Just after I’d cut out this
review, I was sent from New Zealand the new novel by C.K. Stead, The Necessary Angel. It’s a novel I
admire very much and it too has a lot to say about literary criticism and the
literary life. However, far from harking back to Banville’s palmy days on East
Coast America, Karl Stead has located his story in Paris, beginning on midsummer’s
day 2014, and ending with the ‘Je Suis Charlie’ protest march in Paris, six months later.
The central character of the
novel is a New Zealander in his mid-40s, Max Jackson, professor of Comparative
Literature at the Sorbonne
Nouvelle. He is fluent in French – he has a French wife and two bilingual
children – but he does not feel wholly at ease with the language; sometimes he
feels homesick for English. Not homesick for England, however, and it irks him
that his French colleagues blithely assume that to come from New Zealand is,
essentially, to be English.
His wife Louise is part of the
problem. She has exiled him from the family apartment to a small flat a couple
of floors below, ostensibly because she needs to be able to work undisturbed, completing
her latest book – a scholarly critical edition of Flaubert’s
L’Éducation Sentimentale – so, as
Max himself says, he’s now simply ‘the foreigner – downstairs with the dog’. It
is symptomatic of the difference between them that whereas Louise is working on
what will be the crowning project of her literary and academic career, the
definitive edition of a major work by one of France’s most celebrated authors,
Max is trying to write a short book comparing two Anglophone writers, Doris
Lessing and V.S. Naipaul, both of whom had cut themselves off from their native
homes. In the last lecture of term, he discusses Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel by a Russian exile set in America but begun in
Paris.
One thing Max and Louise still
share, however, is their mutual appreciation of each other’s work. When she picks up a page he has just written,
she ‘read a few sentences, and then had to read it all. It was elegant, concise
…. That was Max: not a literary theorist at all – theory didn’t interest him –
but a critic, lucid and persuasive, who could give you the feel of the book he
was writing about.’ Louise herself
shares the same literary critical outlook. She argues in the introduction to
her edition that it was the writers who succeeded Flaubert, not Flaubert
himself, who had made a fetish of art for art’s sake. ‘Against Barthes and
his kind, Louise spoke up for precision, for style, for Flaubert’ – what he had
achieved, she demonstrates, was ‘clarity, intelligibility, elegance’. And Max
doesn’t hesitate to tell her what he thinks: ‘I’m full of admiration – and
envy, Louise. It’s brilliant.’
Another writer whose presence
is strongly felt in The Necessary Angel
is Martin Amis. Exponent of close reading that he is, Max is encountered ‘reading
and rereading’ the opening section of The
Zone of Interest, Amis’s controversial and sometimes comic novel about
Auschwitz, just published in 2014. He is interested in why Amis (‘often
acknowledged as the major talent of his generation’) is so disliked, and why he
has never won a major literary award – not even the Booker, never mind the
Nobel Prize for Literature. Max concludes:
It was
something about the style of the man, and his refusal to hide the light of his
genius under a bushel of green tea. As some writers emanated moral merit, Amis
put talent on display. This was what the literary life taught.
The literary life: in their
different ways, all Stead’s protagonists in The
Necessary Angel are trying to lead the literary life, though there are
times when Max has to call its value into question. 2014 is both a year of gathering
political crisis and the centenary of the start of the First World War. Max’s
contribution to this is to plan a study day on poets of the Great War, but he has
to admit that his seminar seems somehow an inadequate response:
It
meant literature, which meant almost nothing in the bigger picture, and almost
everything to those oddballs for whom life was meaningless and ugly without it.
Later in the year, on
Armistice Day, November 11th, Max finds himself confronted by an
abusive homeless woman. He feels guilty after locking the courtyard gate in her
face to keep her out, and the encounter leaves him ‘divided against himself – a
weightless person, academic, literary, disconnected from reality’. It is only
at the end of the book that, reunited with his wife and children, he regains both
a sense of his self-worth and of the worth of ‘the big world of books’.
What unites Louise and Max intellectually
is a shared sense of the importance of intelligibility and style in writing.
When Patrick
Modiano wins the 2014 Nobel Prize, Louise is delighted, seeing the award as
a vote for the ‘limpidity, transparency for which French literature had always
been celebrated’. Finally, indeed, Max, Louise (and C.K. Stead) – are in good
company: in the cutting I’ve kept, John
Banville too ends by praising Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays for vindicating her ‘old-fashioned
requirement of a good, clear prose style’.
Adrian Barlow
The Necessary Angel in published in the UK by Allen & Unwin.: ISBN 978-1760631154
I have not attempted here to
write a review of The Necesssary Angel,
though I hope I have expressed my enthusiasm for this novel. The first UK
review was by David Grylls for the Sunday
Times, (28.1.18) and can be accessed here.
