Classics 1: The Lay of the Land - Richard Ford

Not least because my various diatribes on such as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan are less than entirely flattering, and partly because I believe there is much to be positive about in current literature, I am going to post a series of short reviews on books that I regard as modern classics.

A classic, I would tentatively submit, is more than a masterpiece. A classic is a masterpiece tested by time. One of the attractions of pontificating about a "classic" which has been written recently is that it tests the reviewer's ability to look into the future. Because I am a person of strong opinions on almost everything, I am afraid to say this doesn't worry me in the slightest. Like a good scientific theory, the prediction that a work is a classic is in principle refutable. If a modern novel which I choose to portray as a classic fades badly with time, then my thesis on that work is falsified.

In earlier posts, I promised that I would do my best to annoy by continuing to emphasise certain principles, in particular that what distinguishes classic literary works from fashionable literary novels is their moral and philosophical content more than their "literary" surface. Richard Ford's recent novel The Lay of the Land, published only last year, exemplifies these characteristics.

The Lay of the Land is the last work in a trilogy which began with The Sportswriter and Thanksgiving Day. They are already widely, and justifiably, regarded as masterpieces of modern American literature. One of Ford's great strengths is his constant exploration and interrogation of his narrator Frank Bascombe's motives. In The Lay of the Land, Frank, battered by his two marriages but by now a reasonably successful realtor, rides a rise in property values at the Millennium. His junior colleague in the property business, Mike, is a Tibetan who elides his Buddhist beliefs with the American dream of constant material ascent. Frank's thoughts on Mike's moral views are respectful but wry:

Mike and I cross the shadowed Square to my car, parked in front of Rizutto's. Mike still has said nothing, acknowledging that I don't want to talk either. A Buddhist can nose out disharmony like a beagle scenting a bunny. I assume he's micro-managing his private force fields, better to interface with mine on the ride home.

Ford is a genius at rendering the sordid so vividly it becomes poetic. Frank, under the weather after his most recent treatment for prostate cancer, enters a shabby bar hoping for a little private space and instead finds himself arguing with a racist and homophobic George W Bush-supporting Republican called Bob. Despite ill-health, Frank cannot help but be drawn into a brawl. Soon the two of them have toppled onto the floor:

All of this begins to seem more like an annoyance than a fight, like having someone's pet monkey hanging on your neck, though we're down on the floor and the stool's on top of me and Bob's going "Grrr, errrr, grrr" and squeezing my neck, his breath and hair reeking like old haddock. Suddenly, I lose all my wind and have to buck the bar stool off my back to breathe, and in doing so I get my knee in between Bob's own squirming, jimmering knees and my right elbow into his sternum, just below where I could interrupt his windpipe.

Ford's deadpan delivery and attention to detail convey the admixture of sordidness and absurdity with an almost casual perfection:

I lean hard on Bob's breast bone, stare down into his bulging, blood-splurged eyes, which register that this event may be almost over. "Bob," I half-shout at him. His eyes open, he bares his long yellow teeth, refastens a fisted grip on my neck tendons and croaks, "Cocksucker." And with no further prelude, I go ahead and jackhammer my kneecap straight into Bob's nuttal pouch pretty much as hard as I can -- given my weakened state, given my lack of inclination and the fact that I've had a martini and had hoped the evening would turn out to be pleasant, since so much of the day hadn't.

When the fight is over, and Bob's "hatchet-faced woman friend" has helped him to his feet and taken him back home, Frank's colleague Mike appears, somewhat unexpectedly, at the bar, and helps Frank totter across the floor to the exit. As they leave, the barman, Lester, who has been watching the fight with detached interest, decides to make his disapproval known.

"Blow it out your ass, you fag," Lester says. "I hope you get AIDS." He scowls, as if these weren't exactly the words he wanted to say, either. Though he's said them now and ruined his good mood. He turns sideways and looks up at the TV as we meet the cold air awaiting us in the stairwell. A hockey game is on again, men skating in circles on white ice. The sound comes on, an organ playing a lively carnival air. Lester glances our way to make sure we're beating it, then turns the volume up louder for a little peace.

That last sentence, apparently nonsensical but psychologically pitch-perfect, is typical of Ford's virtuosity. His work is littered with such beauties. As a final example of the manner in which he is able to mint vivid gold from life's less salubrious aspects, when he and Mike are driving away from the bar, Frank's prostate problems appear once more in material form ("In a moment that alarms me, I realise I haven't pissed and that I have to -- so bad, my eyes water and my front teeth hurt."). He draws over to the kerbside:

My car would make for good cover and has many times since the summer -- on dark side streets and alleys, in garbage-y roadside turn-outs, behind 7-Elevens, Wawas, Food Giants and Holiday Inn Jnrs. But the Square's too exposed, and I have to step hurriedly into the darkened Colonial entryway of the Antiquarian Book Nook -- ghostly shelving within, out of print, never-read Daphne du Mauriers and John O'Haras in vellum. Here I press in close to the moulded white door flutings, unzip and unfurl, casting a pained look back up the side street towards the Pilgrim farm, hoping no one will notice. Mike is plainly shocked, and has turned away, pretending to scrutinise books in the Book Nook window. He knows I do this but has never witnessed it.

There are delicious subliminal references to Frank's earlier life as a sportswriter and failed novelist, now reduced to urinating in the entryway of an antiquarian bookshop in front of the ghostly images of the past's unopened bestsellers:

I let go (at the last survivable moment) with as much containment as I can manage, straight onto the bookshop door and down to its corners onto the pavement -- vast, warm tidal relief engulfing me, all fear I might drain into my pants exchanged in an instant for full, florid confidence that all problems can really be addressed and solved, tomorrow's another day, I'm alive and vibrant, it's clear sailing from here on out. All purchased at the small cost of peeing in a doorway like a bum, in the town I used to call home and with the cringing knowledge that I could get arrested for doing it.

The Lay of the Land sustains itself with similar insight for more than seven hundred pages, leaving this reader at the end with the fervent wish that he could begin all over again.

Poem on Ian McEwan

                McEWAN   

Of the "golden generation" -- Rushdie, Amis, McEwan --

So loved by the literati, you are the most talented

Though not without serious flaws.

You showed your brilliance at an early age

With electrifying short stories, in two great collections

First Love and Last Rites, published at twenty-five

Followed not long afterwards by In Between the Sheets.

Justly lionised, your hard, cold glance

Immolating precision, and perfect evocation

Of dark atmosphere reached fullest fruition

In the short story format. You showed us you were

A peerless miniaturist. But by a curious irony

Those very same skills also bred

Your greatest imperfections as a novelist

Illustrating that a conversant strength

May also be a weakness. Against the short story

The novel is a wholly different form

Requiring distinctive virtues. Soon

After entering that field, despite technical force

Your vulnerabilities began to show.

After your first novel, The Cement Garden --

Still perhaps your best, not least because

At hardly a hundred pages, it is not much more

Than a short story successfully stretched --

Came The Comfort of Strangers. This time the characters

Lacked any sympathy, were curiously passive.

Your technical panache could not overcome

A failure of life or feeling the narrative.

The same occurred with A Child in Time

Setting a pattern which has been followed

From that time to this. Where the short stories

Are explosive, the novels seem lifeless.

                                  2

Yet if we search for reasons for that failure

They lie not so much in what is attempted -- 

Which is always ambitious --

As what is fulfilled.

Your classic technique is to use hot material --

In the case of The Cement Garden the death of a parent

A corpse rotting in a basement --

Within a cold frame of authorial observation.

Though effective in the short story, it cannot

Carry the full architecture of a novel. Your choice of

sordid or rebarbative subject matter -- incest, murder

Irreparable loss -- bred a suspicion

In some of your readers, that you were a cold fish

A gifted voyeur of human tragedy

Utterly without mercy, precise as a surgeon

Yet lacking that inspiring generosity

Towards your fellow humans which

In works of greater span -- in Dickens or Austen

In Melville or Hawthorne, or moderns such as 

Garcia Marquez, Updike, Roth --

Gives life to characters, inspiring that final awe

Of human life which is central to our experience

Of the finest fiction. But if we search your 

Imaginative origins, should we be surprised?

                              3

You were, from the first, a professional 

Literatus, as ambitious as Amis or Rushdie

Determined upon a life of letters. In your view

The short story, of which you are a master

Is not a sufficiently elevated form. Instead

The novel was the ladder you preferred to climb

To high literary status. On this path you set out

With customary rigour and determination

Towards your Booker and your honorary doctorates.

You were the first student of Malcolm Bradbury

In that hothouse at East Anglia

For future writers. Yet as you ascended

In aspiration, so you fell in achievement. 

It is, as many critics agree

A strange and fascinating conundrum

Not least since, from every other perspective

Your rigour is manifest. If you wished to be

A master writing of the decline of humanity

Flaying our human condition, it happened that

By a strange stroke of irony

Humanity left your literature. From the

Nineteenth century to the current day, a wit

Speaking of the decline of letters, might say

"From The Cherry Orchard to The Cement Garden".

Perhaps -- like Rushdie and Amis --

Each of whom treats their characters as objects

For the sadistic exercise of their own egos

You threw out the baby with the bath-water.

                              4

If, after your initial success with the short story

You entered a kind of middle life

It was not unexpected. You yourself said

After that beginning, you had the right to settle down

Find your feet, adjust to the proper task

Of fulfilling your destiny. Yet another central flaw

Arose. In each of the truly great writers there lurks

A fine philosophical mind

Leaving behind works with a palpable structure

A sense of human engagement, which can be mined

Almost indefinitely, in the manner in which, say,

Shakespeare preceded Freud. By that lofty comparison

Your own work is brittle. In The Innocent

Black Dogs and Enduring Love you continued

To build your fiction on shallow foundations.

The Innocent shed no extra light on the spy story.

In Black Dogs the view that barbarity would rise

Again in Europe, was true, but facile.

Enduring Love, constructed on games theory

Demonstrated little not known before

And less about love. As the most assiduous 

Of our novelists, if you aspire

To classic status, the lessons perhaps

Are there to be read, if not by you.

                              5

Amongst your peers, you are the worker at midnight

Composed, undistracted. You at least may learn

To break free of mere cleverness, superseding

The carapace of cold authority.

If our classic American brethren, Melville and Hawthorne

Stun us with their force, arresting disquisition

Weaving myth and image

Into a complex tapestry of original connection

Even Jane Austen (so the revisionists tell us)

Was a great student of moral philosophy.

In her private revolt against the Gothic novel

She rejected singular extremes of character

in favour of complex balance. Her effort

Beginning with will, becomes entirely natural. By mixing

Degrees of ambivalence, her characters

Achieve subtlety and sympathy --

Where yours, by contrast, have been until now

Mere creatures of your own design

Articulated puppets, lacking all autonomy

Frozen in your brittle industry.

So too your ritual grumbling about Thatcher

Whom the left almost wilfully misunderstood --

A radical decentralist who did more

to deconstruct woman's universal image

As a secondary creature, than nearly all the myrmidons

Of feminism -- seems not only conservative, but dated.

In novels such as The Child in Time

Your espousal of fashionable opinion

Now hangs heavy. Even so, given the nature

Of the London literary world, these were

No impediments to your increasing fame.

In other aspects your career

Took recognisable form. With fine irony

You were given, too late, a Booker

For your lamest work, Amsterdam

Which happened to combine

In almost perfect pattern, your worst features --

Fashionably acerbic, its unsympathetic characters

Were mere objects of your bien-pensant dislikes

Ending in an implausible Gotterdammerung

Which brings us to Atonement. Here, at least

You show the first true signs of a novelist

The first shy love of character, like a delicate hue

A limn of light on a moonflower

No fierce sun of compassion, certainly

But the beginning of a structure

Which threatens at last to reflect your rigour

Establishing a sympathetic relation between

You authorial ambition and your subject --

Not perfect, by any means, or strong enough

To justify a grand announcement

But sufficient to create an initial frame

For an absorbing drama. Perhaps for these reasons

It is your most popular fiction. So you enter

Distinguished middle age, with a promise at least

Of adding something useful to the novel

And onward you move. Saturday is merely another

Signpost along the way, well-written but lacking

In profound structure or sympathy of character.

And Chesil Beach, not much longer than a novella

Is, on one level at least, a typically powerful account

Of lost love. Yet even to your fans it demonstrates again

Your shallowness of intellect. Setting it in 1962

Suggesting that the time was a pivotal period of

Sexual awakening -- while a sly joke in Larkin's poem --

In your work becomes the central structure. Even so

It is hardly the first time you have built a novel

On such profoundly weak foundations.

Perhaps the root cause is a kind of intellectual smugness

Not greatly challenged by being so close

To the metropolitan literary world. You too

Love baubles and honours, though with more innocence

Than Sir Salman. Of you, your publisher was heard to say

When you did not win the Booker for Black Dogs

His function was to offer comfort, holding shaking hands.

Yet unlike Amis or Rushdie, your novels slowly improve

Grow in sincerity, accrete invisible weight. Your final

Oeuvre will be distinguished, not as great perhaps

As Updike, Roth or Ford, as poetic as McCarthy or Proulx

But no doubt sufficient for a small island

Living in America's cultural shadow. Your greatest flaw --

A detachment from your fellow humans, expressed

In lovingly detailed descriptions of human loss

And an almost exquisite physical revulsion --

Continues to haunt you. Even so, in a land

Where corporate literary houses are slaves of fashion

Always searching for the newest pretty face, you at least

Ply your trade with attention

And perhaps, better still, with the growing sense

That your best may be ahead of you. In this

We wish you well, and hope one day you may achieve

That greater work your skill deserves.

Poem on Salman Rushdie

               RUSHDIE

I am the rich child, lonely

In the chauffeur-driven limousine

A scion of Rugby and Cambridge

One of those exotic creatures who manage

To both hate their host culture and remain

More British than the British; who succeed

By ruthless opportunism, in playing all ends 

Against the middle. Somehow, I contrive to be

Radical in outward stance, theatrically iconoclastic

Yet inwardly conservative, snobbish, swift to take offence;

A profound self-dramatist, jealous of my independence

Yet avid for honours -- sufficient contradictions at least

To make a certain type of novelist. 

The twin poles of my motivation

Are not the desire to write, or love of literature, but

Vanity and hatred, generating

Enough ambition to power a factory.

My ego is both gigantic and frail

A huge balloon moving on a sparking fuse of neurosis

Across the literary landscape. So I prefer to be

A caricature of a great writer. That aside

With a few exotic trimmings, I am

A consummate politician, with a deep understanding

Of the power structures of the literary world.

Embedded within its cosmopolitan brickwork

I live like a toad under a favourite stone

Charming where necessary, loving gossip

Close to the underbelly, always willing to exploit

My literary connections.

After my first book, Grimus, sank without trace

My second, Midnight's Children, proved

Highly marketable, a lightweight confection

Of magical realism with some peripatetic history --

The perfect novel for the London literary establishment

Searching for something exotic and fashionable

Flattering its hunger for "new writers".

Sensing weakness against my mounting ambition

I demonstrated my merciless nature

Sacrificing my faithful literary agent,

That doyenne of the publishing world

For being too sympathetic to publishers. While 

Simultaneously criticism her for "cronyism"

And demanding a huge advance

I showed, at an early stage, my deepest motives.

In a literary world which admires ambition

More than sincerity, ruthlessness more than talent

I cut an impressive figure. The editors fawned.

I enjoyed my first victory. The rest, as they say, 

Is history. A Booker prize followed.

I was launched into the beau monde.

To my credit, my next work Shame was  a fine novel

Deeper, more heartfelt, than Midnight's Children

Powered by genuine hatred of tyranny

Leaving its readers scorched, not tickled, by history.

But each of us reaches a pivotal point

Where our deepest character emerges.

Shame reached the Booker short-list

But did not win the prize. I was naturally outraged

Angry beyond restraint. Like a dark cloud

I rose in revolt at the insult done to me

Storming out of the ceremony, displaying, as though

By accident, my truest and deepest orientation.

I was a child of the media, the slave of celebrity

Addicted to the baubles of prizes.

Over-sensitive to criticism, praise was my due --

Eternal praise, like a dictator

Standing in a stadium, reviewing the troops

In an endless march of raised salutes.

So I rushed from the Booker ceremony

Slamming the table with my fist, overturning teacups.

My writing never returned to the power of Shame

But like someone who has been bitten

By events -- who learns, perhaps subconsciously

That his bread is buttered on the other side of virtue --

I turned instead to other literary divertissements

In the style of Midnight's Children. Next came

The incessant punning and shallow profundity

Of The Satanic Verses, whose garrulous prolixity

Would have benefited from ruthless editing.

In another world, the novel

Might have sunk below the public surface

Except for an odd incident of a book-burning

And the sudden conflagration of rage

In a distant country.

The novel itself, a pretentious disquisition

Had made an oblique insult to the Prophet

(Hardly noticeable amongst the jumbled narrative)

Suggesting his mother was a whore.

A pious mullah, perhaps mistaking its colossal length

For a sacred text, had found that on a certain page

An apparent reference to Mohammed's mother

Caused his eyes to water.

Suddenly, fundamentalist Muslims across the world

Were scrabbling for their matches

Buying copies from the bookshops to burn

Threatening to incinerate the Satanic author.

So I was invested with vast importance

A literary dramatic personage on whom

A personal fatwa was declared by Iran.

I was a public figure at last, a position I greatly prefer

To the studious calm of a dedicated writer. My story was

As absurd and far-fetched as a Hollywood melodrama.

By some ironic process of fate granting to each

What he most desires, I had become, through my 

Worst work, the most famous literary figure of the age.

This was the final nail in the coffin

Of my private conscience. I had been confirmed

In all my worst expectations. The world was false.

So, like a morality play of Dickensian proportions

I achieved the distinction (the novel being unreadable)

Of being read for blasphemy by fanatical illiterates

In the very religion I had supposedly insulted.

While I continued to proselytise aggressively

Against the work of better writers.

My feud with Mario Vargas Llosa

Over Nicaragua can now be seen

For what it was -- the Sandinistas

Those "natural representatives" of the people

Having disappeared from power

By popular vote --

It seemed Vargas Llosa was right. In literary London

I dabbled in fashionable causes with Pinter et al.

Casually betraying my sincerest supporters

By flirting with conversion to Islam.

Like many self-obsessed artists, my greatest hate

Was directed towards liberalism and democracy.

Only when the hammer fell

On my own head, did it occur

That my own right to cause offence

Was paramount above all others. Until then

I could always be relied upon to oppose the West

Not least since I despised the common public taste

Which ignores my works. Like Graham Greene

At heart I prefer my own brand of authoritarianism 

To a settled world of bourgeois prosperity.

So I played shamelessly to bien pensant opinion

After celebrating 25 years of the Booker Prize

Midnight's Children was named the Booker of Bookers

Demonstrating yet again the almost exquisite

Recidivism of the London literary classes.

My celebrity proceeded apace. I even began --

Ensuring my image elided with that of Hollywood --

To engage in that sine qua non of celebrity

A course of plastic surgery on my studious eyelids.

Before then I had seemed a heavy lidded Hamadryad

Snake-like and powerful, not unhandsome.

Now the surgeon's knife removed that surplus

Of inherited owlishness, allowing me

To open my gaze

To the more important diversions of the age. 

I believed, like Henry Kissinger, that fame

Is the greatest aphrodisiac.

So I left my second wife and took up 

With a beautiful model in New York

Attending parties of the beau monde

Reflecting my elevated status

Savouring the shallowest regions of that capitalist hell

Which I had spent my earliest years despising

Demonstrating to all that beneath my false left-wing

Carapace, there beats the heart of a pure materialist.

My literary career reflected my progress through life.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories was a minor work

But The Moor's Last Sigh illustrated once again

My creative emptiness. Built on the proviso

That the hero aged twice as fast as the average person

The plot ground out the yawning consequences -- 

Seducing nanny at seven, senescence at thirty-five --

I once more reached the Booker shortlist

But not the prize. Another writer, Howard Jacobson

(A far more talented and cogent novelist)

Commenting on its formulaic shallowness

Said, "Enough magical realism!"

But alas, the tide of my career was not halted.

Given my share of bad books, my next novel

The Ground Beneath Her Feet really took the candle.

A "sumptuous" love story which would make

A Mills & Boon romance seem deep

It reflected above all my love of celebrity

My puppy-dog worship of pop music, and

Demonstrated the degree to which I had sunk

To new levels of banality. Yet why should I weep?

I am the king of London's literary culture

Even though I live in New York. Meanwhile 

In further fiction, I continued to declaim --

In works like Fury -- my cartoonish attitudes

Describing a protean figure like Mayor Giuliani

As a "glove puppet" for the rich. Against that

My own subsequent acceptance of a knighthood

Demonstrated, as if further proof were necessary

How to kiss the arse of the establishment

When it suits my own purposes. At the

Same time, I continue to proclaim

In fatuous essay after fatuous essay --

In film criticism which demonstrates 

Not merely y shallow grasp of the medium

But my glibness and faux-profundity --

How the world is deeply corrupt

That my work merely reflects reality.

Like my doppelganger and fellow conspirator

Martin Amis, I continue ad nauseam to proclaim how

The shadows of the moronic inferno

Set the terms of our existence.

Its feverish outlines, or so I argue,

Are plain enough to see. Apres moi le deluge.

Do they? Are they? Will the world fragment?

Or are the fissiparous subjects of my works

Perhaps the puerile projections

Of a narcissistic mind?

Time will tell. Meanwhile

I shall proceed with majestic momentum

To fulfil my lurid fantasy

Of being the world's most famous writer.

              POSTSCRIPT

If I have a single redeeming feature

I am a proven survivor

Of literary warfare.

My ego is such that

When this poem is printed, my reputation 

Will recoil only briefly, and then spring back

Growing by what it feeds on.

The rich effluvia of publicity

Will nourish my notoriety.

Like a weed which cannot be expunged

I'll spring out from the rubble

Branding my verbal Kalashnikov

Uttering dark threats of vengeance.

Impressed by my resilience

My acolytes will gather once more

Like crows on a carcass.

So the grand media circus that is Rushdie

The inflated balloon of hype and expectation

Will once more cast its shadow over the landscape

Moving towards who knows what terminus.

Those who observed a major writer emerge

Saw him show his hand of power briefly in Shame

Might hope that like some great sinner

Who scrapes the deepest barrel of voluptuousness

And materialist frivolity, one day

I will return to the humble, silent work of composition

Construct at last some true work of genius

Not with the venal motive of screwing my critics

Or shafting the literary world, but for the pure

Beauty of prose, the generous contemplation

Of human complexity, the honouring of mankind.

The fuck I will. I know a facile story when I see one;

After all, I've made my reputation living off them.

Instead I shall proceed through life

Exchanging present beauties for ever-younger chicks

Becoming increasingly corrupt and cynical

And then I shall make some major renunciation

Not by writing a great work, but

On the contrary, through some showbiz gesture

Like becoming a Buddhist, entering a monastery

Stopping only to pick up the final bauble 

Of a Nobel prize, bestowed on me by a cabal

Of over-serious Swedes and Norwegians

Moral compasses thrown awry

By my mixture of exotic lineage and erzatz greatness;

And finally to rest

In a huge coffin, carried through the streets of London

By the same literati I outmanoeuvred

Bullied and bamboozled when I was younger

In the absolute certainty

That those who raised me to literary greatness

Will far sooner confirm their stupidity

Than admit any error. On this tide of shame

I will be buried in honour, in the final confirmation

Of a last resting place in Westminster Abbey

And a public statue in Trafalgar Square.