101 Letters to a Prime Minister (29 page)

Everyman
relates the life of a nameless man who is not ordinary or generic in his life particulars—after all, he lives in a specific city, practises during his working life a particular job, has relations to family, friends and lovers that are unique to him—but is an everyman by the fact of his aging body and approaching death. The novel is in many ways a medical story, following the trials and tribulations of Everyman’s body from a biological, corporeal perspective. Ailments and medical emergencies, hospitalizations, convalescences, nurses, old people—this is the universe of
Everyman
.

It’s a grim tale. The conclusion is foregone. In fact, the novel starts with Everyman’s funeral. Roth pulls the reader along, so that Everyman’s demise, like that of Ivan Ilych, is horrifying at the same time as it is compelling. I couldn’t
read the novel without comparing my own imagined old age with that of Roth’s protagonist. Will my heart go like his? Or will it be my back, like that of Everyman’s friend Millicent Kramer, who suffers unbearable pain as the result of her spine’s decomposition? What will my social relations be like? Will I be attended to, or left lonely and isolated? So many tragedies in life can be avoided, some by care and consideration, others by pure luck. I have lived a life remarkably spared of tragedy and unhappiness. But one’s death, the body that falls apart, the mind that goes, that tragedy is inescapable. It is our collective and individual future.

Having said that, there are ways of approaching death that can change its meaning, if not its pain. I’m of course speaking of a spiritual approach. If death is seen as a threshold, a step up whose peculiar form requires the leaving behind of one’s body, then death becomes not an ending but a beginning, a transformation. “Religious mumbo-jumbo! Ignorant claptrap!” some will cry. But one’s death and the ideas one may have about its meaning are no one else’s business. It’s a private affair. And just as children’s heads are filled with imaginative mumbo-jumbo that is the very colour and texture of a happy childhood, so can religious mumbo-jumbo be the colour and texture of a contented letting go at the end of life. In saying this, in arguing for the practical usefulness—as well as the deep joy (and the possible truthfulness)—of a transcendent view of life and death, I am straying from the narrative of
Everyman
. The novel is resolutely, unflinchingly secular. There is no redemption or grace in Roth’s novel, or none that overcomes the dread of death. The ending is grim and it comes grimly. It’s a tale that yields the only moral possible from such an earthbound perspective:
carpe diem
, seize the day, enjoy today for tomorrow you die.

If this is your first Philip Roth, you’ll be struck at the artless simplicity of it. You don’t write so many novels that have won so many awards without learning how to tell a good story well. Even if Everyman’s particulars don’t match yours—his sexual obsession with very young women, for example, struck me as harking to a certain kind of dated aging male who came of age in the fifties and sixties—the psychological astuteness will nonetheless bring him close to you. You may dislike Everyman in his earlier years, feeling repelled by his arrogance, his stupidity, his selfishness, but his slow, grinding end will touch you, because in that he is like you, he is like me.
Everyman
is so finely calibrated emotionally and so perfectly crafted that it resembles the symbolic element on the cover of the edition I’m sending you: a watch.

My father, Émile, who turned sixty-eight a few days ago, sent me a poem he wrote. By coincidence, it too deals with the anguish of aging and I will end this letter with it:

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P
HILIP
R
OTH
(b. 1933) is an American novelist. He has written numerous books, including the Zuckerman novels,
Portnoy’s Complaint
, the National Book Award–winning
Goodbye, Columbus
, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning
American Pastoral
. Roth’s works generally focus on Jewish and American identity, and are often set in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. In 2011 Roth was honoured with the Man Booker International Prize.

Dear Mr. Harper,

An unabashedly literary novel is what I’m sending you this week. You might find the statement surprising. Haven’t all the novels I’ve sent you been literary, you might ask? They have. But the book you now have in your hands,
Flaubert’s Parrot
, by the English writer Julian Barnes (born in 1946), is more self-consciously literary than most of these other books (an exception jumps to mind: the twenty-seventh book I sent you, Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
). The attempt to lure the reader with an intriguing story and interesting characters, the writing style that seeks to be like a pane of glass, invisible so that the story appears to be seen and felt directly, as if the writer were not the intermediary, all these are less prominent in Barnes’s novel. Which is not to say that there aren’t stories and characters and clear writing in
Flaubert’s Parrot
. There are, of course. But their proportion is different. The author is not so self-effacing here, not so wholly dedicated to pleasing the reader.

The definition of a literary novel might be this: a literary novel is a novel that makes the reader work. A non-literary or genre novel builds on conventions. So a murder mystery or a thriller or a romance novel will have characters whom the reader will quickly seize and plot developments that will create definite expectations, which the author will then play with, either shattering them (it’s not the doctor who committed the murder but the little old lady you didn’t think twice about) or confirming them (the boy will get the girl, don’t you worry). A literary novel relies on fewer conventions. The characters are more complex and layered, not so easily reduced to stereotypes, and the plot may hold many surprises. To read such a work is a more demanding experience, a train trip in which the reader isn’t coddled by comforts or told of the final destination.

The literary novel is a daring gamble for its author. The risk of spectacular failure is considerable. A novel that adheres to the conventions of a genre can feature terrible writing and characters as thin as cling film, yet still be thoroughly enjoyable. In fact, many novels that are artistically trite sell very well precisely because they’re enjoyable. A bad literary novel, by contrast, has few redeeming qualities. It often commits the worst sins of a book: it is boring and it lacks credibility.

This is not the case with
Flaubert’s Parrot
. The work the reader has to put in is worth the effort. Why is that? Because the reader has to think. And this leads to a second definition: a literary novel is a novel that makes the reader think. This actually follows from the first definition; if a reader is working, so to speak, it is because that reader is thinking. And therein lies the strength of literary fiction, why the risk of failure is taken on: because thinking is a good and necessary activity. Whereas in our emotional lives we favour stability, seeking and staying with the familiar, keeping in touch with our parents, for example,
long after they’ve stopped parenting us or settling down and living with the same person for years on end, establishing a routine that may last a whole adult life, such fixity is the enemy of intellect. In our intellectual lives, we seek change and evolution, we want to learn and “move with the times.” In the realm of ideas, comfort and excessive familiarity are signs of stagnation, not security. And so the constant thinking is required, because new ideas only come from thinking.

All this to say: be prepared for a slower ride with
Flaubert’s Parrot
. It does not shoot forward like an express train. Regularly, I’ll bet, you’ll say to yourself, “That was well put,” or “That’s a word I haven’t seen in a while.” I also bet you’ll regularly stop reading, as if you were getting off at a station. You’ll stop because you’ll feel the need to think, to decide whether you agree with this or that point in the novel, or if you’ve understood the point at all. But if you get back on the train, you’ll find the journey worthwhile and you’ll be pleased with your final destination. What is that final destination? It’s not for me to say, but I was impressed with the verbal and formal play in
Flaubert’s Parrot
and I felt some of its knowledge and intellect rubbed off on me.

Dear, dear, I’m losing myself in abstractions. Concretely,
Flaubert’s Parrot
is about a retired widower doctor who is obsessed with the nineteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert wrote
Madame Bovary
and was one of the great stylists of the French language (don’t worry, you don’t need to have read anything by Flaubert to enjoy the book). There’s
a lot
about Flaubert in this novel. It’s not linear in its development and it’s full of opinions and observations, each of which the reader is expected to react to. This is the thinking I was referring to. It’s a peevish, proudly persnickety, highly intelligent novel, very much like Flaubert himself. And it’s thoroughly enjoyable, if you make the effort.

If you don’t make the effort, well then, you’ll just find it boring and you’ll want to hurry back to your received ideas. I rather hope you settle into this curious English novel that choo-choos along so nicely.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

J
ULIAN
B
ARNES
(b. 1946) is the author of eleven novels, three books of stories and two collections of essays. He has also written crime fiction using the
nom de plume
Dan Kavanagh. His works frequently address themes of British and French culture and identity. His honours include the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2004 he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Since I was speaking about it in my last letter, I thought I would send you an example of genre fiction, and what genre fiction has a more recognizable brand than a Harlequin romance? A word about Harlequin. Their website informs me that they are a Canadian enterprise that publishes “over 120 titles a month in 29 languages in 107 international markets on six continents.” In 2007, Harlequin sold 130 million books. Since its founding, the company has sold a staggering, an unbelievable, 5.63
billion
books. Those italics are Harlequin’s: they are clearly proud of their success, and so they should be. To have retailed nearly as many books as there are people on this planet is a unique achievement in publishing. You will get a hint of Harlequin’s depth of success when you look at the title page of the novel I’m sending you this week. Publishers usually mention where they have offices. To take a random example from my bookshelf, the hardcover edition I have of
the novel
Slow Man
, by the Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, my favourite living writer, is the British edition, and it was published by Secker & Warburg. The title page informs me where they have offices: London. That’s it. The publishers of Carole Mortimer’s
The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss
, by contrast, append a condensed atlas of cities: Toronto, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Sydney, Hamburg, Stockholm, Athens, Tokyo, Milan, Madrid, Prague, Warsaw, Budapest and Auckland. And their website informs me that this list is not up to date: Harlequin also has offices in Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and even in a place called Granges-Paccot (I looked it up: it’s in Switzerland).

Now, can that many people be wrong? What’s the appeal of
The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss
?

Well, it’s not the writing. Take these three lines:

Oh, those adverbs. They clutter the prose like too many traffic lights on a road. But they make for easy, unthreatening prose, for prose that relieves the reader of having to think very hard. Elegance may be lost, but a clarity of sorts is gained. Faults can be found in other aspects of the writing too, as they can be found in the characterization and in the plot. And yet there are those numbers. 130 million. 5.63
billion
.

I think the appeal of a Harlequin romance lies precisely in those traffic lights. A street with traffic lights is a safe street, a street in which the movement of vehicles is carefully regulated so that everyone can get home safe and sound. There’s something to be said for that kind of security. We don’t always
want to be driving down adventurous roads that cross swamps, deserts and mountains.

The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss
is the story of Linus Harrison, a handsome, muscular, driven multi-millionaire, and his beautiful, independent personal assistant, Andrea Buttonfield. There are obstacles in their way, including a snowstorm in Scotland that would chill the hardiest Yukoner—a storm that strands Linus and Andi in a pub where there’s only one room with one bed available to them—but they will find perfect love. Reading the book, I was reminded of Indian cinema. The usual fare from Bollywood is equally silly, unrealistic and escapist, yet that is exactly what the average Indian viewer wants, an escape from the harsh realities of life into a glamorous world populated by rich, beautiful people where a happy ending is guaranteed. The function of genre fiction is to relax and confirm, not to stress and challenge. Genre fiction seeks to deliver one thing: emotional satisfaction.