Subject
Fw: Amis' Yellow Dog and VN's Pale Fire
From
Date
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NABOKV-L also thanks Alphone Vinh for relaying this item.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Corinne Scheiner" <cscheiner@ColoradoCollege.edu>
> From the New York Times:
>
> For a British Novelist, Tornadoes in August
>
> August 26, 2003
> By SARAH LYALL
>
>
> LONDON, Aug. 25 - In a recent article in The Daily
> Telegraph titled "Someone Needs to Have a Word With Amis,"
> the British novelist Tibor Fischer described furtively
> reading an advance copy of Martin Amis's forthcoming novel,
> "Yellow Dog," on the
> subway and worrying that strangers would assume incorrectly
> that he was enjoying himself.
>
> He wasn't.
>
> " `Yellow Dog' isn't bad as in not very good or slightly
> disappointing," Mr. Fischer wrote. "It's
> not-knowing-where-to-look bad." Shimmering with fury at
> what he portrayed as betrayal by a literary hero he once
> idolized to the point of memorizing passages from his work,
> Mr. Fischer added that reading the book was "like your
> favorite uncle being caught in a school playground,
> masturbating."
>
> In the sleepy days of August, Mr. Fischer's evocative fit
> of bad temper dropped into the pool of literary London like
> a stone, reverberating on the pages of other newspapers, in
> the e-mail messages of rival authors and even in the
> deliberations of the judges for the Man Booker Prize,
> Britain's top literary award. Though it might seem odd to
> declaim in August about a novel that is not scheduled for
> publication until Sept. 4, nothing is odd, really, when it
> comes to Mr. Amis and the strangely potent brew of envy,
> unease, schadenfreude and fury he inevitably provokes in
> fellow writers here.
>
> Before the publication in 1995 of his last novel, "The
> Information," the furor had to do with personal things: the
> size of his advance (at some $800,000, it was big before
> its time); the breakdown of his first marriage; his
> decision to leave his longtime agent (and the wife of his
> then-close friend, the novelist Julian Barnes), Pat
> Kavanagh, for the tough American agent Andrew Wylie; even
> his seemingly un-English foray into dental surgery. Now the
> debate has to do with whether Mr. Amis has somehow lost his
> touch.
>
> "Yellow Dog," a satire that takes on, among other things,
> the pornography industry, British royalty and the tabloid
> press, is either an embarrassment or a masterpiece,
> depending on which critics you listen to; whether they have
> rivalrous relationships with Mr. Amis; and whether they
> admire his pungent, lacerating prose.
>
> Unfortunately for Mr. Fischer's case, his own new novel,
> "Voyage to the End of the Room," is due to be published the
> same day as Mr. Amis's, raising questions about his
> motives.
>
> Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a fellow of Magdalen College,
> Oxford, who gave "Yellow Dog" a glowing review in The
> Observer of London on Sunday, said that given Mr. Amis's
> fictional and other musings on the subject of envy, perhaps
> Mr. Fischer meant his remarks to be a part of an elaborate
> literary in-joke, like that in Vladimir Nabokov's novel
> "Pale Fire."
>
> In the hall-of-mirrors narrative of "Pale Fire," an
> increasingly insane editor comments in increasingly
> eccentric terms about the posthumous poem of a recently
> deceased fictional American poet. (In this scenario, Mr.
> Fischer would be playing the part of the insane editor.)
>
> "You read this and say, `Is this someone who's read "Pale
> Fire" and is adding themselves, as a shared joke, in Amis's
> ongoing interest in envy?' " Mr. Douglas-Fairhurst said.
> "Or is it that he hasn't read `Pale Fire' - or not closely
> enough - and is unaware that he's suffering from the same
> sort of envy that Amis has been able to dissect and examine
> so brilliantly?"
>
> In any case, the knives had come out. A few days after Mr.
> Fischer's article appeared, The Sunday Times of London,
> quoting several anonymous Booker Prize judges who were
> snippily dismissive of "Yellow Dog," stated with some
> satisfaction that the Amis book would not be nominated for
> the prize. That was soon proved wrong when "Yellow Dog"
> duly appeared on the 23-book-long list (which will be
> winnowed into a list of finalists before a winner is
> chosen) along with a resounding endorsement from John
> Carey, the chairman of the judges.
>
> The book is not without flaws, Mr. Carey said in an
> interview, but is still "a great comic extravagance"
> comparable to the works of Jonathan Swift.
>
> "People take, and did take, exception to Swift's depiction
> of the human race in the same way," he said. "It's
> enormously crude and ugly, but it's meant to be, because
> it's satirizing crudeness and ugliness."
>
> But other negative accounts were filtering out, as was a
> serious debate about whether Mr. Amis's celebrity had cowed
> his editors at Jonathan Cape, his publisher here, into
> failing to edit him sufficiently. "The way British
> publishing works, you go from not being published no matter
> how good you are to being published no matter how bad you
> are," Mr. Fischer wrote.
>
> (Dan Franklin, the publishing director of Jonathan Cape,
> was on vacation and unreachable, an assistant said.
> Likewise, Mr. Amis's agent, Mr. Wylie, and Mr. Amis himself
> "are both currently on vacation and out of touch," said
> Michal Shavit, an agent in Mr. Wylie's London office. Mr.
> Fischer did not return calls to his answering machine.)
>
> Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times of London, said
> in an interview that perhaps Mr. Fischer had a point and
> that "Yellow Dog" would have benefited from a more vigorous
> editing to tame some of its more effusive Amisian
> digressions. She said the book was not one of Mr. Amis's
> best.
>
> "I wonder more and more about the editing process, and I
> feel that more and more writers are published rather than
> edited," Ms. Wagner said.
>
> Mr. Amis has been a literary celebrity since, just out of
> college, he unveiled his singular voice and deeply cynical
> worldview in <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
> value="39994">"The Rachel Papers,"</object.title> a
> hilarious account of a very clever and rather hapless young
> man's efforts to get women to sleep with him. Since then he
> has written more than a dozen works of fiction and
> nonfiction, including literary criticism; short stories;
> novels; a memoir, <object.title class="Movie"
> idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="90750">"Experience"</object.title>;
> and a book about Stalin, "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the
> Twenty Million."
>
> But something about him has always set him apart, even from
> the other literary celebrities of his generation - Ian
> McEwen, Julian Barnes and Salman Rushdie. It has to do with
> his father, Kingsley Amis, of course, and also with his
> hard-smoking, hard-drinking rock-star persona, which has
> always proved deeply attractive yet deeply vexing to the
> sort of male writers who tend to interview him for
> magazines and newspapers.
>
> Jonathan Burnham, the president and editor in chief of
> Miramax Books, which is publishing "Yellow Dog" in the
> United States, said that Mr. Amis seemed to provoke
> idolatry and envy in equal doses.
>
> "One thing that drives everyone crazy is that Martin
> doesn't really care about the storm he creates around him,"
> Mr. Burnham said. "He doesn't consciously seek to generate
> all this heat, and it just adds to all this madness."
>
> Mr. Carey, the Booker judge, said that Mr. Amis, in
> addition to being "very brilliant," was also extremely
> resilient.
>
> "I think Martin's pretty tough," he said. "If you're as
> clever as that, and as successful, you don't much care
> about what someone like Tibor Fischer says."
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/26/books/26AMIS.html?ex=1062904638&ei=1&en=
> be891dd30d52e9e8
>
>
> * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
> Corinne Scheiner
> Maytag Assistant Professor
> Comparative Literature
> The Colorado College
> 14 East Cache La Poudre Street
> Colorado Springs, CO 80903
> 719/389-6238 tel
> 719/389-6179 fax
> cscheiner@coloradocollege.edu
>
----- Original Message -----
From: "Corinne Scheiner" <cscheiner@ColoradoCollege.edu>
> From the New York Times:
>
> For a British Novelist, Tornadoes in August
>
> August 26, 2003
> By SARAH LYALL
>
>
> LONDON, Aug. 25 - In a recent article in The Daily
> Telegraph titled "Someone Needs to Have a Word With Amis,"
> the British novelist Tibor Fischer described furtively
> reading an advance copy of Martin Amis's forthcoming novel,
> "Yellow Dog," on the
> subway and worrying that strangers would assume incorrectly
> that he was enjoying himself.
>
> He wasn't.
>
> " `Yellow Dog' isn't bad as in not very good or slightly
> disappointing," Mr. Fischer wrote. "It's
> not-knowing-where-to-look bad." Shimmering with fury at
> what he portrayed as betrayal by a literary hero he once
> idolized to the point of memorizing passages from his work,
> Mr. Fischer added that reading the book was "like your
> favorite uncle being caught in a school playground,
> masturbating."
>
> In the sleepy days of August, Mr. Fischer's evocative fit
> of bad temper dropped into the pool of literary London like
> a stone, reverberating on the pages of other newspapers, in
> the e-mail messages of rival authors and even in the
> deliberations of the judges for the Man Booker Prize,
> Britain's top literary award. Though it might seem odd to
> declaim in August about a novel that is not scheduled for
> publication until Sept. 4, nothing is odd, really, when it
> comes to Mr. Amis and the strangely potent brew of envy,
> unease, schadenfreude and fury he inevitably provokes in
> fellow writers here.
>
> Before the publication in 1995 of his last novel, "The
> Information," the furor had to do with personal things: the
> size of his advance (at some $800,000, it was big before
> its time); the breakdown of his first marriage; his
> decision to leave his longtime agent (and the wife of his
> then-close friend, the novelist Julian Barnes), Pat
> Kavanagh, for the tough American agent Andrew Wylie; even
> his seemingly un-English foray into dental surgery. Now the
> debate has to do with whether Mr. Amis has somehow lost his
> touch.
>
> "Yellow Dog," a satire that takes on, among other things,
> the pornography industry, British royalty and the tabloid
> press, is either an embarrassment or a masterpiece,
> depending on which critics you listen to; whether they have
> rivalrous relationships with Mr. Amis; and whether they
> admire his pungent, lacerating prose.
>
> Unfortunately for Mr. Fischer's case, his own new novel,
> "Voyage to the End of the Room," is due to be published the
> same day as Mr. Amis's, raising questions about his
> motives.
>
> Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a fellow of Magdalen College,
> Oxford, who gave "Yellow Dog" a glowing review in The
> Observer of London on Sunday, said that given Mr. Amis's
> fictional and other musings on the subject of envy, perhaps
> Mr. Fischer meant his remarks to be a part of an elaborate
> literary in-joke, like that in Vladimir Nabokov's novel
> "Pale Fire."
>
> In the hall-of-mirrors narrative of "Pale Fire," an
> increasingly insane editor comments in increasingly
> eccentric terms about the posthumous poem of a recently
> deceased fictional American poet. (In this scenario, Mr.
> Fischer would be playing the part of the insane editor.)
>
> "You read this and say, `Is this someone who's read "Pale
> Fire" and is adding themselves, as a shared joke, in Amis's
> ongoing interest in envy?' " Mr. Douglas-Fairhurst said.
> "Or is it that he hasn't read `Pale Fire' - or not closely
> enough - and is unaware that he's suffering from the same
> sort of envy that Amis has been able to dissect and examine
> so brilliantly?"
>
> In any case, the knives had come out. A few days after Mr.
> Fischer's article appeared, The Sunday Times of London,
> quoting several anonymous Booker Prize judges who were
> snippily dismissive of "Yellow Dog," stated with some
> satisfaction that the Amis book would not be nominated for
> the prize. That was soon proved wrong when "Yellow Dog"
> duly appeared on the 23-book-long list (which will be
> winnowed into a list of finalists before a winner is
> chosen) along with a resounding endorsement from John
> Carey, the chairman of the judges.
>
> The book is not without flaws, Mr. Carey said in an
> interview, but is still "a great comic extravagance"
> comparable to the works of Jonathan Swift.
>
> "People take, and did take, exception to Swift's depiction
> of the human race in the same way," he said. "It's
> enormously crude and ugly, but it's meant to be, because
> it's satirizing crudeness and ugliness."
>
> But other negative accounts were filtering out, as was a
> serious debate about whether Mr. Amis's celebrity had cowed
> his editors at Jonathan Cape, his publisher here, into
> failing to edit him sufficiently. "The way British
> publishing works, you go from not being published no matter
> how good you are to being published no matter how bad you
> are," Mr. Fischer wrote.
>
> (Dan Franklin, the publishing director of Jonathan Cape,
> was on vacation and unreachable, an assistant said.
> Likewise, Mr. Amis's agent, Mr. Wylie, and Mr. Amis himself
> "are both currently on vacation and out of touch," said
> Michal Shavit, an agent in Mr. Wylie's London office. Mr.
> Fischer did not return calls to his answering machine.)
>
> Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times of London, said
> in an interview that perhaps Mr. Fischer had a point and
> that "Yellow Dog" would have benefited from a more vigorous
> editing to tame some of its more effusive Amisian
> digressions. She said the book was not one of Mr. Amis's
> best.
>
> "I wonder more and more about the editing process, and I
> feel that more and more writers are published rather than
> edited," Ms. Wagner said.
>
> Mr. Amis has been a literary celebrity since, just out of
> college, he unveiled his singular voice and deeply cynical
> worldview in <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
> value="39994">"The Rachel Papers,"</object.title> a
> hilarious account of a very clever and rather hapless young
> man's efforts to get women to sleep with him. Since then he
> has written more than a dozen works of fiction and
> nonfiction, including literary criticism; short stories;
> novels; a memoir, <object.title class="Movie"
> idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="90750">"Experience"</object.title>;
> and a book about Stalin, "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the
> Twenty Million."
>
> But something about him has always set him apart, even from
> the other literary celebrities of his generation - Ian
> McEwen, Julian Barnes and Salman Rushdie. It has to do with
> his father, Kingsley Amis, of course, and also with his
> hard-smoking, hard-drinking rock-star persona, which has
> always proved deeply attractive yet deeply vexing to the
> sort of male writers who tend to interview him for
> magazines and newspapers.
>
> Jonathan Burnham, the president and editor in chief of
> Miramax Books, which is publishing "Yellow Dog" in the
> United States, said that Mr. Amis seemed to provoke
> idolatry and envy in equal doses.
>
> "One thing that drives everyone crazy is that Martin
> doesn't really care about the storm he creates around him,"
> Mr. Burnham said. "He doesn't consciously seek to generate
> all this heat, and it just adds to all this madness."
>
> Mr. Carey, the Booker judge, said that Mr. Amis, in
> addition to being "very brilliant," was also extremely
> resilient.
>
> "I think Martin's pretty tough," he said. "If you're as
> clever as that, and as successful, you don't much care
> about what someone like Tibor Fischer says."
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/26/books/26AMIS.html?ex=1062904638&ei=1&en=
> be891dd30d52e9e8
>
>
> * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
> Corinne Scheiner
> Maytag Assistant Professor
> Comparative Literature
> The Colorado College
> 14 East Cache La Poudre Street
> Colorado Springs, CO 80903
> 719/389-6238 tel
> 719/389-6179 fax
> cscheiner@coloradocollege.edu
>