Sam Hanna Bell was born in Scotland and brought up in Northern Ireland. He worked for more than twenty years as a producer for BBC Radio in Belfast. His other books include Summer Loanen (1943), A Man Flourishing (1973) and Across the Narrow Sea (1987).
Age in year of publication: forty-two.
(1) Saul Bellow 1915–2005
1953 The Adventures of Augie March
Bellow’s Augie March is born into immigrant Jewish poverty in Chicago, before the Depression. Augie is on a mythical quest to discover ‘the lessons and theory of power’ but everywhere he finds greed and lies, until acquired wisdom reveals that the greedy and the prevaricators, including his good self, are not to be despised.
This is a picaresque masterpiece, issuing forth the words and thoughts of Augie March in Bellow’s marvellous language, roiling from the gut, strong and vivid. Augie’s pilgrimage begins with his tattered childhood with his mother, his retarded brother George and his labyrinthine older brother Simon, each of them ‘drafted untimely into hardships’. Proceeding through a variety of dubious jobs and precarious adventures — wonderful street theatre involving the riff-raff, rich and poor, of Bellow’s Dickensian humanity — Augie best loves women, the flesh of them, their pernickety brokering for power. Augie chooses Thea, Mimi, Lucy, Stella and more, trailing through abortions, falcon training, each portion of female anatomy closely observed. ‘Guillaume’s girl friend … was a great work of ripple-assed luxury with an immense mozzarella bust …’
This novel is a hymn to city life, suffused with eagerness and delight. Bellow’s pulsing use of words is controlled by the simplicity Augie constantly insists upon, and so this novel avoids the Jewish sentimentality and convoluted clamour which become tiresome in Bellow’s later works. This is a Great Expectations or David Copperfield set in Chicago, full of a sense of longing — a longing for family, for love: the greatest and most universal of all themes in fiction.
Saul Bellow was born in Canada and lived in Boston. Among his famous novels are Seize the Day (1947), Henderson the Rain King (1959) and Humboldt’s Gift (1975), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Both The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog won National Book Awards. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.
Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
(2) Saul Bellow 1915–2005
1964 Herzog
Herzog is Bellow’s most accomplished novel in which ideas are presented fluently without damaging the characters or the sense of life in the narrative. It has a marvellous first sentence: ‘If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.’
He is indeed out of his mind, and he has many good reasons to be so. One, his mind is too well stocked, he knows too much, he has read too much Western philosophy and it weighs him down. Two, his wife has behaved appallingly, has run off with his friend; ‘run off’ may not, however, be the appropriate term since his friend has only one leg. Three, he is oversexed for a man of his age. Four, his whole family history and the emotion surrounding it exasperate him and make him sad. And these are only four examples.
Moses Herzog will not lie down; his despair is made all the worse by the fact that it is rich in comedy. He writes letters to elderly relatives, to the President, to the New York Times, to many dead philosophers. He is deeply worried about the future of civilization, but he is easily distracted by jealousy, further bouts of madness, lust and memories of childhood, not to speak of guilt and hatred, and by his new girlfriend, the wonderful Ramona. The novel possesses an extraordinary narrative energy. Herzog and those close to him take on a life of their own in the book, and the ideas about the future of civilization which obsess him are woven carefully and skilfully into the story of his disintegration.
Age in year of publication: forty-nine.
Elizabeth Bowen 1899–1973
1963 The Little Girls
The title of this novel is ironic. Whatever their age, the three girls in question are in spirit anything but little. Diana-Dinah (Dicey), Clare (Mumbo) and Sheila (Sheikie) emit that fiery power certain women have, which they get from smelting whatever gifts circumstances have given them, however shoddy, into monumental wills of iron. In 1914 the girls are at school together at St Agatha’s in Kent. Fifty years later, Dinah begins to fret for her old friends and she advertises for them; Mumbo and Sheikie surface. These bare bones convey nothing of the rich flesh of this novel, splendidly droll both in its dialogue and in the testy, ironic tone of Bowen’s writing. She is given to short, devastating sentences and she applies them to places and persons: her account of the streets and ‘flaccid gates’ and crumbling dogs of the houses of southern England is incomparable. But the real treasure of this novel is its excavation of the meaning of memory, the meaning of time passing, Bowen’s attempt to catch the very moment when it does. That she succeeds turns this brisk comedy into an extraordinary piece of work: clever, beautifully written, a novel which grasps in words and images and laughter that comic despair which comes from the acceptance of life as something which can be only half seen, half known, half understood.
Elizabeth Bowen was born in Ireland and lived both there and in England. The Death of the Heart (1938) and The Heat of the Day (1949) are two of her most praised novels.
Age in year of publication: sixty-four.
T. Coraghessan Boyle 1948–
1995 The Tortilla Curtain
T. Coraghessan Boyle is one of the funniest, sharpest, most original novelists in the United States now. He is interested in the advanced humour inherent in advanced capitalism; America is the vast, dark comedy to which he is wide awake.
The Tortilla Curtain tells the story oftwo Californian families. The first, led by the nature-loving Delaney, is white and rich and less liberal as the days go by and illegal Mexicans haunt the horizon. The second family is Mexican and illegal and open to every possible calamity known to the human race — fire, flood, robbery, hunger, rape, poison, to name but a few. Delaney’s wife Kyra is one of the most vile people in contemporary literature, and as the book proceeds Delaney starts to join her.
The plot may sound deterministic and crude, as chapters alternate between the ghastly rich and the simpatico poor, but the writing and pacing of the book are too clever for that, and the characters too deeply felt and carefully drawn. The book is, however, very political indeed, startlingly so in a time when hardly any American writing is political; it makes you loathe white middle-class Californians, and this must surely be a good thing.
T. Coraghessan Boyle was born in Peekshill, New York, and is the son of Irish immigrants. His other novels include Water Music (1981), East is East (1990) and The Road to Wellville (1993).
Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
Anita Brookner 1928–
1985 Family and Friends
In this tart comedy of manners Anita Brookner uses family photographs — wedding photographs — to tell the story of the Dorns, a well-off London family with wistful echoes of a middle-European milieu left behind. There is the matriarch Sofka and her four children: Frederick, her pride and joy; Betty, the favourite daughter; Mimi, the gentle one; and Alfred, the sacrificial lamb. In their world of comfort and coffee, brandy and marzipan cake, an ‘air of family unity serves to disguise unforgivable facts’. Some of these are that Frederick and Betty — two of Brookner’s most artful monsters — are heartless and self-serving, manipulators of family arrangements which seem superficially innocent, but which flicker with unexplored deceits and vanities.