Prospect reads

This week, I've been reading an advance copy of James Wood's How Fiction Works. Considering his stature, Wood has produced a pleasingly self-effacing volume: a civilised, intelligent book about the intimate processes of fiction. It's a patient, lovingly nuanced study of beloved books, and one whose faith in the permanence of great art sits in strange tension—as its author knows only too well—with the void he has termed elsewhere, "the public space that might have been": the realm in which it is normal and important to talk about literature as though it mattered, and as though aesthetic and moral concerns were inextricably entwined. I wish there were more books like this; I also wish there could be more books like this. James Wood is a vanishingly rare beast.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth. My first engagement with the much-lauded giant of contemporary American literature has been, on the whole, a disappointment. It's hard to tell whether his prose is deliberately overcooked—it is, after all, a "pastoral"—but too often this tragedy of the all-American prototype just feels utterly contrived. There are flashes of brilliance—a particularly beautifully-evoked scene or an insightful digression—but generally it feels as though the ideas have been done to death. Perhaps that's the point.

I do not read many literary biographies, least of all the lives of long dead poets. But I was forced to read Donne: The Reformed Soul, a biography of John Donne by the young writer John Stubbs, for an Irish literary prize (the Glen Dimplex prize) I was helping to judge. It was a revelation. The first half in particular was a thrilling historical page-turner, set amid the great political and religious upheavals of late 16th/early 17th-century England. At its centre is the charming and remarkably modern soul of the great love poet. Stubbs writes beautifully and weaves together the different layers—the life, the social and political context, the poetry—with novelistic skill. I confess that I had no idea that Donne was so close to the heart of late Elizabethan politics or that he was born a Catholic and converted to the reformed church (in an attractively undogmatic and pragmatic manner). He was even involved in the "singeing of the King of Spain's beard" at Cadiz in 1596. Knowing so shamefully little about Donne I wondered whether the book may have had a disproportionate impact on me—but both my fellow judges (the book won the prize) and many learned reviewers who do know the poet and the period well were also impressed. Although Donne's poetry is, of course, still read and studied, it is odd that his life is not better known—he ought to be a more iconic Englishman (and Londoner: perhaps Ken or Boris could adopt him) and it is high time someone made a film of his life.

I've been reading American Gangster: and other tales of New York, a collection of articles by Mark Jacobson mostly written in the 1970s for Village Voice, New York magazine and the New Yorker. The title piece forms the basis of the eponymous movie of the life and times of Frank Lucas, 1970s superbad Harlem mobster, who once laid fair claim to be the world's most successful heroin dealer. Lucas notoriously formulated a cradle to grave supply chain by importing heroin directly from golden triangle warlords for cutting and bagging on to 116th St New York, smuggling the raw materials in the coffins of dead Vietnam GIs. Lucas was a natural sociopath who blew in from North Carolina, hit the streets and played a death-dealing role in the near-collapse of Harlem's underclass. In another set of circumstances he could have been a Ford, Sloane or Carnegie. After a spell in the slammer and with his billion-dollar assets seized, the decrepit, defeated and semi-derelict superfly betrays hints of his former menace in the course of negotiations with Jacobson and Hollywood for the spectacularly corrosive and amoral story of his life and times. Other articles by this effortlessly talented writer - a funky Runyan - are deeply evocative of Manhattan's rococo sleaze. All human life, and some forms yet to be classified, is there.

Death-Devoted Heart – Sex and the sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde by Roger Scruton. Locating the Tristan legend within the medieval tradition of courtly love poetry, Scruton argues that the genre’s conventions grew out of a need to elevate the human sexual impulse from the mundane world of commodity to the transcendent realm of erotic love. Pre-dating Freud by decades, Wagner chose this mythical setting not out of pre-Raphaelite-style escapism but as an expression of the timeless truths of human existence.

Wagner saw the orchestra as fulfilling the role of the chorus in Greek theatre and Scruton demonstrates how it is the music itself that sets up, underscores and drives the drama in its inexorable progression from forbidden love towards sacrifice and redemption. He skilfully plots the development of the score, showing how the famous opening dissonance is not fully resolved until the opera’s final note and revealing the daring and original character of Wagner’s musical language. I particularly liked his reference to leitmotifs as being like “musical magnets,” around which meaning slowly accumulates in the course of the drama.

Toronto-based doctor Vincent Lam's debut short story collection, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won a major Canadian literary prize. As a fan of med lit, I tracked down a copy ahead of its British publication next year by Fourth Estate. Lam traces the fortunes of four doctors, Ming, Fitz, Sri and Chen, from their student days to their professional lives. Some of the interlinked stories were published separately before being combined in this volume, and the cracks show, with sudden, almost dizzying shifts in time, location and between characters. Yet this structure also proves to be one of the book's strengths—when writers switch between first-person narrators, they often only end up making the (rather banal) point that people perceive the same events differently. Lam's more haphazard approach serves to illuminate his characters, allowing the reader to understand and sympathise with them all.

"Goodbye to All That," in the Atlantic Monthly, by Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan has been cheerleading for Barack Obama's candidacy for months on his blog the Daily Dish. In this article he weaves together the various strands of his case for Obama—his ability to transcend America's sclerotic baby boomer post-Vietnam culture wars, his confidence in combining a strong moral sense and religious faith with public expressions of doubt and scepticism, and the soft-power effect that having a mixed-race president who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia would have on those around the world who increasingly distrust America's motives. At the time the article was published, Obama looked like a busted flush and Hillary Clinton's path to the Democratic candidacy looked inevitable; now a series of assured public performances by Obama have opened up the race again in the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses. As someone who finds Obama the most inspirational presidential candidate in years, I certainly wish him all the best (and not just because I've got a fair bit of cash riding on him).

I'm reading Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K Jerome. This extremely funny Victorian novella, published in 1889, tells the tale of an ill-fated outing on the Thames by three young middle-class men and a dog. The trip is full of mishaps, and the book is studded with rambling asides about such subjects as the time the narrator stunk out a train carriage carrying some cheeses to London. If your knowledge of 19th-century literature is largely confined to long, earnest novels about the upper classes, it is interesting to read something so raucous and informal; it seems very modern. And Jerome K Jerome was an attractive figure—an English Oblomov. He founded The Idler magazine (which still exists), and once quipped, "It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do." More on Jerome here.