By Morris Dean
Today it's two for one1, or one within another. Martin Amis's 2001 collection, The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-20002 is itself a two-for-one: writing that's just fun to read, plus a few dozen reviews of books that you might be glad to have read about and decide to read one or two, or a few.
How could you not want to read Pride and Prejudice after reading a review that begins like this:
The first challenge you face when writing about Price and Prejudice is to get through your first sentence without saying, "It is a truth universally acknowledged."And how could you not want to read a book of reviews and essays that includes that kind of delicious phrasing? Enjoy: one, the other, or both Amis and Austen. I am the one and about to the other.
With that accomplished, with that out of the way, you can move on to more testing questions. For example, Why does the reader yearn with such helpless fervor for the marriage of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy? Why does the reader crow and flinch with almost equal concern over the ups and downs of Jane Bennet and Mr. Bingley? Jane and Elizabeth's mother, Mrs. Bennet—stupid, prattling, coarse, greedy—is one of the greatest comic nightmares in all literature. Yet we are scarcely less restrained than she in our fretful ambition for her daughters. Jane Austen makes Mrs. Bennets of us all. How?
And even more mysteriously, this tizzy of zealous suspense actually survives repeated readings. Finishing the book for perhaps the fifth or sixth time, the present writer felt all the old gratitude and relief an undiminished catharsis.
These days, true, I wouldn't have minded a rather more detailed conclusion—say, a 20-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr. Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well. Such a scene would take place, of course, not in a country inn or a louche lodging house in town, but amid all the comfort and elegance of Pemberly, its parklands and its vistas, and its ten thousand a year.
Jane Austen, with her divine comedies of love, has always effortlessly renewed herself for each generation of readers. And critics too: moralists, Marxists, myth-panners, deconstructers—all are kept happy.
One may wonder what she has to say to the current crop of 20-year-olds, for whom "love" is not quite what it was [review published in 1999]. Today love faces new struggles—against literalism, futurelessness, practicality, and nation-wide condom campaigns. But maybe the old opposition of passion and prudence never really changes—it just sways on its axis....
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean
- Here's how this two-for-one-er came about: Our deeper reviewer, Mr. Jonathan Price, is deep into vacation planning. And until shortly before starting to write this, I was myself deep into an adventure for my wife—stretching a huge shade cloth across a pergola to protect a couple of delicate plants. The adventure involved one of the usual "emergency" runs to the local hardware store, which gave me time to consider what I might review in Mr. Price's absence, and how I might review it. On the way to the hardware store, I was listening to Martin Amis's review of a book by Jane Austen....
- The National Library Service's citation for Amis's collection:
Selection of literary criticism and personal opinion pieces by the British author. Offers appreciations of Philip Larkin, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, and Elmore Leonard, and covers such topics as chess, poker, soccer, and "Masculinity and Related Questions." Some descriptions of sex. National Book Critics Circle Award.
| Please comment |
In fact I did read Pride and Prejudice, in strange circumstances. We were pinned down in high camp on Mt. Rainier by a three-day storm, and soon began swapping books in desperation. So... My reaction is "So that's where the Heaving Alabaster Bosom genre came from." My younger sister assures me this is true. Austen is a far better writer, of course.
ReplyDeleteChuck, it appears that you were thankful for that desperation!
DeleteI started listening to Pride and Prejudice this morning—or rather to Anna Quindlen's introduction to it in the edition whose recorded reading I'm listening to:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." So begins one of the finest novels written in the English language, Pride and Prejudice. Yet it was published anonymously, its author described on the title page only as "a lady." The writing of novels was a disreputable profession in the early part of the nineteenth century. When her family composed the inscription for her tomb in Winchester Cathedral shortly after her death in 1817, Jane Austen was described as "daughter, Christian," but not as writer.
In a memoir of his aunt, J.E. Austen-Leigh wrote of the verger at the cathedral who asked a visitor to the grave, "Pray, sir, can you tell me whether there was anything particular about that lady? So many people want to know where she was buried."