Category Archive: Fiction
A Likely Story
(by Donald E. Westlake) (1984) Very funny tale of hack writer (of “The Pink Garage Gang”, “Coral Sea”, “Golf Courses of America”, etc.) trying to get up a Christmas Book with contributions from various real celebrities that respond with a mixture of indifference, misunderstanding or hideous enthusiasm, while contending with a mother-obsessed editor (‘I’m fine…I’m peachy. Destroyed at f****** lunch with a writer. Home a basket case.’)
Continue Reading →The Great Gatsby
Grave Fitzgeralds (Image courtesy of JayHenry)
(by F. Scott Fitzgerald) The Great American Novel is an absolute synthesis of all that’s great and rotten at the height of the Yankee century. America is so accomplished and competitive that one tends to overlook the result: a defeated majority. Hence the American theme of ‘starting over’ in a different place, exemplified in the go-west mantra of the 1800s and the eastern push of the 20th century. Gatsby emblematised this push, a doughboy made ‘good’ in the new desert of Dr T.J Eckleburg’s New York. Born 1896 in Minnesota, F.S.F. grew into a world of American hegemony but dreamed…
Continue Reading →Sweet Dreams
(by Michael Frayn) Highly original and amusing satire of a bespoke heaven for boyish, middle management men of early middle age and their moral crises as the right hands of god. You can see the influence cast by this book on, for example, Douglas Adams. The chaps, all from Cambridge naturally, are no longer scholars but creators, and they have an easy, breezy, Ian Fleming style way with women and imagine themselves to be radicals, even the lukewarm Head Man, in that smug, cosy, implacable bourgeois way, a la J. P. Sartre. The heavenly staples – taramasalata, gigot aux haricots…
Continue Reading →Snooty Baronet
(by Wyndham Lewis) Lewis was an incendiary hater and this savage and hilarious trifle is worth a read for his acrid scenes involving his literary agent, ‘Humph’, including the delightful dispatching thereof.
Continue Reading →The Screwtape Letters
(by C.S. Lewis) Lewis was unsurpassed in winkling out a small dark corner of the soul and blowing it into toxic glasswork. Here we have one-way correspondence from a demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood: a how-to manual for those who would catch our souls. Exquisite, even for those without the gift of faith. My favourite lesson concerns the lady who quails at that offered, wheedling for “all I want…”. Screwtape’s comment: “Because what she wants is…less…than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.” This…
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