The Modern Library (23 page)

Jake is in constant flight from all that raw emotion. In England, he finds it hard to make much sense of the natives – there is a marvellous description of a ghastly English dinner party. While Jake’s background renders him powerless in the public world of the Swinging Sixties – with actors, producers and TV people
everywhere
– he is tender and human in his own house with his wife and his three children. Jake Hersh is one of the great Jewish creations of the North American novel.

This is a most unusual novel, steeped in imagery of water and light, lakes and trains, and the mountains and snows of the north-eastern USA, where the town of Fingerbone seems to float.

Here live three generations of women. Sylvia, the grandmother, has three daughters: Molly, who becomes a missionary in China; Helen, who is mother to Lucille and Ruthie, but follows her father into the bottom of the lake; and Sylvie, a drifter. Ruthie is the teller of the tale and through her eyes we witness the quiet desperation of children at loose in the world. Grandmother dead, mother dead, they end up with Sylvie, who like all her sisters has eschewed for ever the accepted ways of being a woman. No housekeeping, cake-making or doily-crocheting for her, but magic in the
mountains
and love when required. As the disapproving townsfolk of Fingerbone move in, Sylvie and Ruth and Lucille variously set off on pilgrimage, the past travelling with them.

Marilynne Robinson has a rare eye for nature. Every insect, gnat on the wing, the shifting colours of snow, water, ice ‘the colour of paraffin’, ‘plaited light’ is closely observed. Smells too – woods with the odour of ‘the parlor of an old house’, cleanliness that smells like a sun-warmed cat. This is a wistful, laconic novel, illuminated by a haunting sense of the spirit of nature, and the spirit of place.

Swede Levov has everything: he is good-looking, a superb athlete, rich, a good father, a good son, a good citizen and a good employer; he is married to a former Miss New Jersey, with whom he has a pretty good sexual relationship; he is even-tempered, at ease with himself, mild-mannered, and much admired. Philip Roth establishes him convincingly and in great detail as one of the most contented men in America, post-Jewish, but deeply alert to his family’s recent history as immigrants. Why then, does his daughter, Merry, become such a difficult presence in the house, refusing first to eat her food and then slowly becoming obsessed with the Vietnam War until she puts a bomb in the local store-cum-post office and disappears? Why do the riots in Newark, where the main Levov factory is sited, occur?

Roth dramatizes the significant events of the second half of the century in the United States in the life of one family, in one all-American consciousness. The result is a novel which is intensely absorbing and readable with some magnificent set scenes such as a forty-fifth anniversary high school reunion at which the narrator meets the Swede’s brother among many others, and a dreadful dinner party at the end of the book which must be the best worst dinner party in all fiction. Swede Levov is alive in this book not as a recognizable type, but as a uniquely vivid personality. His character and his consciousness stay in your mind.

Sometimes a novel appears which seems to have no direct literary antecedents, which is written in a tone which is new and fresh, and takes an approach which is original and startling. Norman Rush’s
Mating
is such a book; it deals with Americans in Africa; it is narrated by a female anthropologist on the make in Botswana. She is urbane, intelligent and has read thousands of books, now she is in search of new sensations and a warm climate and useful research material. She is knowing and cynical and pushy, too selfconscious as a narrator to make the reader dislike her too actively, but so adept with sentences and paragraph endings and exciting prose rhythms, not to speak of self-knowledge, that the reader is full of admiration for her and deeply amused by her antics.

The novel, like all good comic writing, has a dark side: our heroine sets out on a lone journey across the desert to find the brave, remote Utopia which a shady and attractive American called Nelson Denoon has set up in a place called Tsau. While some of this is very funny indeed, there is something strange and
unsettling
about the social control which Nelson insists on, and the world he has invented. The tone of this book is flawless, the voice is utterly convincing.

Salman Rushdie is a born storyteller, whose work has been a turning point in the development and perception of modern Indian fiction. Rushdie vibrates with moral passion, with opinion and political belief. He is a dominating writer who engulfs his readers in fabulous stories. A master of comic invention, his characters, full of snot, ego and physical abnormality, leave you with a sense of having sneezed violently and laughed too long and too loudly.
Midnight’s Children
– an allegory for India’s recent history – leaves you with a great love for its Indian world.

Saleem Sinai is born on 15 August 1947, one of 1001 children, magically endowed, whose birth coincides with India’s severance from Britain. Rushdie takes a savage swipe at Mrs Indira Gandhi and her notorious 1971 Emergency measures, whilst the fantastical plot and flamboyant narrative, centring on the swapping of two babies at birth, give entirely new excitement to the most traditional of British comic literary fancies. Rushdie is the kind of writer whose work is too much surrounded by academic contemplations of his ‘magical realism’ and ‘post-modernism’. Readers need only concentrate on the ebullient Rushdie imagination and the wonder and entertainment of the novel itself.

It is against the odds that this book, which had such a cult following in its day, and during the twenty years after publication, should still be fresh and fascinating. But it is still fresh and fascinating.

It tells the story of a few days in the life of a sixteen-year-old boy, Holden Caulfield who, about to be thrown out of another expensive school, escapes to New York. He books into a hotel, tries to lose his virginity, meets his kid sister – the scene where he sneaks into the apartment is magnificent – and ponders on the nature of things. His thought process is direct and unforgettable, he has odd fascinations and desires, he has great loves and hates, and he has a most peculiar and impressive sort of intelligence. Clearly, he needs psychiatric help, but psychiatric help also needs him (and his version of the encounter would be by far the more interesting). In other words, Salinger created a character who stays in the mind, whose first-person narrative the reader enters completely, whose verbal quirks – and he has many – remain funny and do not irritate, and whose story is likely to survive into the far future.

Michael Newhouse, New Zealand Casanova, is the protagonist of this picaresque satire, which takes us from his childhood through his youth to his later years, by way of the procession of vociferous women who catch his eye.

Michael is a puffball of conceit, one of those oblivious men who specialize in making others aware of their own intelligence and emotional requirements. Thus a puzzled sense of indignation wafts through Michael’s story, as he perambulates around Hamilton, Auckland, Wellington, Rotorua and the farms and towns of the North Island, extending his favours to mothers and daughters, utterly unconcerned with his country’s complacent, puritanical values. Circumstance constantly foils him as he snuffles around for a corner of New Zealand life where a more diverse sexuality and a more willing attitude to copulation can be discovered.

Much of the pleasure of the novel comes from the comic grace of its narrative. Michael, raised by his Edwardian grandparents, has mastered a sedate New Zealand version of their formal prose which fluently decorates his descriptions of the ‘raging pit of
disappointment
’ fate always seems to place in his path. Seeming artless, this novel is artful, a radical work using the life and times of an intelligent rake to stick pins into conventional pomposities, in New Zealand in particular, and in the world in general.

India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, the possession most loved, most influential, most mourned. This is the first volume of Scott’s grand work The Raj Quartet, and is set in 1942, the beginning of tumultuous times, with Europe at war and India in ferment, raging with anti-British riots, on the road to Independence.

Rape is at the centre of events, the political rape of India by the British, the physical rape of Daphne Manners by Indian peasants in the Bibighar Gardens in Mayapore, an outrage which reverberates immediately and for many years to come throughout the British community in India. And throughout the Indian communities too, for Daphne Manners had committed the unforgivable sin of falling in love with a Hindu, Hari Kumar. He, in turn, a Hindu educated at an English public school, is an outcast in both worlds.

Over Scott’s vast landscape hovers the magnificence of India itself, almost a spectator, watching as Scott moves through the past, present and future to show that just as there was no mercy in British India for those who transgressed Imperial rules so, subtly, mercilessness became the weapon upon which the British impaled themselves.