The trade paper edition of Ian McEwan's Amsterdam is a garish yellow-green, the better, one supposes, to make it stand out among the dingy browns and pallid blues and greys which dominate the covers of so many novels these days. There are many, many novels these days. I wanted to buy one; I picked up the one that stood out.The Lure of the Novel
by St. Clair Carr,
literary editor, NEW IMPROVED HEADReviewed here and there in this article: Amsterdam by Ian McEwan, Vintage Canada, $18.95 Cdn.
This book is three years old, but given the Great Flood of new books in which we find ourselves adrift these days, the editors figured even a group as up to date literarily as NIH readers may not have had the time to get to it.
I believe that's why Zadie Smith's White Teeth has been such a success. It has a colourful cover. Inside you cannot get past page 3 without finding a character described as "a great bull of a man." But, because of its distinctive cover, people pick it up (or click the link on the book site), read the ecstatic blurb, and think "I'll have a go at that." That's why, before you buy a book, you have to read more than the blurb.
Amsterdam has good blurb, though. The cover proclaims it a winner of the Booker Prize – not a recommendation to all of us, to be sure, but still worth mentioning. A single quotation on the back proclaims it "supremely well crafted" and "a small masterpiece," and inside are two pages of excerpts from glowing reviews in distinguished publications, and in some Canadian ones as well.
But we inveterate readers are wise to that one. We know the susceptibility of the literary classes to one load of old cobblers after another. White Teeth – not to my knowledge a load of old cobblers, but a book which does describe someone as a great bull of a man, on page 3 – has ecstatic blurb.
So the trick is to read some of the book. I usually read the first few pages. Amsterdam's first few pages were impressive. The novel starts at the funeral of a woman who died rapidly of a degenerative disease, and her descent from health into pain and insanity is directly and compellingly described. McEwan also provides an effective passage about a crematorium's Garden of Remembrance whose plants have been savagely cut back and whose lawn is "strewn with cigarette butts, for this is a place where people come to stand about and wait for the funeral party ahead of theirs to clear the building."
I like that sort of passage which gets you to think about the significance of everyday occurrences we tend to overlook when we encounter them in our own everyday lives. Of course, there's no reason you should have to like that sort of thing. Perhaps you prefer books which on their opening pages describe someone's remains as "charred smithereens." You, then, would prefer The Blind Assassin. I'd prefer to wait, though, until Ms Atwood uses a style in her fictional works as admirable as the one she uses in her essays.
That tells you something about the role of the artist in contemporary society, eh? I consider Ms Atwood an artist, yet she can't write a novel that impresses me because if I see a phrase like charred smithereens I immediately get into a snit. Of course, in the scheme of things I am almost utterly insignificant, but there are many millions of us almost utterly insignificant people, we constitute the market, and we are unimpressed. When Ms Atwood releases a book to rave reviews and it is offered for sale to thirty million Canadians, the number who do not buy the book is approximately thirty million. Among the few of us who even bother to look at the book, she runs into smithereen-haters and similar purists.
Why do authors write? If you had to deal with an audience like that, would you deal with it? Perhaps even worse are the people who like your work. A large percentage of admirers of literature seems to consist of the type of person who describes things as delicious even though they are not food. There's nothing really wrong with that, of course, but I imagine that it would often make the skin of a professional writer crawl like a bucket of dew worms.
Well, the simple fact is that writers write because they have to. Trollope's compulsive writing has been mentioned elsewhere on this site. In our day, John Mortimer has had a distinguished literary career in his spare time. In his day job, barrister, he became a QC, in the United Kingdom, where the honour is not dished out with the openhanded generosity with which it used to be dished out when it was awarded in Ontario.
These gentlemen are pretty well typical. Michael Gilbert wrote his detective novels while riding the train to and from his job as a lawyer. Stephen King just keeps producing massive novels, though it's not as if he needs the bucks. In general, bestselling authors continue, after they have made enough money to be able to enjoy themselves singularly well, to spend several hours a day shut up in a room, at their craft.
Perhaps it's a consequence of brain injury. Some people think childhood brain trauma may be the basis of personality. You hit your head a lot when you're a child, and brain trauma is associated with personality change. Of course, the bumps on your head when you're a child don't usually merit a score on the Glasgow Coma Scale, but the effects on personality are expected to be less severe than the effects of bumps which do merit one.
Mr. McEwan exhibits the typical compulsion, anyway. The list, at the beginning of the book, of his other works lists ten other books (one a collection of television plays), two film scripts, and the libretto of an oratorio. One could argue, of course, that Mr. McEwan is simply a working writer. He produces a lot of writing because that's what he's paid to do. However, writing is not a field you would enter if you were interested only in having a career. The only thing the fledgling writer knows about the pay when embarking on a work of literary creation is that if it works out to the equivalent of minimum wage he or she will have done a lot better than most writers.
Artists have in fact sold us a bill of goods about the artistic character. They are certainly not the carefree bohemians we like to think of them as. They are people possessed of the strict self-discipline necessary to master a difficult and often unremunerative craft. It's the scientists who are the bohemians. Kinsey using his research program as a cover for orgies in his attic comes to mind.
I doubt Mr. McEwan is a carefree bohemian. Someone who's produced all those novels and television plays and film scripts and a libretto is probably a responsible type.
And he is responsible for Amsterdam. Regrettably, Amsterdam does not live up to the blurb. It is elegantly written, and consequently pleasant to read. However, despite all the assertions in the blurb about how well plotted the book is, the plot is contrived and implausible. It is resolved only by developments which take the novel into the realm of fantasy, and the characters' actions are not consistent but dictated by the plot. The climax of the novel is achieved only by reducing the two main characters to ciphers. Nothing they do at the end of the book is consistent with what they did in the first nine-tenths, and no compelling reason is offered for the inconsistency.
Amsterdam's degeneration may be intended to parallel one of the developments in the plot; however, if this is so, then, like Chuck Palahniuk in Fight Club, all Mr. McEwan is doing is toying with us for no good purpose. If Mr. McEwan wanted to demonstrate our susceptibility to literary convention and stratagem, the point would only have been made if in fact we were susceptible to this particular stratagem. Writing yourself into a corner and then using ridiculous plot devices to get yourself out is not a form of literary deconstruction.
It is, though, enough to put you off reading. I often wonder why I do read so much, and I usually come to the same conclusion. I read because my initial experiences were rewarding and I developed a strong reading habit. As reading became less frequently rewarding, my reading habit, as learning theory would predict, became more ingrained and difficult to eliminate.
This analysis of course suggests why so-called serious fiction has such a small following. Its following consists of the unfortunates like me who became addicted when young. The fortunate majority got their early reading experience with books like Amsterdam.
The Lure of the Novel © Coolth, 2000
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