The Mumpsimus

While canonical literary history has generally told the story of 20th Century British fiction as the story of men, with some exemplary women here and there, we have enough distance now to see that while the men were certainly the grabbers of headlines and awards, their canonicity was less a matter of merit than of their control of the culture industry. The men ate up all the air in the rooms of litchat. Meanwhile, by and large it was women who wrote the fiction that has survived the years the best, and which remains most readable and interesting today. This is especially true around midcentury, where we can speak of Rebecca West (1892-1983), Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978), Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999), Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), Anna Kavan (1901-1968), Stevie Smith (1902-1971 [best known as a poet, but author of 3 interesting novels]), Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Muriel Spark (1918-2006), Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), Doris Lessing (1919-2013) — and many others, both well-know...

In writing about Brian Evenson's book about Raymond Carver, I noted that both Evenson and I first read Carver right around the time we first read Kafka and Beckett, and we did so without knowledge of the contemporary American fiction writers he's often set alongside (e.g. Ann Beattie, Tobias Wolff, etc.). Later, I gained that context and, consequently, the context I'd originally brought faded, which is one reason why Brian's book so effectively brought Carver back to me — which is to say, it brought a way of reading Carver back to me. I don't mind the American writers Carver typically gets grouped with, but I'd be lying if I said their work really excites me. Kafka and Beckett, on the other hand, are among a very small group of 20th century writers whose work I am in awe of, work that I feel utterly incapable of writing about analytically, work that I can only point to and say, " That . Whatever great literature is, it must surely be that ." Now,...

It's all Mr. Waggish's fault. Since the marvelous book publishing arm of the NY Review of Books reprinted John Williams's little-known novel Stoner , I've noticed mentions of the book here and there, and I had even picked it up a couple of times in bookstores. There was something mysteriously attractive about the cover (part of a Thomas Eakins painting ). But I always hesitated because the novel was praised for its realism, and because the central character is an unexceptional professor at the University of Missouri in the first half of the 20th century. (No, the book is not the sort that has a sequel called Pothead . It was published in 1965 and the central character's name is William Stoner.) The people praising the book, I figured, were probably the sorts of people who truly like books about unexceptional professors at midwestern universities. I am not that sort of person. But then Waggish wrote about it . Mr. Waggish has extraordinarily good taste, i...