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| After Philip Roth, where next? It's sobering to think about how small the world of American letters will look without himHe's just published a new novel, and another is finished and due for publication next year, but the memorialisation of Philip Roth has already begun. The towering American novelist has recently had his works published by the Library of America, giving him an immortal status usually reserved for dead authors. At age 76, his birthdays are now "commemorated" rather than celebrated, with his achievements discussed by awestruck admirers. And Roth himself has been batting off curious journalists probing into his recent meditations on death in The Dying Animal, Everyman and Exit Ghost – are these novels an attempt to come to terms with his own mortality, they ask? But in a sense, those aren't the most interesting questions. Many writers turn instinctively in their later years to the bewilderments of old age. Among Roth's contemporaries, Saul Bellow dealt with the humiliations of dying in his final novel Ravelstein; while John Updike's Seek My Face was as much concerned with ageing as art history. In Roth's case, this shift resulted in one of his best novels. Devoid of the humour which usually leavens his narrators, the stripped down and deadly serious voice in Everyman was dense, lyrical and overwhelmingly powerful. And this points to the more urgent question that will crop up increasingly in coming years. Despite Roth wanting to have them all shot, critics will be asking: can we imagine a world without Roth? "I can't see an American writer coming along who is replacing Roth," says Jay Prosser, who teaches American literature at the University of Leeds. "He writes with his ear – his novels are completely driven by his voice." There is a singularity of voice in Roth's work which is hard to find elsewhere. The current crop of high-profile American writers – such as Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer and the late David Foster Wallace – have raised technicality to an art form, but it would be hard to argue that they drive their novels home with the same ferocious intensity. And a piece of American history will also fall into the sea when Roth goes. Now the last one standing from the big-hitting male American writers who shot to fame alongside him, Roth came of age when writing the Great American Novel was still an embodiment of the American dream. Tom Wolfe wrote in 1972 that the novel was "one of the last of those superstrokes, like finding gold, through which an American could, overnight, utterly tranform his destiny". Now that novels have to compete in the attention economy along with everything else, younger American writers have found themselves emerging on lower pedestals. David Foster Wallace argued in the 1990s that American fiction writers under 40 operate in a media-saturated realm which separates them from the likes of Roth, Updike and Bellow. It could well be that American novelists never again achieve the same level of mythology as Roth.Philip RothFictionChris Coxguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Taking No Prisoners A historical novel about the ferocious Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest and the slaves who followed him. feeds.nytimes.com |
Jonathan Coe on Comfort And Joy Bill Forsyth, 1984Whenever I contemplate the career of Bill Forsyth, I realise I'm getting old. It's more than a quarter of a century since he was considered one of the great new hopes of British cinema, but to me, the sudden flowering of his oblique, wilful talent still seems like one of the more recent miracles of film history.After the cult success of his Glaswegian caper comedy That Sinking Feeling (just issued on DVD in an insulting format – with a dubbed soundtrack for American audiences), Forsyth hit the big time with his second feature, Gregory's Girl. I watch this film whenever it comes on TV – every two or three years, I suppose – and it never disappoints. The bittersweet experience of adolescent love is expertly captured, but more than that there is an unstoppable flow of comic invention: even the smallest characterisations are quirkily memorable, every scene crackles with good lines. There is not a dull moment.Local Hero, released in 1983, lacks the comic momentum of Gregory's Girl but makes up for it in several ways: a more global perspective; mature, expansive performances from Burt Lancaster and Peter Riegert; a magical sense of landscape. It has rightly become a classic. And then, in the late summer of 1984, Forsyth presented his latest comedy to the world: Comfort and Joy, the story of a Glaswegian DJ abandoned by his girlfriend and suddenly finding himself caught up in the city's (all too real) ice-cream wars.The diary I was keeping at the time records that I found the film "slightly baffling" when I first saw it. The comic brio of Gregory's Girl seemed to have receded even further. The pacing seemed to be weighed down by the melancholy of Bill Paterson's central performance. The plot didn't really make sense. I was, in effect, disappointed. I didn't quite get it.Yet now, 25 years later, Comfort and Joy is the Forsyth film I come back to most often, and with the most satisfaction. I can't find fault with it any more: or rather, it's become one of those films I love so much that even its faults become virtues. The language of the storytelling is fluidly cinematic; Chris Menges's cinematography keeps catching the grey-blue sheen of Glasgow at dawn and twilight in a way that perfectly reflects the emotional tone; Paterson is wonderfully vulnerable and endearing. And, far from lacking comedy – as I seem to have felt on a first viewing – the film is stuffed with brilliant jokes. Nothing endears me more to Forsyth's vision than the way he crowbars in the moment when Paterson's boss at the radio station, concerned that one of his star performers might be having a breakdown in the run-up to Christmas, asks his secretary to check the wording of his contract and "find out if there's a sanity clause".Because, yes, Comfort and Joy is a glorious Christmas movie as well as a glorious movie in its own right. I would far rather people watched it with their turkey and crackers than the hectoring, hysterical It's a Wonderful Life. The glow it induces is infinitely more subtle. It's that rarest of beasts, a truly serious comedy: a film that not only entertains us for 100 minutes, it then sends us out into the world feeling that, without realising it, we have been made to understand a little bit more about ourselves somewhere along the way.After making this film, Forsyth went to Hollywood and ran badly into trouble with his ambitious, ill-fated Robin Williams vehicle Being Human. He has not made a movie now for more than a decade. According to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, however, he is currently developing a new film project with the working title of Exile. If this is true, it's the best piece of news about British films that I've heard in years.• Jonathan Coe is a novelist. His most recent book is The Rain Before it FallsJonathan Coeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Hardcover Nonfiction Top 5 at a Glance1. GOING ROGUE, by Sarah Palin2. HAVE A LITTLE FAITH, by Mitch Albom3. ARGUING WITH IDIOTS, written and edited by Glenn Beck, Kevin Balfe and others4. STONES INTO SCHOOLS, by Greg Mortenson5. OPEN, by Andre Agassi feeds.nytimes.com |
Gormenghast sequel due, completed by Mervyn Peake's widow Titus Awakes, continued by Maeve Gilmore from prefatory notes left by her husband, to be published in 2011More than 40 years after its author Mervyn Peake died, the story of the lord of Gormenghast Titus Groan is set to continue following the discovery of a fourth book in the series completed by his wife.Peake died in 1968, leaving behind him three Gormenghast novels and the start of a fourth, provisionally titled Titus Awakes. His wife, the writer and artist Maeve Gilmore, began writing the book in 1970 but her completed manuscript was only recently discovered by their granddaughter. Digging through boxes which had been in the attic, she found four exercise books in his mother's handwriting and realised what they were."It came as quite a revelation," said Sebastian Peake, Mervyn's son. "When I was reading it for the first time a few weeks ago, it gave me a real kick in the solar plexus ... It's highly poignant."The Gormenghast trilogy, telling of the adventures of the 77th Earl of Groan Titus in his crumbling gothic castle Gormenghast, was begun by Peake in 1940 when he was called up to the army. The three books Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone are seen today as classics of fantasy fiction, and are also the subject of a BBC television series. The third and final book completed by Peake, Titus Alone, saw Titus Groan set off for a world outside his castle.Gilmore has picked up from a couple of pages of prefatory notes made by her husband before his death. Her story sees Titus wandering the world, before ending up on an island where he metamorphoses into Mervyn Peake himself. "The leitmotif of the whole thing is his search for some sort of final home," said Peake. "My father moved all over the place with his father, they were always travelling, so in a sense his island was the house he was brought up in in the middle of a vast Chinese city, outside the walls of which millions of people were rushing about. His sanctuary was coming back to that house ... My mother understood that, and it precipitated this extraordinary ending. Titus has become her husband and is brought back to where he wanted to be."Three publishers have expressed interest in publishing Titus Awakes next year, to mark the centenary of Peake's birth. 2011 will also see the release of a new illustrated edition of the Gormenghast trilogy, complete with 60 never-before-seen drawings by Peake which his son is currently placing within the novel. Peake's daughter, Sebastian's sister Clare Penate, has also just sold a memoir of her life with their parents.Gormenghast expert Brian Sibley said that while Gilmore's ending was something Peake himself would probably never have considered, it nonetheless "ties up ends in a way which is totally satisfying". "What this book does is take some of his original ideas and then develop them and see them through to become something which I think is much more poignant and much more meaningful, which is almost a resolution of Mervyn Peake's personality," he said yesterday on the Today programme.FictionScience fiction, fantasy and horrorAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |