Journalism: all current articles

Joyce Carol Oates - I'll Take You There

01 March 2003

Readers of TransAtlantic fiction often feel uneasy. Critics love to tell us how much bigger, better and bolder American novelists are than British ones. Our small, delicate, class-obsessed fictions do not measure up to the vitamin-enriched super-prose of Bellow, DeLillo or Updike, the big swinging dicks of American fiction. Yet what exactly is the British reader supposed to get out of Joyce Carol Oates's 'I'll Take You There'?

Great Expectations Revisited

01 December 2002

Of all novels, Great Expectations strikes me as the greatest, partly because it changes so much when you re-read it. You can read it as, or to, a child (I'm reading it at present to my 9-year-old daughter) and thrill to the plot, not least because any book that starts with its protagonist as a child offers something of the child's eye view. Like a detective story, which it also is, it has a dramatic opening, with the 'small bundle of shivers' that is Pip being terrified by an escaped convict, Magwitch, into stealing food for him. From time to time, I tell my children the plots of classic novels on walks, and the power of this one was unmistakable, because even the 6-year-old was asking, What happens next?

David Lodge - Consciousness & the Novel

01 October 2002

The closest we may ever come to learning how another human being thinks is reading novels. Despite all the ingenious suppositions of science fiction, and the technical advances that could eventually assist us to penetrate the mystery of another person's consciousness, what will always remain is the old-fashioned method of putting black marks down on some sort of surface. Whether this is an accurate version - when philosophers such as Daniel Dennett insist that the metaphor for the brain is Pandemonium - is something novelists have been debating ever since Joyce and Woolf. However, there should be no doubt that by being given a fictional version of how imaginary beings see, feel and think, our own lives are rendered richer, more human and possibly more humane. As Ian McEwan wrote after September 11, 'If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed...Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality.'

Writing as Another Sex

30 June 2001

Gender bending is all the rage this year. With Nick Hornby, Sebastian Faulks and even the poet and scholar John Fuller choosing to write from the female viewpoint, the modern novel has entered the sex-war as never before. Cynics may wonder whether this isn't due to the simple fact that women buy far more fiction than men: according to the agent Giles Gordon, publishers aren't interested in books about men any longer because these sell so badly. Yet at some point, any serious novelist is going to try to write from the perspective of the opposite sex, because the joy of writing fiction, as of reading it, is about getting outside your own head and into someone else's. Stepping beyond your own gender takes that process further. It's an irresistible challenge, but as I discovered last year, a very real one...