John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

It's 1867. Charles Smithson (note 'everyman'-type surname) is engaged to a rich young woman, Ernestina Freeman (note 'everyman'-type surname), who is as earnest as her name in her belief in moral decency. The engagement is one of the by now commonplace alliances between the fading aristocracy (Charles's heirless uncle is a baronet) and the wealth of trade (Ernestina's father owns a chain of department stores). Charles feels the wrongness of the emotionally stunted age in which he lives -- despite the intellectual powerhouses of Darwin, Marx et al -- but he can't quite think himself out of his natural chauvinism. Oh, he also visits prostitutes sometimes, and has some really twattish friends, but we're not meant to mind that too much, because that was just, y'know, the 1860s. Charles is just a Victim of Circumstance.

On a visit to Lyme Regis, Charles meets 'the French Lieutenant's Woman', also 'the French lieutenant's whore', Sarah Woodruff. She is also a Victim of Circumstance. She has a lot of hair which is frequently loose and she likes looking out to sea, because she's Deep. More specifically, she's sad because she's unable to be sexually and intellectually free, because she's hampered by the oppressiveness of Dorset society and the knowledge that if she goes to London she'll probably end up exactly what the Lyme residents think she is. She likes to walk in the Undercliff, a very beautiful strip of land west of Lyme, which is full of ancient woodland and fossils, and equally full of canoodling couples (mostly also Victims of Circumstance).

Ernestina is young, pretty and reasonably clever, with no apparent interests or individuality except her determination to marry Charles. She is obviously also a Victim of Circumstance.

OK, it's easy to criticise the slightly cardboard characters, but the real trouble comes from the narrator. Fowles is desperately trying to do that postmodernist thing where you repeatedly call attention to the fact that this is all fiction. He playfully puts himself in and out of scenes as an observer, toying with the characters' fates, telling you forcefully how to interpret their thoughts and actions, linking each to some generalisation about the Victorian age. He's aping the classic Victorian omniscient narrator, but he's way more dictatorial, and not half as funny, as Charles Dickens or George Eliot, and he gets in the way. The characters stop being characters and become allegories. We lose interest in what happens to them: if all outcomes are equally possible, then somehow all outcomes become equally unimportant. (I have the same problem with Borges, who frequently doesn't engage me emotionally at all.) The final scene fragments in all sorts of directions, but unfortunately I had pretty much stopped caring which one might be the 'real' ending.

Meryl Streep as Sarah in the
film version (1981)

Although Fowles clearly loves postmodernism (he places himself proudly in the age of Barthes), it's kind of like your grandfather trying to do postmodernism. He questions, but he doesn't question enough: the Victorians were all like this and we can see that in how this character behaves in this story I've written. This woman (Sarah) was unusually clever, but she was still very feminine and passive and had a very nice body. This woman (Ernestina) is a shallow idiot, but, poor little thing, it's because she's so young and hasn't been taught any better. This woman (Mrs Poulteney, a local busybody and sort-of-philanthropist) is very religious and therefore is a bitch because that's what Victorian notions of piety made you into.

One thing which really stops it coming to life is simply a lack of individualising detail. Ernestina could be any rich young woman from trade. Charles's only distinguishing character traits are his interest in Darwinism and his emotional confusion, which are hardly enough for the protagonist of a 470-page novel. Ernestina's Aunt Tranter is a classic generous-hearted, generally ignorant spinster. The novel seemed to me the worst kind of allegory, where the author is so busy making the characters illustrate the Conflict of Ideas that he forgets to make them into real people. The only place this lets up is Charles's manservant, Sam, who is a real Cockney dandy, wants to open a haberdasher's shop, and falls in love with Aunt Tranter's maid, Mary. He's accidentally the most interesting character in the book, and my heart warmed to him.

Fowles peppers the novel with references to contemporary sources, including a lot of Hardy, Tennyson, Clough, and Matthew Arnold, as well as Darwin, Marx, Malthus and other social commentators. Each chapter has two quotations set against one another, clearly designed to undercut the beautiful image the Victorians had of themselves with the socio-economic reality. This gets old very quickly. He does a pretty poor parody of Henry James (at least compared to Max Beerbohm's priceless 'The Mote in the Middle Distance'), and chats vaguely about Christina Rossetti being a raging hysteric so blithely that it made me really quite cross.

The Undercliff in Dorset, which is
actually really nice and worth a visit

I think, basically, the novel hasn't dated very well. Some of the social assumptions Fowles portrays in the 1860s, such as gender essentialism, were still fairly prevalent in the 1960s, and he unthinkingly reproduces just as many social conventions as he satirises or attacks. Women are either spinsters or objects of sexual desire. At points it's sickeningly complacent and misogynistic, and even leering. In one scene that sticks out a mile, he shows Sarah sharing a bed with another maid in the house in Lyme. BUT DON'T WORRY, he says, YOU MUSTN'T THINK THEY'RE LESBIANS. Phew, I thought, wiping my brow which was already beaded with anxious sweat. Thank goodness for that. (Actually, I genuinely was quite relieved, because I didn't want to see the excruciating mess Fowles would probably made of a real lesbian plotline.)

The novel is dry and sometimes funny, but not consistently, and neither the 'meta' bits nor the actual narrative are successful: the former seems dated even for the 1960s, after the much more interesting challenges that modernism made to Victorian prose fiction; and the latter is just plain lacklustre. The Magus and The Collector are not without their intellectual pretensions, but at least you want to know what happens at the end. Read them instead.

AS Byatt, Babel Tower

I've read this rather long novel, the third in Byatt's Frederica Quartet, twice now. The protagonist, Frederica Potter (=, more or less, Antonia Byatt), last seen in Still Life shortly after the sudden death of her sister Stephanie, is now married with a son, although her choice of husband (Nigel Reiver) has turned out to be an unwise one. Nigel is manipulative, violent and chauvinist, refusing to let Frederica put her prodigious mental capacities to use in any kind of paid work. He resents her for having mainly male friends (a natural consequence of being at Cambridge in the 1950s), and is deeply suspicious of books. So when Frederica decides to leave for London, and her son Leo decides quite firmly he's coming with her, it's no surprise that Nigel is desperate for her to return, and even more desperate to regain custody of their child. A lawsuit ensues.

Meanwhile, Frederica gets involved in the world around the Samuel Palmer School of Art, teaching literature classes there (and also extra-mural ones). Through this she meets Jude Mason, a repellent, troubled and charismatic writer whose book, Babbletower, is published and then immediately prosecuted for obscenity. It's a pivotal, symbolic event, with the memory of the Lady Chatterley trial still fresh, and in the midst of debates about the teaching and value of language and literature in schools (intersecting with the traumatic bullying at a fictional boys' public school, presumably Eton), as well as the rapidly diverging discourses of science and art. Frederica battles like a wildcat to stay connected to the intellectual arenas where she feels most comfortable, to sustain connections to her family, and to try to forge new friendships and relationships as a single mother in London.

AS Byatt has always been great at portraying the intellectual life. I read somewhere that it's impossible to create a character who is cleverer or better-educated than you are, and if that's true then Byatt must have a phenomenal mind and have read and remembered sheer mountains of books. Yet she's never, ever cold: the characters are deeply and fiercely emotional, sexual, physical beings, and I always come out the other end of a Byatt novel (for it is a tunnel-like experience) desperate to read more, write more, and talk more to people I love. The second novel in the series, Still Life, made me cry like a child, and Babel Tower wasn't far from achieving the same effect.

The book was published in 1996, and is set in the 60s, and there are some parts of it that either haven't dated well (this is certainly true of the first in the series, The Virgin in the Garden) or were slightly monochrome to begin with. Nigel, his sisters and his housekeeper are all really loathsome upper-class idiots, and I did wish at times that Byatt could be more impartial. As a consideration of the emergence of postmodern discourse in the 60s, it is sporadically successful and a bit irritating: in one rather "look-at-me-i'm-being-all-meta-now" passage, Frederica cuts up a lawyer's letter and rearranges it, pace Burroughs, to form a new and disorientating nonsense-text.

But for me the overwhelming impressions is of a novel about people who enjoy thinking deeply and passionately about life and art. One of the cover-quotes uses the word "heady", and that seems accurate to me -- the book sweeps you into a world where everyone can quote Rilke in German, if they want, or effortlessly write Tolkien-esque novels for their children. It's not quite realist, but it's exciting, and heart-rending, and that's what I read Byatt for.

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair; Ali Smith, How To Be Both; Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat

It's been a while since I posted, but it's the beginning of Lent and I'm trying to replace Facebook with  reading, so I thought it'd be a good time to start blogging again.

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

A set text for the 'Ludic Literature' module I'm taking this semester, this short novel is narrated by Hermann Hermann, a Russian émigré businessman in Berlin who unexpectedly meets a man who appears to be his perfect doppelgänger. He concocts an elaborate plan to secure him and his wife financially, the details of which gradually emerge as he tells his story.

Hermann is a forceful narrator, rhetorically persuasive and severely deluded, much like Lolita's Humbert Humbert, and much of our discussion in class centred around the nature of his delusion. We theorised that he, like Humbert, has tried to use his life as an aesthetic 'laboratory', rather than confining his experiments more appropriately to the page. I wondered if there was a connection between the repeated name and the delusion that he has managed to unify life and art; but perhaps this is far-fetched.

As with several other Nabokov novels, there's a lot of exploration of mirrors, doubling, self-splitting and so on. There's a fair amount of narratorial misogyny. It's a very funny novel, and readable, though not the thing to read if you want to be emotionally gripped. It's not as engrossing as Lolita, nor as dazzling as Pale Fire, but an enjoyable read nonetheless.

Ali Smith, How To Be Both

My mum and I have been great fans of Ali Smith for six or seven years, and this wonderful novel was a reminder of why: her warmth, her playfulness, her fearlessness when it comes to fictional innovation. Sometimes I worry that British literary fiction is too safe, that a vacuum in the highbrow zone is being filled with decidedly middlebrow writing. Ali Smith is a great antidote to this. Her plots can usually be summarised in a few bullet points; the drama is all mental, intellectual, emotional, creative. 

This latest novel was shortlisted for the Booker (her third shortlist -- she's surely due a win soon ...) and won the Goldsmiths Prize, the Costa Novel Award and the Saltire Society Literary Book of the Year Award in 2014. It's in two sections, each titled 'One', and is famously available in two versions, with the two sections in different orders. In my version, the first section focuses around George, a grieving, intellectual teenager in the twenty-first century, and the second on a renaissance painter struggling to establish a reputation despite various (some unexpected) hindrances. The stories intertwine both thematically and, sort of, dramatically, with a healthy dose of magical realism.

My mum and I both agreed that reading the sections in the opposite order would probably have been extremely confusing, so I wonder how successful the conceit of two equal, non-ordered sections really is. (No point in trying to re-read them in the opposite order, of course, now my ignorance has been destroyed.) I also think one section is more emotionally involving than the other, although the other section makes up for this in the way it analyses creative and artistic processes. But there are some wonderful passages in both -- funny, defamiliarising, shocking and thoughtful by turns. Her favourite issues -- art, gender, sexuality -- come up again, though in pleasingly new and ambiguous ways, and there are some others too: the ubiquity of pornography; bereavement and memory; sibling relationships; and so on. 

The prose is not always easy; indeed, sometimes it's not always prose. Read it slowly, sure, but read it all the same.

Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat

Although Penguin cheekily charge £8.99 for this book, it's really a novella rather than a novel, padded out to just over 100 pages by an elegantly large font (not that I was protesting -- my eyes slid through the prose with grateful ease). A woman, Lise, leaves the office to go on holiday, meets a couple of people on the plane, arrives in a 'southern' city where there seem to be a lot of Fiats, befriends an old woman at the hotel who's waiting for her nephew, insists she's searching for her 'boy-friend', assesses who is and isn't her 'type', and eventually reaches a sticky end.

This isn't a spoiler: you're told this very early on. Spark shifts the question from 'What will happen?' to 'Who will do it?' and 'Why?' and, most often, 'Is this woman a complete lunatic?' It's told in a third-person impersonal narrator, in the present tense, as if we're a camera following Lise about, semi-analysing her movements at times, but mostly just watching. We've no idea what she's thinking. Details at the beginning gain their relevance by the end, so she clearly has some kind of plan, but not a rational or sane one. It's disorientating, frustrating, and fascinating. As John Lanchester's introduction points out, we can tell easily enough that she's mad, but then what? It doesn't seem to help us much.

Coincidentally, this week I've been reading about 'poetics of indeterminacy' -- specifically with reference to Rimbaud and John Ashbery, but pretty useful generally -- the idea that a text has no internal coherence, wants to be suggestive rather than cohesive, resists interpretation and simply enjoys its own play. As with Rimbaud and Ashbery poems, individual sentences of The Driver's Seat, or paragraphs, or even whole scenes, seem to make sense, but are almost immediately cancelled out by the next thing. Details that seem to have great symbolic significance, like whether her mouth is closed or open, appear not to resolve into an overall pattern. It's great fun trying to puzzle out what she's planning, whether she cares, what's in her head, and there's a certain amount of pleasure in the knowledge that you probably won't find out. 

For readers who don't like this so much, there are some exceptionally beautiful and comic descriptions -- for instance:

She switches on the central light which is encased in a mottled glass globe; the light flicks on, then immediately flickers out as if, having served a long succession of clients without complaint, Lise is suddenly too much for it.

And, at a brief 106 pages, there's almost no excuse not to read it. I pretty much polished this off in an evening and was left bewildered and excited by it. Highly recommended.

Stoner by John Williams: "Glad to be unhappy and sad to be so gay"

I first saw John Williams's novel Stoner (1965) when it was given its own little table in my local Waterstones. Having worked there, albeit briefly, I know that Waterstones doesn't crack out the parlour-sized furniture for any old thing (the new Thomas Pynchon at Gower Street was the last one I remembered), so it caught my eye. I think the accompanying sign said something along the lines of "The book everyone's talking about," which, if true, had escaped me; but the equally hyperbolic jacket quote from the New York Times, "This is a perfect novel", convinced me that if I could claim any interest in contemporary trends in fiction, I should pay attention.

It turned out that the book had been excavated from near-obscurity by Vintage on the recommendation of John McGahern (Julian Barnes gives a helpfully detailed explanation of this for the Guardian), and been catapulted, in the slightly puzzling way that these things happen, into an international bestseller. Only the understated Vintage aesthetic could convince me that it wouldn't be another Fifty Shades.

Before I read it, I bought it as a present for my granny, who is an impressively wide reader. She, alas, didn't like it. Neither did my aunt. Neither did my cousin's boyfriend. Most other people I asked hadn't even heard of it. Suddenly it had become a rather flawed novel that somewhat less than everyone was talking about. So, over a deliciously rainy and relaxing bank holiday weekend in Cornwall, I got down to business and read it.

Luckily, I loved it. It's a short-ish novel (under 300 pages), and follows William Stoner as he transforms, in a stuttering kind of way, from an uneducated only child set to inherit his parents' farm, via a sudden epiphany (through Shakespeare's Sonnet 73) to a literature major, doctoral student, and finally a tenured professor at the University of Missouri. He specialises in the reception of the classics in medieval literature, which, combined with his refusal to join up to fight in World War II, sets him up as a man content to bury himself in as deep a niche as he needs to, for a quiet life.

*SPOILERS BELOW*

But he certainly doesn't deserve the fallout of his greatest mistake: to marry someone he barely knows and never manages to, Edith Bostwick, who becomes the antagonist for around half the book. It is infuriatingly ambiguous whether she's genuinely waging war against him (that's what it feels like) or simply trying to compensate for her own lack of fulfilment. She slashes at the intimacy he has with his daughter Grace, and erodes the space in which he can work, forcing him to spend most of his time at the faculty. It's not clear what she gains from this, if anything -- certainly not a better relationship with her daughter or husband. The two are perfectly balanced: William's personality is neat and simple and affectionate and unextraordinary; Edith's is complicated and incoherent, an almost complete mystery.

The University of Missouri, around which Stoner is based

Photo: University of Missouri

Everything that follows from his domestic alienation -- including a gorgeous, predictably doomed love affair, and a vicious conflict in the University department -- adds weight after weight onto the emotional cartload that William pulls with him through his life. The novel, I think, is about how a simple failure to be honest about one's feelings can lead, not just to one disaster, but to catastrophe after catastrophe, until the spirit is broken. As the other jacket quotes foretold, this novel broke my heart, quietly, often without anger. And its slightly greying, weary-feeling, straightforward narrative style -- as if Williams might have comforted himself by saying, "Come on, John, just work through the story, explain it clearly, then you can take a rest" -- only makes it more heart-wrenching. 

I did, thankfully, discover a friend who had read the novel and enjoyed it. He and I read English together as undergrads, and had a short but agreeable discussion about its brilliance (though we conceded that, as English graduates, we're pretty much the perfect audience for a book about a literature professor). We also touched on the way that certain types of American literature make you feel, as my friend put it, "as if even putting words on the page is an act of sadness". I've never felt this so acutely as I did with Stoner. 

John Williams is quoted as having said, "To read without joy is stupid." And Stoner is, despite its trajectory of tragedy, full of great joy -- not only in the rare moments of happiness that William himself finds (doomed, of course), but also the joy I experienced as a reader in being led to feel such sympathy with any human being, even a fictional one. In Harvest (which, to my mind, deserved a Booker win more than Eleanor Catton), Jim Crace writes of a fiddle melody, "His tune is both glad to be unhappy and sad to be so gay"; and so is Stoner both devastating and reassuring, all at once. It's not a perfect novel (steady on, New York Times), but it's lovely nevertheless.

Reading Diary: Eleanor Catton, more Trollope, and Bates in the woods

Eleanor Catton is not only longlisted for the Booker, she's apparently odds-on favourite -- and for a book, The Luminaries, that hadn't bloody well been released when the list was actually announced. Like AM Homes (see previous post), Catton is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is published in the UK by Granta, but she's ACRES better, with natural style and wit and a great sense of pace. Her first novel, The Rehearsal, was mind-blowingly self-assured, and my god does the fact that she's only about 28 make me depressed.

The Luminaries wasn't due out until September, though I suddenly received an email from Amazon suggesting I buy it and realised they had brought the publication forward. I have now obtained it and lugged it two miles in my backpack on a hot day -- man, it's a chunky beast. But hey, if even a bit of the £14.99 in Blackwells goes to Eleanor Catton, it'll make up for the piss-poor customer service Heffers offered, not to mention the inevitable carpal tunnel syndrome I will have after reading it.

Whilst on Mull this year, I read another by Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now, a chunky semi-panoramic drama dealing with the rise of the City and the exciting possibility of spinning money from almost nothing, simply by investing in the right places. Trollope clearly sees Cityboys as a threat to his homely standards of decency and tradition, although, interestingly, the one exception to the 'new money = bad' rule is also the only Jewish character, which at least reminds us that Trollope was in some respects remarkably liberal. 

I say 'semi-panoramic' because the book lacks the social sweep of Bleak House or Middlemarch, which are rather more substantial as a result. Nor did I find it as moving as The Warden. But The Way We Live Now has one great advantage, which is that it's also, pretty much, the way we live now, where the very rich are almost untouchable unless those in power decide to allow them to fall (Murdoch, anyone?). I have a feeling that, were Trollope alive today, some things wouldn't look so very strange to him.

HE Bates's short meditation on the joys of woodlands, Through the Woods, attracted me instantly because I've recently expanded my nature interests to include trees, wildflowers and butterflies (I've liked birds for some years already). Bates draws out a languid, vivid narrative of how several of his favourite woodlands develop with the seasons, complete with a rant about gamekeepers and pheasants: "The pheasant is the lord of life, the almost divine sovereign of the woods. You must not ... do anything to upset his chances of ordained death." Bates is sarcastic and profoundly emotional by turns, and the book is beautifully presented with an elegant, well-spaced font and a gorgeous cover. It's part of a Little Toller series of nature writing -- Frank Fraser Darling's Island Years, Island Farm is going onto my list.

May She Be Forgiven: AM Homes's prize-winning disappointment

I was thrilled when AM Homes won the Women's Prize for Fiction. I have to admit, it's not a prize that has always filled me with joy: back when it was the Orange Prize, it was won by Madeline Miller, for The Song of Achilles (2011), a sacharine romance whose only saving grace was that it was based on The Iliad, and by Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), a self-justifying piece of narcissism if ever there was one.

However, I still cheered for AM Homes, because I read The End of Alice (1996) about five years ago, and remembered it as adventurous, beautifully-written and rather seductive. This Book Will Save Your Life (2006), her best-known since, didn't appeal to me, but I bought May We Be Forgiven (2012) shortly after her victory in the Women's Prize was announced, thinking it would be a safe bet for a great summer read. And hence I learned (as I learn regularly with the Booker) that there is no such thing as a "safe bet" in literary prizes.

The book is plastered with gushing gobbets and is marketed as a Franzen-esque "great American novel" (Jeanette Winterson's words). It certainly has some of the classic tics of one: an obsessive focus on Jewishness, race, presidential history and American branding, not to mention adultery, the failure of the nuclear family, substance abuse and gruesome scatalogical black humour -- to name but a few.

**SPOILERS ALERT** 

(Even Mark Kermode gets told off for this now, and I'm going way further than he does, so I feel bound to issue these warnings.)

The narrator, Harold "Harry" Silver, is kissed by his brother's wife Jane at a Thanksgiving Day dinner. His brother George, a just-slightly-stereotyped American big business type with penchants for sexual harassment, incest roleplay and violent tantrums, crashes his car and kills a couple (possibly deliberately). He is taken to a psychiatric unit, from which he escapes, comes home, and finds Harry in bed with Jane. He smashes his wife over the head with a lamp. Their two children are fetched home from boarding school just in time to see their mother's life support turned off.

It's fair to say the novel starts with a bang. The rest of the narrative piles up subplot after subplot in a rather rambling fashion: Harry starts finding women to sleep with on the internet and becomes temporarily convinced one of them has been murdered (she later disappears, leaving him to look after her demented parents); he goes with another woman to an erotic party in a Laser Quest; loses his job as a Nixon scholar. George's children, Nate (12) and Ashley (11), suddenly awaken to an awareness of the world around them and convince Harry to adopt the dead couple's son, Ricardo; Ashley is sexually abused by a teacher at her boarding school; George, now in a wilderness-survival prison unit, uses the iPad Harry sent him to get into arms dealing with an Israeli prisoner friend, necessitating an utterly unnecessary sequence where Harry has to be cruel to be kind and help the FBI recapture his own brother.

The novel climaxes with a trip to a tribal village in South Africa for Nate's bar mitzvah (he has done work with the village), during which the local medicine man effortlessly points out some profound and noble truths about Harry and his family (my racism radar definitely started twitching in this scene), and gives him some mysterious tea which help him to expel the vile and putrid mess he has made of his life so far (as well as rather a lot of faecal matter).

Some of the facial expressions I
perfected while reading this book

There are some highlights. The glimpse of academic thriller (thing Byatt's Possession and Frayn's Headlong), when Harry is allowed access to some boxes of Richard Nixon's previously-unseen papers, is good fun. Homes uses a first-person present-tense voice, which I generally find incredibly annoying, but which she manages to keep light with a lot of dialogue and a fairly unreflective style. It's a pacy read, with no official 'chapters', only short breaks. And Ricardo, Nate and Ashley (if not Harry) are generally sympathetic characters, though all of them seem at least five years older than they're meant to be, and I started to feel some affection for them well before the end.

I can feel what Homes is trying to do -- it's a narrative about trying to live with guilt, and the impulsiveness and soullessness of modern life. But the book never stays in one place long enough to do any of this properly. None of the subplots are developed or add anything to the story other than a sense of how random and transient most things are; none of them, in fact, really qualify as subplots at all. And I was never emotionally drawn in, even during the inevitable breakdowns and outbursts of both Nate and Harry, which should be the climax of the book; instead they are dealt with in half a page, and "told" rather than "shown". The book is stubbornly non-visceral.

Not only this, the writing is uneven and even lazy. Homes has a weird habit of ending a sentence with a dash followed by a single word. "It's a denuded glass booth -- powerless." "... pieces of the lamp -- shards." "... to suck the hot mustard directly from the plastic packets -- self-punishment." WHERE DID SHE GET THIS FROM? It's such a self-conscious piece of stylistics that I was sick of it after literally one example -- saturated. There was never a place where I thought, ah, yes, this extra word adds a whole new dimension to this sentence -- clever. Either it repeated something already expressed, or it smacked us across the face with the subtext any intelligent reader would have been able to infer -- superfluous.

I actually started marking things that
pissed me off. She repeats the same
phrase twice in two lines, for
no obvious reason. ARGH.

And that pretty much sums up my twin problems with this book -- that Homes appears to trust the reader too much in the big emotional moments and plotlines she really ought to have taken a bit more time over, but can't manage to trust us to understand the simplest of things. "I can't help but notice," Harry muses, "that I've become close to Cheryl, that I share things with her, that I'm starting to think of her as a friend, a confidante." Oh my god, I thought, that's how we should be reading the intimate conversation you've just been having. My head was starting to bleed from all that puzzled scratching, but now I understand -- enlightened.

Basically, the skeleton plot of this book has already been covered by Nick Hornby's About a Boy: empty, materialistic man suddenly encounters crisis and learns what is really important in life, i.e. engaging with the people around you. It's a decent length at 480 pages, and yet the message of the whole novel has to be sledge-hammered home by what Theo Tait termed the "keynote speech" of the book. This is fine for a dick-lit-hit-cum-Hugh-Grant-film, but for serious, prize-winning literature, it did not live up to my expectations -- disappointing.

Recent Reading and Recommendations

Exhausted as I am from writing that absurdly alliterative title, I wanted to update with a brief note about what I've been reading in the last few weeks:

• Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot - If you've read either of Eugenides's other novels (The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex), you'll know he's a writer of phenomenal imaginative power, very learned and very funny. These qualities are again exhibited in The Marriage Plot, though perhaps not to the same degree, or as consistently. The novel follows three undergraduates at Brown as they fall in love, graduate and attempt to begin their lives, confused about how to live in a post-modern where Derrida and Barthes dominate. I loved the satire of 1980s intellectual fashion -- it appealed particularly to my memories of stumbling through literary theory at university -- but in other places the writing feels a little lazy. The balance of narrative between the three characters also felt wrong, with one perhaps neglected compared to the other two; but overall it's an engaging and humane novel, if not quite as magnificent as his previous two.

• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone - This was another gap in my literary knowledge, and did not disappoint: I raced through it in less than a week because it is both gripping and highly readable, and the last part, in which the characters try to recreate the disappearance of the prized diamond in order to try to work out what happened to it, is particularly interesting. A recognisable prototype for a kind of forensic detective fiction which really took off with Sherlock Holmes. At times with Collins, as with his more famous friend Dickens, you wonder how much his misogynistic protagonist is simply ventriloquising his own views, but this wasn't so annoying as to destroy my enjoyment of the whole.

• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre - I reread this rapidly on a whim. There isn't much to say about its brilliance that hasn't been treated better and in more detail by others; but I had forgotten how comically dry Bronte can be at times.

• Ali Smith, Artful - This is a series of four lectures that Smith gave at St Anne's College, Oxford, dealing with 'time', 'form', 'edge' and 'offer and reflection'. As suggested by the title, the lectures are partially entangled with Oliver Twist -- Smith says she reread the novel whilst writing them -- but draw on a breathtakingly wide array of literature, film and music. She weaves thoughtful, but only lightly analytical, commentary on her topics into a narrative about a bereaved person finding her dead lover's scholarly notes (i.e. the lectures). The imitation of early novels where the authors had to invent an excuse for the narrative existing (e.g. in Moll Flanders, Pamela and Les Liaisons Dangereuses) is presumably deliberate, and it adds a lightness of touch and a humour which is quintessentially Smithian. As inspirational pieces for students at Oxford, I imagine these went down a storm.

• Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination - After months of eyeing this up, first in hardback and then in paperback, I persuaded my partner to buy it for me for Christmas. I'm only a quarter of the way through, and am enjoying it immensely: it's readable and vivid, and made me cross when I realised I'd just missed the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the Tate, which has now gone on tour to the USA and taken all the normally resident masterpieces with it. My only problem with the book is that it does treat some events and topics more briefly than I would have liked. It has the air of a work that was cut intensively before publication, and although paring down is a highly-encouraged habit amongst writers, in this case I think it has diminished the quality of the whole. My indignant letter to Faber and Faber will be in the post today ...

The final thing is that after March my commission for Mslexia will be finished and I'll be back blogging here more regularly. Thanks to everyone who said nice things about those posts!