Increments of Uncertainty
As Updike’s word count mounted, so did the rancour. The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani, considered by many the most powerful literary critic in America, regularly savaged his work. Over the last decade she accused successive novels of being “bogus in every respect”, “shopworn”, “cringe-making” and “claustrophobic”. Indeed the regularity of her vitriol was such that that when she gave the posthumously published My Father’s Tears a favourable notice, literary blogger Shane Barry commented: “We now know what Updike had to do to get a good review out of Kakutani.”
The School of Cool
Tin Pan Alley’s imaginative impoverishment, its slack tempi and banal lyrics, were nothing but expressions of limits and control, as ersatz as they were dispassionate. This kind of thing might be Big Brother’s idea of a good time, but it was pretty obviously just another of the many mind games he practised back in the good old days, when he wasn’t the family member he’s since become. One thing about progressive music was that it came across as self-consciously averse to being commercial. This greatly helped its sales.
The Modernist Volcano
Ezra Pound: Poet (A Portrait of the Man and his Work) I: The Young Genius 1885-1920, by A David Moody, Oxford University Press, 544 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0199215577 In a poem, “Monumentum Aere, Etc.”, first published in 1914 in Blast, a short-lived but highly influential magazine edited by Wyndham Lewis that styled itself the “Review of the […]
Northern Miniaturist
It is not love, it is hope that saves. To hope is perhaps weariness, but in the desert where there is no other coolness than death, the shadow of the future is all that remains. This short poem is typical of the work of Gösta Agren, one of Europe’s finest and yet least known poets. […]
To Aran or Isfahan
Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space, by Cees Nooteboom, Vintage Books, 240 pp, £7.99, ISBN 978-0099453789 It may be something of a miracle that the Dutch travel writer and novelist Cees Nooteboom has come to understand himself as a nomad. Many years ago, he claims, he presented himself to the abbot of a monastery […]
Never Say Die
Everyman, by Philip Roth, Jonathan Cape, 192 pp, £10, ISBN: 0224078690 Philip Roth once claimed, in his collection of reflective and self-evaluating essays Reading Myself and Others (1975), that his critics saw him as an “irresponsible, conscienceless, unserious” writer, bereft of morals and seeking merely to outrage and shock ‑ a Howard Stern of the literary scene. […]
Man of Constant Sorrow
Brian Lynch’s subtle first novel, The Winner of Sorrow, is based on the life of William Cowper, a hugely acclaimed poet in late eighteenth century England whose work has gone into neglect in the last hundred years.