Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid

I just published this post over on the new substack. Sign up to get future reviews and essays. Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid Then, turning to me, my father asked what he could make for me.It came into my mind without thinking. "A trunk," I said."But you have a trunk already. You have your mother's trunk," …

A Happy Marriage, Rafael Yglesias

What a sucker punch of a novel. Joyce Carol Oats said the prose had subtle irony. Maybe I missed that. Certainly there's a wry self observation. But it's a double bildungsroman, first of the young man failing in love, then of the middle aged man repairing and recreating a deep powerful marriage, so a wry …

Symposium, Muriel Spark

She was twenty- three and he was twenty- nine; they had met in London in the fruit section of Marks & Spencer’s, Oxford Street, less than four months ago. She had spoken first: ‘Be careful, those grapefruits look a little bruised.’ Who else could get that blend of the bizzare, the romantic and the puzzling. …

Loitering with Intent, Muriel Spark

This novel opens in a graveyard, involves the machinations of a group of pompous middle class twits who attend meetings of the suspicious and cultish Autobiographical Association, has a plot twist that hinges on a young novelist's friendship with an elderly woman who wets herself, swears a lot and helps the novelist steal manuscripts, acts …

Convenience Store Woman. Is Sayaka Murata a reactionary arguing against conservatives? (Plot spoilers, Straussian reading.)

Convenience Store Woman. (US link). What is the lesson of the eccentric book? Perhaps mostly that we should not think it is so eccentric? The obvious analogy between working in a store as a convenience to customers and living in a normal way that is convenient for everyone else extends to the idea of a …

The Comforters, Muriel Spark

The novelists of the 1930s developed narrative techniques based on the movies: short sharp scenes, characters differentiated by dialogue, dropping readers into the middle of the action, patterning scene changes to built plot suspense. The huge changes in technology in previous decades, such as radio and movies, were behind these innovations. By the time Muriel …

Evelyn Waugh, Ann Pasternak Slater

More literary criticism ought to be like this. Ann Pasternak Slater understands the genre Waugh writes in and judges his work according to what it was trying to achieve. She pays meticulous attention to the structuring and patterning of his novels, demonstrating how his themes and arguments are built up through the careful choice of …

The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro

The criticisms of this book seem overstated. Big set-piece reveals are one way of brining shock and awe to a reader. But the expectation of astonishment is another. Ishiguro does break his own rules, but the rules are vague and magical, so I'm not so worried about that either. Judging a book by standards it …

The Clerk’s Tale and the expectation of astonishment

Penelope Fitzgerald mentions this as one of the stories that developed her love of plots with a twist at the end. But it appeared on the 1970 A-level exam with this question: 'Whatever its other merits, The Clerk's Tale does not achieve its effects primarily through surprise.' So is it a plot with a twist …

The Remains of the Day

What can I tell you. This book is Pride and Prejudice good. The control over the language and the plot is immense. The use of the word costume, which appears twice, is an excellent example. It would be a good book to use to teach the use of irony in all its forms. And it is …