I am always cheered when a lit-type person acknowledges this
At this rather gloomy time of the year, I was rather charmed to open the latest issue of Literary Review, which can be rather uneven, and has, indeed, something in the way of form for ponceyness and higher codswallop in the opening 'Diary' page, which tends to be by very various hands.
But this month, Philip Hensher comes good in praise of comforting and consoling reading, when in adversity (having recently been whisked off to St Thomas's for an unexpected operation): There’s no conflict between greatness and consolation. Contemporaries of Wodehouse, Conan Doyle, Simenon and Pym, those creators of closed fictional worlds, often tended to underrate them; their quality emerged over time. Of the literary novels of 1990, what really survives, even thirty years later, except A S Byatt’s Possession and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels? The National Book Critics’ Prize that year was awarded to John Updike’s ho-hum Rabbit at Rest. Can anyone suppose that it is more likely to be read in a hundred years’ time than the magical, effusive inventiveness and unstoppable fantasy of Get Shorty?
He goes on to make a brilliant case for the undervalued virtues of really good genre fiction: It makes one think that we have got a couple of things wrong about what literature can or should be doing behind the low walls we build to enclose it. Get Shorty is in the thriller section, but there is absolutely nothing formulaic about it. In fact, it doesn’t look like any other book ever written.
Yes I said again yes.
Am also prepossessed - if we are talking about literary undervaluing - by the sound of this book: Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives by Helen Taylor: She examines both the ‘feminisation of literature’ (exploring the woman reader’s financial and cultural influence on writing over six centuries) and the potential of reading to aid social mobility among women readers. The book benefits, too, from Taylor’s dexterous deconstruction of the language used to censure women for taking pleasure in reading. In short, cultural commentators have chastised women for seeking ‘escapism’ rather than assessing why they might want to ‘escape’. This drive has deep historical roots: one of the book’s most memorable quotations comes from Elizabeth I, who wrote in 1576 that she read so that she might ‘less perceive the bitterness of this miserable life’. For most of us, reading is as valuable in removing us from our own minds as it is in allowing us to explore other people’s.
And in further bookish news, those of you who are not already following the University of Chicago Press free monthly e-book giveaways, this month, o joy, it is Simon Goldhill's A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain. Susan Howatch eat your heart out... This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3036236.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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