Category Archive: Fiction
Clarissa
(by Samuel Richardson) (1748) The Varnished Culture mentions this merely to brag: longer than War and Peace (it’s the longest novel in English at approximately 984,870 words), this account of virtue chased and trashed is the novel’s version of continuous cricket: mad in detail, slow in execution, passionately related. Told in letters, very long letters, the correspondents spend what seems a year recalling a year but a crowded year. Take this book to a desert island; it will endure and also make a crackling blaze. Coleridge nailed Richardson’s “close, hot, day-dreamy continuity” and Priestley (in Literature and Western Man) commented:…
Continue Reading →A Confederacy of Dunces
(by John Kennedy Toole) Lovingly wry story of modern misanthrope, Ignatius J Reilly, a protean and monolithic loser who falls in love, sort of. “Oh, my God, their tongues are probably all over each other’s capped and rotting teeth”.
Continue Reading →Burr
(by Gore Vidal) A knowing, rollicking account of the early Republic. Vidal smashes the Jeffersonian myth but creates a more interesting figure of history in lieu. Burr’s uneasy, half-respectful relationship with Alexander Hamilton, whom he ultimately killed in a duel, is particularly interesting, although contentiously handled. Vidal paints a vivid, unflattering portrait of Thomas Jefferson, the ultimate effect of which is to confirm his stature. But it’s a close-run thing: here is Burr reflecting on the 3rd President: “He was the most charming man I have ever known, as well as the most deceitful. Were the philosopher’s charm less, the…
Continue Reading →Burial Rites
(by Hannah Kent) Once the reader accepts the book as a claustrophobic minuity, s/he will find this wintery Icelandic saga is worth the solitary confinement; a lucid and authentic small tale of murder and retribution, with as much cause for optimism as in a Ken Loach film. Ken Loach should buy the film rights. [Update note: Ms Kent’s second novel is due out. No pressure, but….]
Continue Reading →Blood Meridian
Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (by Cormac McCarthy) The Addams Family out in the Old West have adventures of the type conceived by the bastard child of Hunter S Thompson and Zane Grey. This windy road will have gratuitous blood, is not for old men and weirdos ride the pretty horses… Apparently multiple attempts to wring a film from this book have failed, which is not surprising, as it is heavy-handed, ludicrously-praised nonsense.
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