The Modern Library (5 page)

Bellow’s Augie March is born into immigrant Jewish poverty in Chicago, before the Depression. Augie is on a mythical quest to discover ‘the lessons and theory of power’ but everywhere he finds greed and lies, until acquired wisdom reveals that the greedy and the prevaricators, including his good self, are not to be despised.

This is a picaresque masterpiece, issuing forth the words and thoughts of Augie March in Bellow’s marvellous language, roiling from the gut, strong and vivid. Augie’s pilgrimage begins with his tattered childhood with his mother, his retarded brother George and his labyrinthine older brother Simon, each of them ‘drafted untimely into hardships’. Proceeding through a variety of dubious jobs and precarious adventures – wonderful street theatre involving the riff-raff, rich and poor, of Bellow’s Dickensian humanity – Augie best loves women, the flesh of them, their pernickety brokering for power. Augie chooses Thea, Mimi, Lucy, Stella and more, trailing through abortions, falcon training, each portion of female anatomy closely observed. ‘Guillaume’s girl friend … was a great work of ripple-assed luxury with an immense mozzarella bust …’

This novel is a hymn to city life, suffused with eagerness and delight. Bellow’s pulsing use of words is controlled by the simplicity Augie constantly insists upon, and so this novel avoids the Jewish sentimentality and convoluted clamour which become tiresome in Bellow’s later works. This is a
Great Expectations
or
David Copperfield
set in Chicago, full of a sense of longing – a longing for family, for love: the greatest and most universal of all themes in fiction.

Herzog
is Bellow’s most accomplished novel in which ideas are presented fluently without damaging the characters or the sense of life in the narrative. It has a marvellous first sentence: ‘If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.’

He is indeed out of his mind, and he has many good reasons to be so. One, his mind is too well stocked, he knows too much, he has read too much Western philosophy and it weighs him down. Two, his wife has behaved appallingly, has run off with his friend; ‘run off’ may not, however, be the appropriate term since his friend has only one leg. Three, he is oversexed for a man of his age. Four, his whole family history and the emotion surrounding it exasperate him and make him sad. And these are only four examples.

Moses Herzog will not lie down; his despair is made all the worse by the fact that it is rich in comedy. He writes letters to elderly relatives, to the President, to the
New York Times
, to many dead philosophers. He is deeply worried about the future of civilization, but he is easily distracted by jealousy, further bouts of madness, lust and memories of childhood, not to speak of guilt and hatred, and by his new girlfriend, the wonderful Ramona. The novel possesses an extraordinary narrative energy. Herzog and those close to him take on a life of their own in the book, and the ideas about the future of civilization which obsess him are woven carefully and skilfully into the story of his disintegration.

The title of this novel is ironic. Whatever their age, the three girls in question are in spirit anything but little. Diana-Dinah (Dicey), Clare (Mumbo) and Sheila (Sheikie) emit that fiery power certain women have, which they get from smelting whatever gifts circumstances have given them, however shoddy, into
monumental
wills of iron. In 1914 the girls are at school together at St Agatha’s in Kent. Fifty years later, Dinah begins to fret for her old friends and she advertises for them; Mumbo and Sheikie surface. These bare bones convey nothing of the rich flesh of this novel, splendidly droll both in its dialogue and in the testy, ironic tone of Bowen’s writing. She is given to short, devastating sentences and she applies them to places and persons: her account of the streets and ‘flaccid gates’ and crumbling dogs of the houses of southern England is incomparable. But the real treasure of this novel is its excavation of the meaning of memory, the meaning of time passing, Bowen’s attempt to catch the very moment when it does. That she succeeds turns this brisk comedy into an extraordinary piece of work: clever, beautifully written, a novel which grasps in words and images and laughter that comic despair which comes from the acceptance of life as something which can be only half seen, half known, half understood.

T. Coraghessan Boyle is one of the funniest, sharpest, most original novelists in the United States now. He is interested in the advanced humour inherent in advanced capitalism; America is the vast, dark comedy to which he is wide awake.

The Tortilla Curtain
tells the story oftwo Californian families. The first, led by the nature-loving Delaney, is white and rich and less liberal as the days go by and illegal Mexicans haunt the horizon. The second family is Mexican and illegal and open to every possible calamity known to the human race – fire, flood, robbery, hunger, rape, poison, to name but a few. Delaney’s wife Kyra is one of the most vile people in contemporary literature, and as the book proceeds Delaney starts to join her.

The plot may sound deterministic and crude, as chapters alternate between the ghastly rich and the
simpatico
poor, but the writing and pacing of the book are too clever for that, and the characters too deeply felt and carefully drawn. The book is, however, very political indeed, startlingly so in a time when hardly any American writing is political; it makes you loathe white middle-class Californians, and this must surely be a good thing.

In this tart comedy of manners Anita Brookner uses family photographs – wedding photographs – to tell the story of the Dorns, a well-off London family with wistful echoes of a
middle-European
milieu left behind. There is the matriarch Sofka and her four children: Frederick, her pride and joy; Betty, the favourite daughter; Mimi, the gentle one; and Alfred, the sacrificial lamb. In their world of comfort and coffee, brandy and marzipan cake, an ‘air of family unity serves to disguise unforgivable facts’. Some of these are that Frederick and Betty – two of Brookner’s most artful monsters – are heartless and self-serving, manipulators of family arrangements which seem superficially innocent, but which flicker with unexplored deceits and vanities.

Family and Friends
includes some of Anita Brookner’s finest writing – and some of her most trenchant. Her fiction is noted for its subtlety and technical skill but this can be deceptive, and has indeed deceived the odd ghetto of English critics who greet her novels with delighted misunderstanding. Elsewhere it is recognized that, in ambush behind her classically beautiful prose, rooted in her territory of small lives, is a devilry that works on her stories like lemon zest.
Family and Friends
, in Alfred’s final revenge, provides a finale so delicate and precise that you can almost see the keen eye of the author slowly blinking at you.

Anthony Burgess wrote a thousand words a day – journalism, reviews, criticism, autobiography, verse, short stories, novels. He never repeated himself. He wrote science fiction and a thriller, he wrote
A Clockwork Orange
(1962), he wrote novels about Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Beethoven, and many comic novels.

His most ambitious novel and the work in which he combines his comic talent, his sense of history and his nose for a good story is
Earthly Powers
. It is narrated by one Kenneth Toomey, an octogenarian celebrity writer, a cross between Burgess himself, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, a man capable of producing the following first sentence: ‘It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.’ The archbishop wants to talk about Carlo, Toomey’s brother-in-law who became Pope and could work miracles. The novel explores the cruelty of the century watched through Toomey’s decadent and world-weary eyes. It is a gripping, exhilarating and often
melodramatic
book which plays with ideas of good and evil, and combines moments from history – the Holocaust, the death of the followers of Jim Jones, changes in the Catholic Church – with strong characters and moments of pure theatre.

This is a novel of dreams and nightmares, hallucinations and sudden moments of crystal clarity. Nothing connects, except an uncompromising tone, an attitude, and the constant presence of the body in all its ugly manifestations, and the state, or organized society, in all its brutality. This is not to forget the narrator’s relish in offering further images of pure disgust, setting scenes of cruelty and violence and drug-induced craziness and laughing at the good of it all. If there is a pregnancy, then there will be a bloody miscarriage; if there are teeth, then they will fall out; if there is a passenger plane, then someone is chopping the floor out of the lavatory. Blood, semen, pus, gangrene, venereal diseases, all types of drugs, belches, farts, hangings, shit, toilet paper, condoms, are everywhere. There is some marvellous surgery, including a scene in which a live monkey is sewn into the patient. There are sick jokes about ‘niggers’ and Jews; there are some good one-liners: ‘May all your troubles be little ones, as one child molester says to the other.’ The tone is often deadpan, matter of fact, like a movie script; the book is full of a morbid energy and rhythm; the method, which is fast-moving, aleatory and jumbled, holds your attention and makes the novel oddly riveting, relentlessly dark and crazed.

This feast of a novel, accurately subtitled ‘A Romance’, is replete with love stories both passionate and fateful, with high comedy, languishing tragedy, poetry, mystery and adventure.

The time is now – and then. Now tells the story of an array of scholars of varying levels of greed or goodwill, anxiety and envy, who pursue the literary and emotional pasts of the Browningesque poet Randolph Henry Ash, and Christabel LaMotte, poet and muse. Then is the story of the Victorian liaison between Ash and LaMotte which is dramatic and obscure, and – as is slowly revealed – thoroughly heartwrenching. The present-day lovers-to-be, Ash research assistant Roland Michell and LaMotte scholar Maud Bailey, are inheritors of and act in counterpoint to the lovers from the past.

A. S. Byatt is remarkable for the abundance and richness of her storytelling gifts. She offers robust drama – and a hundred other pleasures: myth and fairytale mingle with the poetic works of Ash and LaMotte and with journals, letters, mishaps, discoveries and farcical absurdities.
Possession
is a romance and a detective story which combines all the entertaining virtues of popular fiction with those qualities A. S. Byatt shares with George Eliot: prodigious narrative, imaginative energy and intelligence. Reading
Possession
is a mesmerizing experience; it becomes a happy addiction, one of those rare novels that lingers in the mind.