very much not the issue here. The point is an attack on the social legacy of the 1960s, and an attempt to reverse the decline in the punitive moral authority of the church. “New York”, with its bankers and filthy art galleries and suspiciously European mass-transit system, often stands in for the nebulous idea of What Is Wrong With America. Or “Hollywood”, understood as a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the nation by showing pictures of American soldiers losing and girls with their tops off.

In more ideologically sophisticated regions of the American right, the notion of a cultural elite is threatening because it suggests that value may spring from something other than pure market forces. How dare you, the unelected critic, presume a specialist knowledge that can override the mystical self-unfolding of consumer choice? In this landscape, the highbrow/lowbrow divide seems like a quaint relic of a bygone age. We now live under the hybrid tyranny of middlebrow. No serious person believes the Oscars are a list of the best films, or the Grammys the best music. Charitably one could say they represent a kind of averaging out, an index of the taste of a group of informed people. At worst, critics acting en masse, with one eye on what’s popular and one eye on what’s good, end up praising work that doesn’t upset them. That’s why there’s so much stuff that looks like art, smells like art, but when you bite into it, it just tastes of cardboard.

This is why we have the internet. Social networks don’t strive for consensus. Instead they thrive on argument. A feed populated by diverse people (professionals or amateurs, paid or unpaid) whose taste you trust (and a few with whom you disagree productively) is the best way to squirm out from the tedious flubbery weight of middlebrow culture. It’s more work than getting your opinions off the TV, but once you try it, you’ll never go back.

John Naughton, professor at the Open University and Observer technology columnist: ‘The decline in critical authority began long before the net’

Well, of course the internet has something to do with it, but the decline in critical authority began a long time before the net was imagined, let alone built. What we’re looking at – at least in a British context – is the cumulative result of social and demographic changes that go back to the 1950s.

It’s mostly about the erosion of deference, and – as it happens – we know exactly when the process began. It was the evening of 8 May 1956, the first night of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, at the Royal Court, when the audience gasped at the sight of an ironing board – an ironing board! – on a West End stage.

Why the astonishment? Because up to that point, the London theatrical scene had been dominated by plays about the upper-middle classes written by chaps such as the Hon William Douglas-Home. The subliminal message was that culture was a toff’s preserve – a royal enclosure of the mind, as it were. By putting something approximating to real life on the stage, Osborne was called an “angry young man” for his pains. But he broke the mould. Suddenly everything that had gone before seemed, somehow, absurd.

And then, with impeccable timing, the toffs really blew it. Anthony Eden, the epitome of the cut-glass, West End matinee idol, masterminded the Suez debacle and the country woke up to the fact that its governing class was a busted flush. From then on it was downhill (or uphill, depending on your point of view) all the way.

The erosion of social deference had a cultural impact because until the late 1960s professional criticism was also, if not a toffs’ preserve, certainly a highbrow, Oxbridge-dominated enclosure. The nation opened its heavyweight newspapers every Sunday to learn what Raymond Mortimer (Malvern and Balliol), Cyril Connolly (Eton and Balliol) or Philip Toynbee (Rugby and Christ Church) made of the latest books, or what John Barber (King Edward’s and Merton) and Kenneth Tynan (King Edward’s and Magdalen) thought about the new plays. In the circumstances, Geoffrey Madan’s description of the British cultural elite as “an arboreal slum of Balliol men” sounds peculiarly apt.

It couldn’t last, of course, and it didn’t. Rupert Murdoch arrived and made vulgarity respectable. Maggie Thatcher disparaged the cultural elite, questioned the worth of intangible values and legitimised greed. And all that happened long before Tim Berners-Lee first thought about the web.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jan/30/is-the-age-of-the-critic-over?INTCMP=SRCH

 

Everyone’s a critic now

Neal Gabler - The Observer, Sunday 30 January 2011

A refusal to heed the advice of highbrow cultural critics is nothing new. But when the public can quickly share their own – different – views on Twitter, Facebook, myDigg and other social media, is criticism dead?

Late last year there was a confluence of critical opinion in America the likes of which the nation hadn’t seen in years. Every single film critic in the traditional media – 350 “best” lists, the ads boast – seemed to anoint The Social Network, director David Fincher’s semi-fictionalised account of the founding of Facebook, as the movie of the year, maybe even of the decade. Every single literary critic in the traditional media seemed to agree that Jonathan Franzen‘s Freedom, his saga of a dysfunctional American family, was the novel of the epoch. And just to make it three for three, just about every television critic in the traditional media seemed to genuflect before Martin Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire, an HBO series that depicts the depredations of a mob kingpin in Atlantic City during Prohibition.

This is an extraordinary bounty of greatness in such a short time, though what is really extraordinary is the extent to which critics seemed almost to collude in issuing their superlatives. Could it be they were joining forces to assert their authority at a time when that cultural authority is under siege?

There is, of course, nothing terribly novel about a critical consensus. In America nowadays, critics usually travel in packs, afraid to stray lest they be left wandering by their lonesomes outside the conventional wisdom. What is novel is the vehemence of this consensus, the insistence that these things were not just good but somehow the very best, and the way in which this consensus immediately entered the larger culture. There was a period of a month or so late last summer and early autumn when The Social Network, Freedom and Boardwalk Empire were so ubiquitous that you could scarcely pick up a newspaper or magazine, watch a TV show or listen to a radio show without reading or hearing about them. Even President Obama had a copy of Freedom tucked under his arm to take on vacation.

And there was something else novel this time around. Despite the deafening ballyhoo, the critical consensus didn’t seem to make much difference to the larger public. The Social Network did only “all right” business, not the sort of business one might expect for a celebrated cultural milestone; it has not yet broken the $100m mark at the box office and was the 29th highest grossing film last year, right under that blockbuster, Date Night. (The Coen Brothers’ True Grit, by comparison, took $100m in just three weeks.) Similarly, Freedom just logged its 17th week on the New York Times bestseller list, after having fallen from the list before the holidays. It came 39th among the 100 bestselling books of 2010 on the USA Today list, despite the boost it got as an Oprah Book Club selection. And Boardwalk Empire began in September with a ratings bang of 4.8 million viewers, only to sink to 2.7 million by November. As Entertainment Weekly opined, it “doesn’t seem to have the water cooler appeal” of The Sopranos or Mad Men. Critics were talking about it but ordinary people weren’t.

So if this was some sort of critical last stand, a desperate ploy by critics to display their power by circling the wagons, it seems to have failed. Even if The Social Network wins the Oscar as expected, Freedom the Pulitzer Prize and Boardwalk Empire the Emmy, it would only serve to confirm the breach that now seems to exist between the critics and the public. Once upon a time, critics could close that breach through a process close to cultural brainwashing. They could get people to see and love The Social Network, to read Freedom, to watch Boardwalk Empire. Now they can’t.

The usual suspect in this immunisation is the internet. It is certainly no secret that the internet has eroded the authority of traditional critics and substituted Everyman opinion on blogs, websites, even on Facebook and Twitter where one’s friends and neighbours get to sound off. What is less widely acknowledged is just how deeply this populist blowback is embedded in America and how much of American culture has been predicated on a conscious resistance to cultural elites. It is virtually impossible to understand America without understanding the long ongoing battle between cultural commissars who have always attempted to define artistic standards and ordinary Americans who take umbrage at those commissars and their standards.

This is hardly a recent occurrence occasioned by the internet and other democratising elements. It actually began at the country’s inception when political opposition to England bled into a form of cultural opposition as well. Europe was seen as effete, corrupt, supercilious and haughty. By contrast, ordinary Americans saw themselves as manly, honest, commonsensical and populist, and early on they tried to fashion a culture that manifested these characteristics – an American culture divorced from any European antecedents, a democratic culture.

What complicated matters was that within America there was much of the same irksome aristocratic hauteur as there was in Europe, which meant that rifts quickly opened here between those who saw themselves as custodians of a high culture and those who were opting for that distinctive American culture with its democratic elements. The political avatar of this division was Andrew Jackson, the plainspoken hero of the Battle of New Orleans who ascended to the presidency in 1829 by declaring himself a “fighter not a writer”, to distinguish himself from his well-educated opponent, John Quincy Adams. Jackson seemed to be a common man, and he exploited that image.

The division took shape culturally with some innovations of the Jacksonian era and the years that immediately followed: crime almanacs that provided bloody accounts of horrific murders; sentimental novels such as The Wide, Wide World that were the forerunners of today’s soap operas; dime novels that depicted the stories of western heroes; the penny press that specialised in tawdry stories of sex and violence; and various forms of popular music and stage performance. This was the introduction on the American scene of what would later be known as “low culture” or “popular culture”.

Not surprisingly, the conventional take on American popular culture by intellectuals is that it was the product of ignorance and a deficiency of good taste among the mass of American citizens. They had to bowdlerise culture because they couldn’t appreciate the unadulterated thing.

But the reality of the formation of American popular culture may have been something else entirely. Nineteenth-century Americans were, in fact, highly literate. Many of them were conversant with high culture – from Shakespeare to opera to classical music to what passed for fine art. These are also people who took their picnic baskets to hear Lincoln and Douglas debate for hours. They might not have been super-sophisticates but neither were they Neanderthals.

And yet even as they consumed high culture, they seemed to resent those who felt duty bound to impose it on them. Or put another way, it wasn’t high culture they disdained so much as high culturists who, not incidentally, disdained them. Though it is impossible to prove with any certainty, it is likely that American popular culture, which is arguably the most ubiquitous and powerful culture in the world today, arose from this contrarian impulse: ordinary Americans would consciously create a culture that was everything the elitists detested. They would not only welcome the elitists’ contempt; they would actively try to foment it. This was how America became engaged in its battle between high culture and low – not by accident but by design.

What this meant is that supposed stupidity didn’t shape popular culture; rather, popular culture shaped supposed stupidity. At almost every cultural juncture – from travelling variety shows to vaudeville, which was like the English music hall, to movies to television to rock music to gaming today – the elites hectored the general public, shouting that the sky was falling. Everything popular, the elites proclaimed, would subvert American standards and values. Culture was under democratic assault. It couldn’t possibly survive the masses.

For a country that prides itself on its democracy, as America does, there is a long train of literature that is passionately anti-democratic, and not just from the unreconstructed right wing. Sometimes the enemy was democracy itself; sometimes the enemy was the system, as when the Frankfurt School expatriates and other neo-Marxians blamed not the masses but the mass culture industry through which devious capitalists manipulated people – dumbing them down. And sometimes the enemy was just plain obtuseness, which is why critic Dwight Macdonald coined the terms “masscult” and “midcult” to revile not only low culture but also a middle-class culture that had ridiculous pretensions to be higher than low. Today critics are less likely to excoriate popular culture as a whole than its various components – from reality TV shows to popcorn movies to Justin Bieber – but the sentiment remains. Culture needs gatekeepers to protect it from the hoi polloi.

Of course it was one of the triumphs of American popular culture that the rigid distinctions between high and low gradually disappeared. You can actually witness the rapprochement in Fantasia when classical conductor Leopold Stokowski shakes hands with Mickey Mouse, showing as well that with the growing power of popular culture, not even the practitioners of high culture wanted to be on the wrong side of the cultural divide. In time, popular music, the movies and particular television shows would all have critical champions in the most influential, highbrow media organs, and a few powerful ones, such as the old New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael, would even make their reputations by insisting that “official” art was dull and desiccated and that the real vibrancy was with the subversive trash of popular culture.

Kael’s was a time in America, some 40 years ago, when the balance of power was shifting from the elites to the populists – a last-ditch fight that turned criticism into a blood sport with all sorts of warriors. One could actually find critics on nightly talk shows then – something that almost never happens now – and many were practically household names: proud elitists such as John Simon of New York Magazine, populists such as mustachioed Gene Shalit of The Today Show, professional eviscerators such as Rex Reed and Judith Crist, who won attention when she called The Sound of Music “The Sound of Money”. This was criticism as entertainment but it also demonstrated a genuine dispute over cultural hierarchy – over the claims of informed taste over popular taste.

Eventually the battle ended, the dust settled, and movies, TV shows and even popular music became acceptable topics for serious critical discourse. This did not mean, however, that high culturists had totally capitulated to popular taste. It only meant they had shifted the terms of their authority to fit the new circumstances. Among film critics, they still derided all but a few action movies and just about every film of overt sentiment to prove they weren’t susceptible to these primitive emotions; they still generally rewarded foreign movies with higher accolades than American movies; they still tended to review film-makers as much as they reviewed the film, giving so-called auteurs the benefit of the doubt; and they still rallied around the same kinds of films and often the very same films. To wit, The Social Network.

One might imagine there would be an enormous diversity among critics, tough-minded souls each expressing his or her own unique sensibility. And, as mentioned, there once was. But among American critics in the traditional media today, there is surprisingly little diversity. The “best” film lists or “best” television lists or “best” album lists or “best” book lists usually have the same titles, regardless of critic or publication. In short, critics continue to attempt to assert their control, only they do so by uniformity, coincidental or not. And the public seems to sense it.

That’s important because there may be no more powerful public emotion in America than the contempt for contempt. In this theoretically egalitarian society, condescension is practically un-American, which is why ordinary Americans always seem to yearn for some form of redress against those who seem to think they are above the so-called masses. (This is also, by the way, one of the primary features of American politics, and it helps explain folks like Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and Sarah Palin, who understand how to nurse resentments.) To take it one step further, it is so powerful an emotion that it may have been the real fuel for the internet, one of the central functions of which has been to challenge authority – to provide a democratising voice against the custodians of official culture. Thus the old spent war between high and low seemed to reconstitute itself into a war between traditional media and new media.

By now the brickbats flung by critics at bloggers and by bloggers at critics are old news. “Bloggers in pyjamas” was the taunt by the mainstream media. But there is an irony in this fight that neither side seems to recognise. Though the most popular bloggers have come to threaten the influence of the old establishment critics, it is in the new nature of the internet that the more popular these bloggers become, the more establishment they become. A blogger such as Harry Knowles, whose aintitcoolnews.com website often preempts mainstream criticism by tipping movies that have yet to open, seems less like a fresh, new populist voice in the critical ether than a familiar old one. His opinions if not his colloquial style would fit comfortably in the New York Times or The New Yorker.

Indeed, the most popular voices on the web are less likely to be contrarian than conventional. Rottentomatoes.com, a site that aggregates several hundred film blogs and critics and then devises a rating based on the percentage of them who liked or disliked a particular film, is usually squarely within the consensus. Eighty-nine per cent of its users, for example, approved The Social Network. It is the rare critic, such as Armond White of New York Press, available on rottentomatoes, who challenges the consensus. His take on The Social Network? “Like one of those smart middlebrow TV shows, the speciousness of The Social Network is disguised by its topicality. It’s really a movie excusing Hollywood ruthlessness.” Similarly, bloggers largely enthused over Freedom and Boardwalk Empire. They didn’t take on the mainstream critics. They joined them, which means the sides weren’t really skirmishing so much over standards as over the locus of power.

So while bloggers may dilute the authority of critics in the traditional media, the real threat to cultural authority turns out not to be blogging but social networking. It is Twitter, Facebook, myDigg, Yelp and dozens of other sites where, sometimes just by sheer quantity of opinion, the people are overrunning the Winter Palace of cultural elitism. At this moment, for example, you can find an ongoing debate on Twitter, which anyone can join, comparing the relative merits of Inception and The Social Network. Or you can find someone named “Yogareach” tweeting about Freedom: “Started out great but needs seriously editing.” Or another tweeter named Kate saying that the novel didn’t raise her “care factor enough to be interested”. Or you can find various tweets about the period details of Boardwalk Empire, and whether it qualifies as The Sopranos of this decade.

The point isn’t that the traditional critics are always wrong and these populists are right, or even that these comments are overwhelmingly negative or invariably take on the critical consensus. More often than not, they aren’t and they don’t. The point is that authority has migrated from critics to ordinary folks, and there is nothing – not collusion or singleness of purpose or torrents of publicity – that the traditional critics can do about it. They have seen their monopoly usurped by what amounts to a vast technological word-of-mouth of hundreds of millions of people.

We live, then, in a new age of cultural populism – an age in which everyone is not only entitled to his opinion but is encouraged to share it. Nothing could be more American.

Neal Gabler’s most recent book is Walt Disney: The Biography. He is currently working on a biography of Senator Edward Kennedy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jan/30/critics-franzen-freedom-social-network

Five ways to get into Oxford

Oxford University has finished selecting its new intake of students for 2011. It’s a world-famous institution that has educated 25 British prime ministers. So what’s the secret to getting in?

Thousands of students have now heard whether they have been offered places at Oxford University.

For those that have nervously opened the envelope to find good news, they have the added satisfaction of knowing they succeeded in what the university says was the most competitive year yet. More than 17,200 people were chasing 3,200 places.

The application process has a daunting reputation and, for state school pupils, it can seem especially difficult. While only 7% of pupils in England and Wales are from the independent sector, they make up around 46% of Oxford’s undergraduates.

The university says these stats don’t tell the whole story, because a third of students with all A grades in their A-levels – the pool of talent from which Oxford students are drawn – are privately educated.

Getting in is hard, but perhaps not as hard as people think, says Mike Nicholson, the university’s head of undergraduate admissions, with on average five applications for every place.

“We’re looking for students who are intelligent – very interested in their subject and who can demonstrate their interest,” he says.

So what are the ingredients of a successful application?

1. HAVE CHUTZPAH

A touch of impudence can go a long way, says Mark Robinson, head of history at Barton Peveril College in Eastleigh, a state school with a good track record of getting students into Oxford.

“It’s about having confidence in your own opinions, even when someone else says ‘that couldn’t be right’.

“Rather than the pupil giving ground, saying ‘oh dear, silly me’, we want them to say ‘don’t be ridiculous, of course that’s the case’.

“It’s an adversarial style of discussion. When we do our mock interviews and extra lessons with history students, I encourage them to argue.”

There is a presumption that if applying to Oxford, you have to be incredibly well-rounded… you don’t”

Mike Nicholson

Oxford University

The small class sizes of independent schools help cultivate this skill because they make pupils feel special and give them a sense of entitlement, he says.

Pupils who stick up for themselves stand out, says Oxford professor Thomas Noe.

“What we are looking for is a student who can address issues in a logical fashion, reason from premises to conclusion, we’re looking for someone who can stand up for their own ideas but is not particularly inflexible.”

Even if a student is hesitant or shy, how well he thinks will still be evident, he says.

2. UNLEASH YOUR GEEK

Extra-curricular activities are not that important, says Mr Nicholson.

“There is a presumption that if applying to Oxford, you have to be incredibly well-rounded.

“It’s not good enough just to be academic. You have to have climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, raised £10,000 for charity and rescued three children from a burning building, all these fantastic achievements. You don’t.”

Some students have well-rounded activities and some don’t. But they are all smart and that’s the key, he says.

3. BE PASSIONATE

It’s important to communicate your enthusiasm for your subject and not appear like you’re regurgitating lines, says Bethany White, 17, who is heading to Mansfield College to study language and literature.

“It was all natural. When I was talking, I hadn’t planned anything and maybe that helped. I didn’t have preconceived ideas. it was spontaneous.”

Go for it and be yourself, adds Bethany, from Taunton’s College in Southampton.

“And your passion really. The enthusiasm and passion is really important, and if you haven’t got that then don’t bother.”

4. PUT IN THE HOURS

At some schools, like Barton Peveril, students in their final year complete nearly four hours a week of extra classes in preparation.

Showing a knowledge beyond the A-level syllabus is crucial, and that’s what makes the interview the most important part of the application, says Sos Eltis, an English tutor at Brasenose who teaches other Oxford professors how to interview.

It’s about identifying the pupils who think more widely, she says, for whom A-levels seem to hold them back.

“You can’t see that from paper alone. You have to interview them.”

There is also a programme of week-long, residential classes over the summer, run by the university, called Uniq.

Lawrence Holdsworth, 18, who will study history at Somerville College, says it made all the difference to him.

“The Uniq summer school gave me a good taster of the teaching system which was something that I really enjoyed. The debating that comes with it and how you get to explore matters and really go off on a tangent. That is something I definitely advise.”

5. GO TO A SCHOOL WITH KNOW-HOW

Schools can develop relationships with colleges, says Mr Robinson. Once you get a student into a college, he says, that college will often write and ask for more.

Anyone can get into any Oxford college, but some colleges seem to take students from the same schools year after year.

Families also play a big part in providing the right encouragement and work ethic at home.

Ragulan Vigneswaran, 17, says his Sri Lankan parents have been a big factor in his success in getting to Balliol College.

“From a young age, my parents really tried to instil into me that education is pretty much the most important thing.

“My mother I remember was teaching me maths from a really young age because she wanted me to become really adept at it and become passionate in the subject in the way she was.

“They have been supporting me continuously and encouraging me to study more – encouraging out of school study – to make myself more knowledgeable and prepared for the future.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12308121