I’ve been thinking all afternoon about Bernard Malamud. He understood the mixture of milk and iodine that constitutes adult consciousness. He could be tender, strict, sentimental and then unsentimental, having the realism of Zola and the darkness of Kafka. It’s customarily said we are lost. Malamud asks us to consider in what ways this is so. And in what ways it isn’t.
The second consideration is where the harder aspects of literary consciousness reside. “Middlemarch” is just so.
I’d add Dos Passos to this list along with Dostoevsky and Toni Morrison. For me, too much contemporary fiction is just squishy. Wave your Updike or your “Fleischman is in Trouble” but come on, contemporary fiction is squish and has been so for decades.
Enter William Boyd whose work defies the squish. His people are not cartoons coated with style. Boyd knows this and writes in his novel “Any Human Heart”:
“Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary—it is the respective proportions of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.”
The novel is built around this. No squish.
Without giving too much away the narrator, Logan Mountstuart is a strange mixture of Augie March and Don Quixote but with more of the former’s discernment. He wanders the world having left his native Uruguay and meets everyone in the kaleidoscopic art scene of the 20th century. Its his comic irony that makes him:
“Picasso seems to me one of these wild, stupid geniuses—more Yeats, Strindberg, Rimbaud, Mozart, than Matisse, Brahms, Braque. It’s quite tiring being with him.”
Comic irony, that self awareness which springs from knowing who you were when younger and then, who you are now, becomes the locus of the narrator’s sensibility. He’s Bellow without the bullshit:
“Reading Nabokov’s Ada: an intermittently brilliant but baffling book— an idée fixe on the rampage, leaving friendly readers stunned and exhausted behind. I have to say that as an admirer of style—a loaded word, but actually best thought of as a synonym for individuality— VN’s mannered artfulness, his refusal to let a sleeping word lie, becomes in this book more and more like a nervous tic than a natural, individual voice, however fruity and sonorous. The studied opulence, the ornament for the sake of ornament, grows wearing and one longs for a simple, elegant, discursive sentence. This is the key difference: in good prose precision must always triumph over decoration. Wilful elaboration is a sign that the stylist has entered a decadent phase. You cannot live on caviar and foie gras every day: sometimes a plain dish of lentils is all that the palate craves, even if one insists that the lentils come from Puy.”
I remember a friend, a budding novelist announcing that he was “Henry James without the bullshit” which is amusing enough but it wasn’t true. And like Malamud, there’s no bullshit in William Boyd. No squish. The scalpels take care of it.
Planet of the Blind 