Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘books’

Steve Himmer – The Bee-Loud Glade

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Back in January I mentioned a book called The Bee-Loud Glade*, by Steve Himmer, whom I should say for reasons of full-disclosure is a very good friend of mine. The book comes out on April 4th, so this is now the right time to tell you more about it. I’ve just had the pleasure of re-reading this novel and I realized that the short announcement I gave for it in January only scratches the surface of all that this book contains.

At first glance, this is a novel about a man called Finch who works in the Brand Awareness department of a big corporation selling “hyperefficient plants” (fake plants, fake nature), who loses his job and gets hired by a billionaire named Mr. Crane to live as a hermit. Finch is asked to take a vow of silence, to wear a horrible wool garment that gives him hives, to share his garden with a drugged lion, and lots of other tasks as invented by his whimsical and powerful employer – beekeeping, music, painting, gardening, you name it. If some hermit somewhere in history was asked to do something, Mr. Crane wants his hermit to do the same.   

But there’s more. Beyond the gentle comedic tension and satire created by Mr. Crane’s tasks, the novel has a serious heart. Finch must slowly learn how to be a hermit, dealing with loneliness and fear and boredom along the way. Not to mention with the repeated visits of Mr. Crane’s wife, a beautiful woman with plenty of opinions and questions for Finch about why he remains and “performs” his work as a hermit. She is a difficult temptation for Finch as he settles into a solitary existence but she also forces him to clarify exactly why he continues with his difficult project.

A hermit’s days are quiet, with plenty of time for observation and reflection. And Finch is a confirmed city-dweller, a nice twist on the story, and by that I mean he isn’t someone who already loved nature and so plotted and planned his retreat into the wild for ages. Finch has never had much experience with nature, and his withdrawal from the world has more to do with his dissatisfaction with society and with the kind of person society makes him. When he begins to get settled into his cave and his garden, much of the natural world comes as a revelation to him, giving the reader similar opportunities for reflection.

So I learned a lot about mushrooms and their shy lives. I learned that they’re quick to cower and quick to hide, that they’re willing to keep quiet and small so long as they’re left to grow…

Thinking like a mushroom came quickly to me, and it worked. In the first place I looked, brushing aside a soft curtain of moss and weeds, I found three perfect mushrooms crouched in the shadow of a large rock. They were so close they were practically—but not quite—touching each other, and as soon as I leaned close and disturbed the air around them my nostrils filled with the sweet scent of secrets, of wine cellars and old canning jars and the thrilling surprise of turning a stone to find a bustling community of potato bugs and millipedes thriving beneath. The excitement of life where it wasn’t expected.

This main story, however, actually takes place in the past and is framed by a narrative of Finch as an old man, alone in his wilderness, voluntarily forgotten by the world until one morning, after a violent storm, a pair of hikers trundle their way into his universe. These are the first people Finch has seen in a very long time, and the complexity of their intrusion is compounded by the fact that Finch has become nearly blind. The necessary relationship that develops between the hikers and the now-old Finch is where a part of the novel’s social commentary resides, adding a nuanced response to Himmer’s question about the value of living in complete isolation from other human beings.

There is also a very subtle twist in The Bee-Loud Glade, a question of the modern world intruding on Finch’s haven in an unexpected way. This is not an overwhelming plot turn by any means, but it is quite effective in getting Finch to formulate his ultimate understanding of the meaning of his life.

It should be pretty obvious that this is a novel that looks with much curiosity, censure and concern at the way in which humans live now, and which tries to identify other ways of engaging with the natural world and with one another. Himmer is careful, however, not to draw unbreachable boundaries around the ideas the novel offers. There is a deep criticism in The Bee-Loud Glade, but that criticism isn’t paralyzing or desperate, instead it orients the reader toward reflection, compassion and study. For a novel about a man living alone in the wilderness who hasn’t spoken for thirty or forty years, this book has quite a lot to say.

*The title of the novel, for anyone as curious as I was, comes from a poem by Yeats called The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Here are the first lines: I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree / And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; / Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, / And live alone in the bee-loud glade

 
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Eric G. Wilson – My Business is to Create

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About two weeks ago I finished an interesting non-fiction book written by Eric G. Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University, and which will come out later this spring from the University of Iowa Press. I wrote a more formal review at Necessary Fiction, but thought I’d mention it here as well.

The book is called My Business is to Create: Blake’s infinite writing and it was an interesting combination of scholarly analysis of William Blake’s poetry and art with a kind of writer’s handbook. Wilson traces a ‘method,’ if you will, inspired by Blake, that he thinks creative types might find useful. I like the thought of combining these two ideas because I can see how close reading and literary analysis can be inspiring and, apparently, as Wilson points out, William Blake has been a source of inspiration for musicians, artists and writers for hundreds of years.

There was also something quite moving about Wilson’s evident admiration for Blake. I get that when you’ve studied someone for a very long time, you kind of can’t help becoming their champion. Not that Blake wouldn’t deserve this anyway, but Wilson’s esteem for Blake’s artistic fervor infused the book with a lot of earnest energy.

I know only a little about William Blake, so the biographical information and excerpts that Wilson provide are fascinating. I can see how across the centuries Blake has become a kind of mythical figure—the perfect stereotype of the struggling artist. A little bit crazy, a little bit eccentric, but touchingly devoted to his life’s work.

And Wilson is really serious about the method part. He traces out a way of conceiving of yourself as an artist and a way of developing a process of intense but ultimately liberating self-criticism. Underneath all of this is the simple truth that all art takes an immense amount of work and personal energy.

My Business is to Create is a slim little book, just under 100 pages, and Wilson’s writing is lively, if, at times, a little overly poetic, sacrificing clarity for exuberance. Ultimately, however, I found it an engaging and thought-provoking read.

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a few words on Franzen's Freedom

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I have more to say about Michel Houellebecq’s La Carte et le Territoire, but I’m switching gears today because I finished Franzen’s Freedom last night. It isn’t really my style to trash a novel completely, and Freedom doesn’t actually deserve that, for various reasons that would be a little boring to go into in detail, but I do feel like spending too much time writing about Freedom might actually be a little more than it deserves.

I’ll try to be succinct.

And fair.

Essentially, my frustration with Freedom is two-fold. First, I am strongly averse to novels which attempt – however clever the writing, however clear and thorough the character analysis – to base an entire fictional universe on what is essentially facile psychology. Not a single person in Freedom did anything unexpected, or behaved in any way which wasn’t already signaled by Franzen in the first few paragraphs of their fictional existence and which was then explained away by Franzen through pop psychology drivel, or, excuse me, ideas.

And second, well, frankly, the book made me feel like I was watching a witty reality TV show. Here are the Berglunds airing their difficult marriage for the entire world to see and comment on. And don’t we all feel so much more superior for not behaving like them? Aren’t they all such sad little creatures? And we can feel sympathetic; we can, but not too much, because really it is all their fault, and the fault of that superficial beast of American culture. I mean, come on, can’t we write incisively, meaningfully, about America without mimicking such a problematic form?

I suppose if I had to, I could come up with something nice to say about this book. But those two reactions trump any praise I might have. Franzen is a good writer, and Freedom is nearly an enjoyable read. But I didn’t find anything really clever in Franzen’s project.

In fairness, I think reading Freedom after finishing Houellebecq might have contributed to the violence of my reaction. The two writers are doing something very similar in their novels. Both are a little manic in their attempt to document contemporary culture, both are cynical toward that society (although their cynicism takes vastly different forms), and both are interested in explaining contemporary neuroses. But where Houellebecq’s metafictional experiment plays with form and content, and therefore implicating the reader which brings his social critique full circle in an ingenuous way, Franzen just seemed to recycle pop culture and superficial psychology.

Did I just go ahead and trash the novel? Okay, yeah, pretty much. Well, maybe in a few days I’ll come back with something more balanced…

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first thoughts on Houellebecq – La Carte et le Territoire

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Well, reading my first Michel Houellebecq novel was not exactly what I expected. I imagined I would have to put up with some gritty and depressing sex scenes (there were none) and I thought I would be impressed nevertheless with his writing (yes, and no). As I mentioned before, I came to his latest novel, which won the 2010 Prix Goncourt, with the preconceived notion that he was a good writer, but probably not to my taste.

This is all just to say that hype is ridiculous, and try as I may to avoid it, there is always some amount of hype that filters its way into my reading brain, thus coloring my reading experience. So okay. Despite all that, what did I think?

La Carte et le Territoire (Eng: The Map and the Territory, which will probably come out later this year) is a strange novel – on one hand it’s extremely clever, on the other I couldn’t help finding it a little dull.

I want to say quickly why I found some of the book dull. First, I think I was simply expecting Houellebecq’s writing to be more intense or more daring. The book is well-written. But the prose is straightforward. Not very lyrical or descriptive. Most of the descriptive work is spent on labeling things. Objects are given their brand names, for example, and people are presented as static images, much like a photograph. The animation of each person comes through the 3rd person omniscient narrator who dips into the thoughts of the characters—fluidly, but again, almost always through exposition.

There is definitely a cynicism in Houellebecq’s writing, a cynicism toward human beings. I was expecting this aspect of his work, and I even agree with some of his vision, and yet there were moments that startled me. Moments in which Houellebecq expounds on some thought or notion of one of the characters and I just found myself thinking—how sad, how untrue.

Despite all that, I think what I’m really resisting about this book is its purposeful unwillingness to engage me in a seamless story. Time and time again, the novel does something to remind me of its fictional status. Where I got frustrated with this is that La Carte et le Territoire doesn’t necessarily do anything unusual with that pointed revelation. It just becomes a clever twist layered on top of a conventionally-told conventional story.

Briefly – the story:

Jed Martin is an artist. The novel recounts his entire life, with particular emphasis on his 30s and 40s, his relationship with a Russian woman named Olga, his friendship with the writer Michel Houellebecq and his feelings about his father.

Martin and Houellebecq meet because Houellebecq gets asked to write the catalog for Martin’s biggest exhibit. The men develop a strange friendship, which is cut short when Houellebecq is savagely murdered.

There are several layers of admirable cleverness to the metafictional trick of Houellebecq putting a writer named Michel Houellebecq into the novel:

First, Michel Houellebecq appears as a character for the first time when Jed and his father are having their annual Christmas dinner together. Jed mentions the fact that a write named Houellebecq was asked to write the catalog. The father says, “Michel Houellebecq?” and Jed says, “Do you know him?” The father answers:

“He’s a good writer, I think. An enjoyable read, and he has a pretty accurate vision of society.”

This is funny, obviously – Houellebecq having a character tell the reader that Houellebecq knows what he’s talking about when he portrays the world.  

Second, the catalog. In the novel, Houellebecq writes the catalog of Jed Martin’s art exhibit and this catalog takes the form of an overview of Martin’s artistic development and vision. But of course, the novel is exactly the same thing. Houellebecq writing about the life and art of Jed Martin.

Third, on page 151-153 of my edition, Jed Martin falls asleep at a café in the Shannon airport (after meeting Houellebecq to discuss the catalog project) and dreams that he is in a book, a book that recounts his life. He walks around a moment in this book, looking at the black letters against a white surface, at the names that appear and then disappear. And then he wakes up. As soon as he arrives in Paris, he calls Houellebecq to say that instead of giving him any old painting as a thank you for the catalog, Martin will paint Houellebecq’s portrait. Thus the two men are creating each other.

I haven’t even gotten to the murder part yet, or what I think Houellebecq might be doing with his Jed Martin character…but I’ll save that for another day.

It’s probably fairly clear that I’m a bit undecided about this work. I could discuss it for hours, for that reason alone it’s a fascinating piece of literature. I wish I’d read Houellebecq’s other novels first, so I’d know where to place this latest work. I have the sense this is a departure in many ways for Houellebecq, but I need to start reading if I want to see how…

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Joanna Ruocco – The Mothering Coven

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I recently reviewed this book at Necessary Fiction :

But this is not a book to read with blithe inattention, as much of what happens and what is said could be perceived as nonsensical whimsy. A slower, more careful read detects the fragile threads of what makes this a novel and not a playful and poetic montage.

If you are interested in discovering a charmingly eccentric universe created out of a string of elegant and bizarre little scenes featuring eight formidable women and other unconventional characters, please look for this book.

I wanted to add a few words here about the experience of reading Ruocco’s style of experimental fiction. Experimental fiction can ask a lot of a reader – either in concentration or complicity – and not all readers are willing to enter into that exchange. Including myself. I think a person either falls willingly, happily, dizzyingly, into the experimental universe or is kept, for whatever reason, at too far a distance to engage with the text.

As I began to turn the pages of The Mothering Coven, I was at first curious, then amused, then agreeably puzzled. I found myself both delighted at and concerned about the strange world and characters Ruocco had created. Eventually, I fell into the rhythm of the book’s intriguing vocabulary and shifting perspective. I am a sucker for a carefully-placed first-person plural, unusual description and poetic imagery. Especially if all of that comes packaged within enough “story” to keep me invested in remaining along for the rest of the journey.

Also, I appreciated Ruocco’s ability to combine whimsy with real feeling. So much of what happens in The Mothering Coven is, for lack of a better world, silly. But somehow, inexplicably, none of it is really silly at all. This is a novel about people feeling unsteady in their world and about missing loved ones. It is both comical and ridiculous, making it a lighthearted read, and yet wholly serious, making it difficult to forget.

Finally, to end, here is one of my favorite passages from the book:

The action has moved to the kitchen. It must be time for lunch. For Agnes, it is a working lunch. She is researching vermilions, the tiny lions crushed by the thousand to color the crimson velvets of Versailles. Her heart isn’t in it. Vermilions had many hearts. Of course, they have been crushed to extinction.

 

mid-read thoughts on Woolf's Night and Day

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Officially, I am just about halfway finished with Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day. Despite a slowish start, this is turning into an excellent read. The style is subtly different than her other work, a bit more calm, a bit more serious.

Night and Day (published in 1919) is the story of three, almost four people. I say almost four because three of the characters appear to have taken hold a little deeper in Woolf’s imagination and she gives them more of her time than the fourth. At least in the first half of the novel, I suppose this could change. Essentially, this is the story of four young people, two men and two women, and how they negotiate and cope with their feelings about marriage. The central question seems to be whether love and marriage can and should be associated.

I suppose if I wanted to be overly critical, I might say the novel plods a bit. But this isn’t quite the right expression. It has a leisurely pace in terms of story momentum, and it involves quite a lot of interior deliberation. Yet, one of the things I enjoy most about Woolf is her ability to give a character room to think. She has her characters weigh their actions, justify their thoughts and decisions, explore their possibilities. It takes a great amount of narrative skill to do this without alienating a reader, and I think Woolf succeeds.

Here is one easy example:

Katherine looked at her mother, but did not stir or answer. She had suddenly become very angry, with a rage which their relationship made silent, and therefore doubly powerful and critical. She felt all the unfairness of the claim which her mother tacitly made to her time and sympathy, and what Mrs. Hilbery took, Katharine thought bitterly, she wasted. Then, in a flash, she remembered that she had still to tell her about Cyril’s misbehavior. Her anger immediately dissipated itself: it broke like some wave that has gathered itself high above the rest: the waters were resumed into the sea again, and Katharine felt once more full of peace and solicitude, and anxious only that her mother should be protected from pain.

This is quite a hefty dose of explanation, and another writer might have portrayed these same emotions through action or dialogue. Much of the novel, perhaps a good three quarters, is given this way. It works, however, to my mind, because Woolf’s narrator is terribly eloquent and not afraid to sneak in a bit of imagery (the wave idea) to spice up all that exposition. Also, the middle bit of that second sentence is extremely straightforward, but extremely powerful…with a rage which their relationship made silent.

I am starting to believe that Woolf’s greatest skill may in fact be her narrator…which is a fascinating thing to trace, as she experiments so much with it.

Woolf project catch-up

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Today, I am thinking about Virginia Woolf. Her diary, her short stories and her second novel Night and Day.

Let’s start with Night and Day. I had never even heard of this book before I put together all the reading lists for my Woolf project. And I suspect that along with The Voyage Out, it isn’t often read unless someone is doing what I’m doing, or maybe for a class. Truth be told, it isn’t remarkable in the way her other novels are. I’m thinking of To The Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, novels which begin with a full head of steam and sort of charge forward with that recognizable Woolfian prose. (Have I mentioned that I dislike the word Woolfian…how to write about her without using it? Ugh.)

I am only about a third of the way through the book, so obviously my thoughts will shift and change, but for now, Night and Day feels like Woolf restrained. There is something almost too straightforward about the descriptions and the narrative. More so than The Voyage Out, which was her first novel and as I mentioned before, similar to a 19th century society novel and ‘tamer’ than I expected. But even The Voyage Out had more narrative wandering and plenty of those unique narrative insights and descriptions I so love compared with Night and Day.

This is not to say I’m not enjoying the novel. It is just quieter, and has less of that typical Virginia Woolf feeling. It is a novel about class, and a bit about politics also, and most definitely about love. I’ll have more to say, and hopefully with more enthusiasm, as I get further in.

On to the short stories. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf is organized chronologically and begins with five pieces written before 1917. I don’t think any of these were published with her first collection in 192, which makes sense as they all feel a bit like experiment pieces. Different tones, different POVs, different subjects.

I wrote a little about Phyllis and Rosamond earlier, and I’d just like to mention one of the others, The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn. It is a two-part story, beginning with the description of an older woman interested in British history who comes across a manuscript from 1520. The manuscript is the diary of a young woman, who we learn from the manuscript’s keeper, a distant relative, never married and died at the age of thirty.

Knowing about her early death and spinsterhood before we begin to read Joan Martyn’s journal is a neat trick on Woolf’s part, because much of the diary is about her impending marriage to one of her father’s associates. She is a practical young woman although some of her dreams are quite big, and since we know that none of it will come to anything, it is quite a bittersweet little story.

But aside from the story, which is richly imagined and involves a variety of ideas from poverty to literacy, it is mostly just intriguing to see Woolf write in the voice of a young woman from the 1500s. This is what I meant about these early pieces feeling like experiments. It’s clear she is trying to imagine what someone like herself – a reader, a writer, an independent thinker, would have felt under different, more severe restrictions. In that sense it is intensely felt. The ending is lovely and reveals the inner life Woolf gives her fictional Joan, who is standing in their family church, admiring the tombstones, where she will be taken in a shorter time than she realizes:

As a child I know the stark white figures used to frighten me: especially when I could read that they bore my name; but now that I know that they never move from their backs, and keep their hands crossed always, I pity them; and would fain do some small act that would give them pleasure. It must be something secret, and unthought of – a kiss or a stroke, such as you give a living person.

Finally, just a few quick words on her diary. I’m curious about how little Woolf writes in her diary about her writing and I wonder if this is because of the era. Would it have been strange in the early 1900s for her to be obsessing over the details of her writing decisions, her characters and her ideas for fiction in her personal diary? She writes mainly about the people they see, stories about friends, a little bit of news about her and Leonard’s printing work. It’s all very interesting to read, but I am struck with the absence of her literary thoughts. Does she begin to do this later?

another quick word on Gordimer

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On Saturday I said there were two other articles I wanted to mention besides the wonderful Barnes piece from The London Review of Books. The first of these is a short, (nearly infuriatingly so) piece on Nadine Gordimer from The Guardian. The occasion of the article was a lecture she gave in England a few weeks ago, after which the journalist was able to ask her a few questions, and the subject was her life and her newest book, the complete collection of her non-fiction writings, Telling Times, Writing and Living, 1954 – 2008.

The article is worth a skim, especially if you are a fan of Gordimer like me, but it served more to remind me to start reading Telling Times. Which I did right away, and which is about as delightful as going through her fiction again. I like that I’ve read all of her fiction before now experiencing her non-fiction essays. I feel I have a sense of what she tried to accomplish through her literature, and I have judged and admired that on its merits, and so now I can go back and discover her personal voice.

I believe, although I could be wrong, that most people think of Gordimer as a strictly political writer. And so, in some sense, despite her Nobel Prize, despite her other awards and general prestige, her work actually gets overlooked by many readers who might be intimidated, or simply not interested, or putting it off for the right time. But I think that keeping her in such a strict classification is a gross mischaracterization of her work. Yes, all of her novels have some social-political element to them, that fact cannot be pushed aside, but they are all novels of people more than anything else.

In an essay from 1963 on how she came to writing, she says:

I was looking for what people meant but didn’t say, not only about sex, but also about politics and their relationship with the black people among whom we lived as people live in a forest among trees. So it was that I didn’t wake up to Africans and the shameful enormity of the colour bar through a youthful spell in the Communist Party, as did some of my contemporaries with whom I share the rejection of white supremacy, but through the apparently esoteric speleology of doubt, led by Kafka rather than Marx. And the ‘problems’ of my country did not set me writing; on the contrary, it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of ‘the South African way of life’.

I loved reading these lines, especially the first and last sentence, because they confirm to me how Gordimer approaches writing. It is simply the essential fact of her existence, the first fact. Other facts have layered themselves around this first one, perhaps the greatest is having been born and raised in South Africa. But Gordimer would have written, and written superbly, had she come from anywhere else.

a review of the new Madame Bovary translation

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I’ve recently come across three excellent articles, all about matters close to my own heart. I’ll mention the first one today and get to the two others either tomorrow or Monday.

The first is Julian Barnes’ Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer from last week’s London Review of Books. This is not only a thorough and excellent review of Lydia Davis’ much-celebrated and much-discussed new translation of Madame Bovary, it is also a careful discussion of what literary translation is all about and what kind of choices translators must make.

With careful and good-natured severity (the best kind), he explains many of Davis’ choices and compares them to other, previous English versions of Madame Bovary. These comparisons are wonderful for a details enthusiast like me, as each reveals how the various translators interpreted or compromised the original.

I haven’t read Madame Bovary in translation, and I didn’t really plan to until reading this article, but as a translator I am now extremely interested in the choices that its previous translators have made. One choice that Davis made came as a surprise to me – she wanted to mirror Flaubert’s grammar and sentence structure as much as possible. This is a curious choice. Often a French sentence is a little turned around compared to an English sentence, not in terms of subject/verb or the big important parts of the sentence, but in terms of the little clauses and the commas. This is part of the musicality of French, and something that English doesn’t necessarily have.

As Barnes suggests, and I would agree, to keep Flaubert’s grammar in English is a risky decision. It keeps the translation accurate in one sense, but opens up a separate claim to inaccuracy. If a sentence reads awkwardly once it has been transformed into another language, this is a deep betrayal of a writer like Flaubert whose prose is anything but awkward. Which obviously makes Flaubert a most difficult writer to translate.

Barnes’ final critique of Davis is that she isn’t a great fan of Madame Bovary and he wonders whether it is possible to create a truly masterful translation when you are “out of sympathy” with the work. This is an excellent question. I would tend to say no. If you cannot find the beauty of the work in the whole, and not just on a sentence per sentence basis, I suspect your readers won’t either. But Barnes is ultimately fair with Davis, however, calling her translation “more than acceptable.”

For those of you who have read Davis’ translation, or any others, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

Iris Murdoch – Under the Net

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If you had asked me to describe Iris Murdoch a few months ago, when all I had read of her fiction was The Sandcastle and The Nice and the Good, I would have described her as skilled at sharp, biting domestic fiction. The kind of writer who picks apart personal relationships – friendships, marriages, sibling dynamics – with careful and sometimes frightening acuity. I would have tempered those two statements with a comment on her ability to render her characters with sympathy, with shades of gray, with feeling and with compassion.

But now, after reading Under the Net, I realize she is not so easily categorized. With Under the Net I must add humorist and satirist to her accomplishments. It isn’t every writer who can do both straightforward fiction and satire, and I was very impressed to get into the novel and realize how different it was from the other books of hers I had read.

Under the Net is about Jake Donaghue, a struggling novelist who translates French potboilers on the side. Jake is about as self-absorbed as you can get. But he is also wonderfully clever and likeable. He has a personal philosophy against work, so he does a lot of sponging off of friends and girlfriends.

This personal philosophy is what sets the entire book in motion. His current girlfriend, Madge, has decided to kick him out. So Jake and his friend Finn (most excellent character, by the way, a kind of Jake-shadow, who chimes in from time to time with many of the novel’s best lines) must move. Their options are limited, and Finn suggests Jake go look up an ex-girlfriend named Anna. The suggestion appears to unmoor our poor Jake.

One of the aspects of the book I enjoyed so much is Jake’s constant hyperbole. Suddenly, although we’ve never heard of her before, although he hasn’t mentioned her until now, suddenly Anna is the lost love of Jake’s life. And finding her, getting her to love him back, sends him on a series of wild capers across London and all the way to Paris and back. And many of these capers raise a measure of doubt as to whether Jake really cares for Anna at all. But of course Under the Net isn’t just about Anna and Jake.

If I had to hazard a statement to sum up in one line what the novel is about, I’d say it’s about poking fun at that pervasive myth of the artistic temperament. Jake, who is so committed to his writing that he’s willing to live in relative poverty in order to devote himself to his typewriter, doesn’t write a single word for the entire book. And he considers himself a deep, intellectual and perceptive person but most of the novel’s action results from his misunderstandings.

Now, despite the humor of the book, there is a subtle philosophical discussion running its way through Jake’s antics. About friendship and politics and about the individual. I think this works and never gets heavy because Jake remains so completely likeable. I think if I were to meet someone like Jake in person I’d want to throw him off a bridge, but within the universe of the novel, I followed him with great sympathy and support. As a reader, I wanted Jake to eventually succeed. I leave it to anyone else who reads the book to determine whether they think he does.