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England's Lane by Joseph Connolly – review

Joseph Connolly pulls the strings artfully in his sardonic portrait of 1950s England, though the language may grate

Joseph Connolly specialises in sardonic period melodramas whose characters he either harshly cherishes or affectionately despises – it's hard to resolve the nuance, which is part of the sour fun of reading him. England's Lane portrays the lives and loves of assorted people living in the un-smart Hampstead street of the same name at the tail end of the 1950s. There's Milly, estranged from her insensitive ironmonger husband and saving all her love for her orphaned nephew Paul, almost 11, who lives with them. There's Stan the sweetshop owner, whose wife Janey has either become catatonic after their son contracted polio or is putting on an act. And there's Jonathan the butcher, cultivated and charismatic in the three-piece suits he wears even at work, clearly not born to his trade, whose remark that blood has no smell isn't exactly reassuring.

1950s detail is evoked in all its oppressiveness, with the occasional half-wink to the reader signalling shifts in perception. "Nigger brown" is still a colour of fabric. Smoking in pregnancy isn't seen as dangerous and nor is X-raying your feet in the shoeshop (assistants do it for a lark). Chicken is a luxury. Stan thinks a new chocolate mint has no chance of establishing itself unless it drops the silly name of After Eight. The characters' illusions about themselves are partly exposed by their choice of words, whether it's Milly bringing "a selection of sandwiches" to an erotic rendezvous or Jonathan describing himself as "replete" after a meal and his wife as "over-refreshed" when she's plain drunk.

Connolly has a very individual way with point of view. There are two main ways of handling multiple points of view in a novel, corresponding to the two main traditions of puppetry. The operator is either hidden, as in a Punch and Judy show, or in plain sight, as in the Japanese bunraku. A powerful effect can be achieved by either method – but the glimpse of a hairy wrist protruding above the striped frontage of a booth at the seaside kills the illusion of Mr Punch. Something of the sort happens when a background third person makes itself felt a little too much: "Stanley Miller the sweetshop owner was not looking forward to today – no sir I am not, he would easily confide in you…", for instance, or "…here is how Fiona Barton would idly be talking, how she would languidly confide in you…". In fact, Fiona has her husband's secrets to protect, and doesn't confide in anyone. Moments like these betray the lurking presence of a narrator, even if his role is pure stage management and he never develops any particular characteristics."

England's Lane is far from being an experimental novel but it borrows several cups of sugar from that grand house of literary experiment, Ulysses. Its tone has a sort of soaring fussiness of diction: "This is the thought that was idling contentedly in Milly's happy mind as she girlishly was swinging to and fro a shopping basket in time with her purposeful steps, squinting up at the sun that alternately filtered softly, then suddenly was sparkling silver through the overhanging lattice of thin and quivering quite black branches, so very high above her." And this is Jonathan: "The defiant and aristocratic curvature of a proudly prominent nose was dapplingly encrimsoned by crazed and hectic lattices of detonated veins." Something about the word "lattice" seems to trigger particular excess.

All the principal monologues, in fact, have a disagreeable texture. Jonathan's mind is like a fierce old tweed that has become greasy with wear but still chafes the skin, and Milly snags the reader's toenails like a nylon bedsheet. If you don't enjoy having your teeth set on edge then perhaps this isn't the book for you. It's difficult to combine the use of interior monologue with the advancement of a plot, a problem which Joyce solved by relegating plot to the far background. Here the stream of consciousness only seems to meander, and is actually pulled along by a purposeful undertow towards the weir of the next incident or confrontation.

Jonathan is the wild card in the book's consciously ill-assorted deck of caricatures. He seems to be an intruder from a more lurid genre. By the time he has asked Fiona to knit him a thick black balaclava, and she has obliged in short order with an item in triple-ply cashmere, it's clear that we're approaching the domain of parody. Joseph Connolly delights in highlighting his story's unreality, even while he works to maintain its levels of entertainment and surprise (this is not a novelist who traffics in the obvious outcomes).

His strangest decision is not only to make Jonathan and Milly's styles overlap (the word "umbrous" an obvious giveaway) but to have other characters remark on it. For good measure he takes one of Stanley's refrains, the phrase "sort of style", and gives it to Jim for the second half of the book. The adverbial excess given to Fiona as a defining mannerism ("generally usual", "wholly probably unspeakable") gradually spreads to other characters.

There are moments when England's Lane poses as a national portrait: "it is not just England's Lane that begins to stir," as the last page tells us, with the 1960s under way, "it is England's every lane and borough." Easy to discount this ersatz ambition, easy too to resist the bogus hints of deeper meaning – the Austrian refugees, for instance, who discover that if they put their real name, Schmidt, on the sign above their delicatessen, they will encounter boycotting, violence, the smashing of windows. Everything they thought to escape. That's all very well, but it's the author who has set the parochial limits, and only now gestures with conscious humbug towards a wider world.

It's the same with the two West Indian characters – glib to condemn the reflex racism of the past while sticking with your own rudimentary characterisation, one man witlessly benign, the other full of cruel rage, and not taking the risk of venturing into either head. Connolly must be forgiven these teases. He knows exactly what he's doing, in an immensely contrived, sophisticated and satisfying game.

FictionJoseph ConnollyAdam Mars-Jones
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NW by Zadie Smith – review

Adam Mars-Jones finds himself stumbling on the cracks in Zadie Smith's new novel

Zadie Smith's new novel is oddly divided between confidence and indecision. The confidence is easy to understand, given an enviable alignment of talent and readership, which offers the possibility of being faithful to roots without being bound by them, ignoring the old rules about minorities and the mainstream, and politely rejecting the role of poster girl for post-ethnicity. The indecision is harder to account for. Uncertainty keeps on cracking the pavements and makes for a stumbling journey through the streets of the book.

"NW" is north-west London, though the focus is tighter, largely on Willesden (south London being no more relevant than Tierra del Fugo). The main character in the first section is Leah Hanwell, a Willesdener of Irish descent now in her mid-30s, brought up on a council estate with a dodgy reputation, still living nearby though in relative comfort. Leah has a philosophy degree but works ingloriously in an office where powerlessness is dressed up in the language of empowerment. She is warmly teased – with an undercurrent of real resentment – by her female, African-Caribbean co-workers (and they're all female and African-Caribbean) for having laid hands on a treasure that rightly belongs to their community – her husband Michel, a francophone black man hoping to earn a better living from online investing than he has from hairdressing. The only flaw in the marriage is that Michel wants children and Leah does not, though she's never said so.

There's a lovely rippling effect over the opening pages, with Leah's thoughts and surroundings enriching each other, rather in the manner of Ulysses. It begins to look as if Joyce will be the patron saint of this novel, as Forster watched over the previous one (On Beauty). It's a style that doesn't bed down, though. The short length of sections works against the sense of total immersion that suits stream-of-consciousness writing. There are still modernist moments, but they take the form of minor flourishes, such as Leah's wandering thoughts being presented on one page in the shape of a tree, and a monologue from Michel (to which she's barely listening) on the next.

Leah may be a native Londoner, but she has her naive side, and falls for the standard hard-luck story (mother desperately ill in hospital, no money for a taxi) told to her by a distressed woman knocking at the door. She offers £30, feeling some sort of rapport, particularly when it turns out that the two of them went to the same underperforming school. Michel and her mother make common cause in scolding her for gullibility, but even when she realises she has been scammed Leah's feelings for the con artist (name of Shar) remain conflicted.

These tendrils of plot and situation could be trained across the trellis of various genres. A woman who wants everything but the baby her man has set his heart on? Chick lit but with deeper possibilities. An encounter with a stranger leading to an invisible criminal underworld very close at hand? London Gothic à la Ruth Rendell, perhaps, but with convincing youth details. Smith doesn't develop these strands, but she doesn't risk cutting them loose altogether.

Meanwhile the tempo slackens, as if a well fitted-out yacht were waiting for a breeze that never comes. Not all the secondary decisions are successful, but at least they get made. One of them is to present dialogue without inverted commas, as Joyce did (he hated those marks, calling them "perverted commas"), using a dash instead. This preference calls for extra clarity when it comes to demarcating the end of speeches. What to make of this, for instance? "– I can see the magistrates' court and … a roundabout? Kids, stay close, stay in. It's like walking the hard shoulder on the motorway. Nightmare. Kennedy Fried Chicken. Polish Bar and Pool. Euphoria Massage. Glad we took the scenic route. This can't still be Willesden. Feels like we're in Neasden already." Ulysses taught readers to read sentence-fragments as signals that the barriers between inside and outside, speech and thought, were dissolving, but here the whole paragraph seems to be spoken aloud.

There's an unpredictably changing distance in the point of view as it addresses Leah. The equivalent in a film would be jarring alternation between long shot, two shot and extreme close-up. There's even some wobble in matters of detail. Leah's mother thinks goods in Poundland can be priced at £2.49, and a local chemist's does a brisk trade developing films. At one stage Leah puts a payment on an old credit card from her student days, to prevent Michel from finding out. That's quite a trick, with a card so long expired.

The whole of the first section is defined by its resistance to genre, by what it doesn't want to be. It's like an oddly shaped inner-city park, bounded not only by chick-lit and thriller but by the modernism it aspires to. The touches of dilute Joycean play are less like new ways of looking at the world than mildly adventurous ways of organising a narrative. NW even abuts on the territory of the "Hampstead novel" (Hampstead being geographically close however socially and spiritually distant), that antique dismissive term for novels in which middle-class people alternately gloat and lament over their privileges. Leah's oldest friend Natalie invites her and Michel to dinner parties whose conversation is reproduced as a composite stream of banalities ("Let me tell you about Islam") and food fetishism ("Pass the green beans with shaved almonds"). There's a touch of bad faith here, since successful authors are rarely looking at dinner-party rituals from below the salt. The whole book is oddly queasy about the value of getting on in the world.

In the next section the tone warms up. Inverted commas make a return, like birdless wings after some seasonal migration, bringing with them an immediate uplift in terms of readability. The main character here is Felix Cooper, a recovering addict putting his life back together and rejoicing in a recently established relationship. Encounters with his father and a neighbour sketch in a painful but not hopeless background. The dialogue can't avoid the pervasive non-interrogatives "innit" and "is it", but isn't ruled by them ("to chirps", meaning " to chat up", is lovely). Felix sets out from NW6 to W1 to inspect a derelict sports car owned by a posh boy named Tom, going cheap, but also pays a visit on impulse to Annie, an ex-lover of his based in Soho.

It's perverse to represent Tom's point of view, without the necessary knowledge or sympathy, but Annie is the one privileged character in the book who isn't dead on the page, perhaps because she survives by performing her class status, in the hope that poshness will disguise poverty. The section about Felix's day is certainly the most successful in the book, though it connects weakly with the rest, as if this were a separate project, imperfectly incorporated.

The rest of the book is devoted to Leah's friend Natalie. There's nothing limited about female friendship as a subject, as long as you have confidence in it. But the Leah panel and the Natalie panel simply don't line up – the hinges grind. The time scheme moves past the original dramatic set-up, the entanglement with Shar, as if it had never been important.

This is the section that works hardest to achieve consistency of tone, but the chosen tone is an odd one, of brittle distance. The character is routinely referred to as "Natalie Blake", as if the writer was reminding herself not to get close. Numbered subsections suggest a series of propositions, about marginality, education, privilege, rather than a felt story. Sometimes subsections need a title to clarify an allusion, so that "178. Beehive" establishes, for the reader in need of clues, that the singer being described ("this voice sounded like London") is indeed Amy Winehouse. Similar contortions of reference shroud perfectly ordinary mentions of Friends and The Wire. There's no sophisticated response to the world that excludes irony, but the irony here seems anxious and self-protective. It's in this section, where she works hardest at building a wall between character and reader, that Smith also feels the need to break through it with misjudged interventions along the lines of "You're welcome" and "In case you were wondering …" The conflicts within the writer are deeper than the ones she has devised for her characters.

The trailing plot threads aren't exactly tied off, more tucked back in. The real mystery of NW is that it falls so far short of being a successful novel, though it contains the makings of three or four.

• Adam Mars-Jones's Cedilla is published by Faber.

FictionZadie SmithAdam Mars-Jones
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Mo Said She Was Quirky by James Kelman – review

James Kelman's pursuit of verisimilitude saps his writing of any vitality

The title of James Kelman's new novel is more welcoming than his past choices, which have tended towards the jagged (Not Not While the Giro) or the melancholy-dour (How Late It Was, How Late, which won the Booker prize in 1994). Mo Said She Was Quirky is almost a Roddy Doyle title, but the book carries on Kelman's campaign for truthfulness in writing, as he sees it. Unfortunately this is also a campaign against vitality. There's no set formula for vitality, of course – Dickens's version very different from Beckett's – but without it no writer can maintain a hold on a readership.

"Mo said she was quirky but it was more than quirky." "She" is Helen, 27, a Glaswegian working in a London casino, Mo her live-in boyfriend. Mo is a restaurant worker from a Pakistani family, the name she uses for him presumably the abbreviation for a full form that doesn't get a mention. The two of them met in Glasgow and moved south, partly to get out of range of Helen's nasty ex, father of her young daughter Sophie. The relationship is strong and solid, though Mo has no plans to introduce her to his family.

On the opening pages Helen sees, from the taxi that is taking her home from work in the early hours, a shambling down-and-out who may be her brother Brian. The rest of the book covers the next 24 hours or so of her interactions with Mo and Sophie, but mainly her thoughts. There's a little flurry of incident at the end of the book, by which time the reader no longer expects any pandering to the dramatic and doesn't quite know how to react.

One woman's life in a day – this is Mrs Dalloway territory, but drastically defoliated. The method is "virtual first person", so that the character is represented as "she", but with the bare minimum of context or commentary from outside. Kelman's technique is a little awkward in those opening pages. There must be less bald ways of explaining your set-up than saying "Mo was her boyfriend. She and her six-year-old daughter lived with him", or of indicating which side of the family a grandmother belongs to than explaining "She was Mum's mother", something of which Helen presumably doesn't need to be reminded.

Kelman's background is hardly more privileged than his central character's, and it's obviously important to him politically to give oral culture priority over the stale and literary. This sounds admirable but isn't straightforward. Kelman everywhere purges the apostrophe from abbreviated forms like "wasnt" and "didnt". Sometimes he drops the core conventions of the sentence (initial capital, final stop), so as to convey rhetorically the urgency and shapelessness of Helen's thought.

When you try to customise the toolbox of punctuation in this way you can end up multiplying the contradictions you want to eliminate. Kelman isn't the only writer to dislike "wasn't" and "didn't", Cormac McCarthy being another, but if the apostrophe is a class traitor, why retain it elsewhere, in possessive forms? If informality is the aim, what about the semicolon? It's a mark of which Kelman is fond, but this virtually ancien régime piece of punctuation must have pulled strings to survive the typographical Terror. And what's that double dot in the middle of the word naive, looking suspiciously like a tiara?

Real speech is repetitive and goes in zigzags, and the same goes for Helen's refracted monologue, but authenticity is an irrelevant notion in this context. Nothing remains oral once it's written down. Accent, intonation, eye contact, body language, social setting, all these fall away, and after that the choices are a matter of literary convention. When Kelman writes of Helen: "She had experienced a thing similar in the past to do with confidence, and her ex, it was him and whatever, she didnt know what to do just like standing still, that was all, like a panic but just so quietly and that cold sweat, just so – not able to move," the incoherence is artificial, making uphill work for the reader though a friend saying something similar would be perfectly easy to understand. We forgive friends their conversational tics, but it's harder to forgive Kelman for Helen's unrelenting use of "so so" ("so so wrong, just so so wrong" and "so sad, so so sad, really" on the same page), the constant overemphasis that achieves with so much labour no emphasis at all.

The strangest authorial decision governing the book is the virtual abolition of detail. Perhaps the idea is to reach general applicability without passing through specifics, as poetry occasionally can, but the trick can't be worked in prose. Even a novel as mightily indeterminate as Finnegans Wake is made up of melted particulars.

Helen worked at a casino in Glasgow before the one in London, but there's no portrait of either establishment, no account of atmosphere, rituals or tricks of the trade. Only towards the end of the book is it possible to believe that the author has even visited such a place. It's as if abstention from detail is a piece of righteous self-denial, mortification of the writer's spirit, but mortifying your reader into the bargain can't be a good idea. Kelman withholds detail even when it's unnatural to do so. Helen (for instance) obviously doesn't think of her ex as her "ex" but by his name, which doesn't appear. She refers to "the scary exhibition" near London Bridge station, as if for Kelman identifying the London Dungeon would be culpable indulgence, the beginning of a recovering addict's relapse into binge naming.

The few details of the Glasgow casino that do get through the puritan filter are bizarre. The only drink reported as being taken is tea. Old Chinese women apparently drop in to drink tea and to chat with their friends, and the management tolerates this, even when their voices are loud and carrying, because they are the place's "bread and butter". I'm not saying that there are no Glasgow casinos where old Chinese women drink tea and gossip at the top of their lungs, but when these are the only details given they seem utterly unreal. They stand out stark and stunted on the skyline of the novel.

Detail is the rain that makes the soil of a novel imaginatively fertile. Without it nothing can grow. (The semi-arid ecology of Beckett's novels can sustain life but attracts few visitors.) There are widely separated bits of succulent Scots vernacular in Mo Said She Was Quirky ("shoogly" and "fankled together" early on, then a long wait for "crabbit") which resemble occasional drops of dew let fall, either mercifully or sadistically, on to the reader's cracked lips. It's a sign of a truly desperate thirst to be pouncing on a specified place name for its illusion of moisture – Charing Cross station, mentioned on page 190, where Helen has to change on her way from her generic south London home to her generic West End workplace – like someone sucking stones in the delirium of dehydration, or a castaway cut loose in an open boat reduced to drinking seawater.

James KelmanFictionRoddy DoyleCharles DickensSamuel BeckettAdam Mars-Jones
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Adam Mars-Jones: my lunch at the Dorchester with Gore Vidal

'I turned up wearing a singlet and (I hope I'm wrong about this) leather biker trousers, presumably with some idea of dazzling his senses'

The man who said, on hearing of the death of Truman Capote in 1984, "Good career move" will hardly have expected to be treated with kid gloves when his own turn came. In fact, Gore Vidal would have been insulted to be given the traditional 21-gun salute of half-meant compliments, the fly-past of platitudes.

The jibe about Capote was characteristic of his waspish talk-show manner, and few writers have shown so much flair in using television to maintain their public image. But there could be a certain hardness on such subjects even in private. Christopher Isherwood, having supper with Vidal soon after EM Forster's death in 1970, was slightly shocked by his saying "Well, we've all moved up one rung higher". Isherwood revered Forster, and deprecated the obsessive American habit of ranking reputations, ubiquitous since Hemingway claimed so unconvincingly not to consider writing a competitive sport. He seems not to have noticed that Vidal was at least acknowledging Forster's superior status, something that didn't come easily to him. This is as close as a wasp can get to blowing a kiss.

I interviewed Vidal for the Sunday Times in 1984. We had lunch in his room at the Dorchester – A-list authors were well looked after then. I turned up wearing a singlet and (I hope I'm wrong about this) leather biker trousers, presumably with some idea of dazzling his senses. I wasn't quite 30 and he was a little way off 60. He looked me up and down and said, "My, you're certainly … à point." It's the phrase used in French to describe a steak cooked medium rare. Perhaps I had caught the sun, but more likely he was indicating that I seemed to be serving myself up like a piece of meat on a plate.

The keynote of the lunch was barbed cordiality. Our starter was quails' eggs in pastry boats, a speciality of the Dorchester's which I politely praised. "Yes," he said, "they're great favourites of Sir Victor's also", daring me not to know that "Sir Victor" was VS Pritchett. Vidal knew how to play up to his image, and was obligingly both preening and sardonic, inviting me to notice for instance his facial resemblance, in the cheekbone area, to Pasolini. To a British readership he was a pleasing anomaly, an American who not only understood irony (in defiance of an old and by now discredited stereotype) but treated it as his meat and drink.

In theory he was promoting his novel about Lincoln, though I had been given more pleasure by his previous book, the satirico-surrealist Duluth, and he was happy to talk about that. He mentioned a current film project, a version of Kaufman and Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner (in which a venomous radio celebrity injures his hip and is immobilised among strangers in their family home), reworked as a vehicle for Joan Rivers. I'd have paid good money to see that, but The Woman Who Came to Dinner didn't happen. Vidal claimed to be ashamed of his dealings with Hollywood, describing them as "bordello visits". It's a harsh phrase that conceals some face-saving, since those who visit bordellos are the customers, while in this situation the jobbing writer is the hustler rather than the john, the working boy turning a trick and not the client being pleasured and despised.

One thing that seemed revealing in the interview was that whenever Gore Vidal was defending a value rather than attacking it, praising DH Lawrence as a critic of American literature, for instance, or expressing his awed admiration for The Golden Bowl, and I expressed mild reservations, he would back-pedal, not exactly retracting his approval but ironising it. It was as if he needed to be the person in the room (any room) with the fewest illusions.

The hired tape recorder I was using for the interview had performed heroically at the LA Olympics but wasn't fully recharged. After about half an hour of conversation it conked out. I was able to find a wall socket in the room and to plug it in, but when I listened back to the early parts of the recording, our voices progressively accelerated and rose in pitch as the motor began to fail. It happened that Vidal was complaining about a Jewish media conspiracy not to review his work when he started to sound, on playback, like an antisemitic munchkin. I imagine he would have regarded the indignity of his voice being distorted on the tape as more damaging than the distorted politics. I was amazed that this supreme insider could consider himself neglected.

It's a matter of fact that the New York Times excluded his books from its review pages for years after The City and the Pillar (1948), with its homosexual hero (the paper refused even to accept advertisements for the novel). Vidal would have made a superb figurehead for the gay movement as it emerged a couple of decades later, with his fearlessness, his media skills and his sense of entitlement, but he distanced himself sharply from any such role. He claimed to disbelieve in the reality of homosexuality as a category, distinct from individual sexual acts. Foucault made a similar point in a different style, insisting that gay identity was a historical artefact rather than a fundamental reality, but Vidal's position was more libertarian than radical. It could come to seem positively conservative. In particular his coyness about the status of his partner, Howard Austen, looked like old-fashioned social shame, though it can hardly have been that.

He must have known, for at least the last two decades, that he would not be remembered as America's biographer, the job description he coveted, on the basis of his series of historical novels with the overall title Narratives of Empire (starting with Burr in 1973 and ending with The Golden Age in 2000), but as an essayist. It would be surprising if the Library of America – motto "Seeking the Enduring" – published Narratives of Empire, and surprising if it didn't find room for his essays on the list. The essays aren't short on glittering rhetoric and elegant feuding, but they also contain plenty of sharply appreciative criticism. His comments pointed me towards, for instance, the novels of Italo Calvino and Dawn Powell. It's not the immortality Vidal would have wanted, but junior immortality is a lot better than no immortality at all.

Gore VidalAdam Mars-Jones
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New Selected Journals, 1939-1995 by Stephen Spender – review

Stephen Spender's journals show that his feelings about sex, fidelity and fellow poets were far from simple

In a famous photograph from 1931 (reproduced in this book), Auden, Spender and Isherwood face the camera, though Spender's eyes are looking off at an angle. Auden looks like an overgrown schoolboy, Spender like a cricket captain, Isherwood like a pocket film star or glamorous jockey. Spender is the central figure, but only as a requirement of photographic composition, thanks to his height. His arms are behind his friends, though it's not clear if he actually has his hands round their shoulders, as he does when the grouping was repeated in front of another camera on Fire Island in 1947. Spender's eyes are closed on the later occasion (he's in mid-smile and the day is sunny), while Auden and Isherwood grin warmly at each other.

All three writers tried to be true to literature without ignoring politics, and also to balance the claims of desire, commitment and public image. In 1935 Isherwood rejected the idea of marrying Erika Mann, to give her citizenship and safety, because he hated the idea of seeming to want a respectable facade. Auden stepped in without hesitation, as if marriage held no sacredness for him, yet he committed himself completely to his partner Chester Kallman in what seemed to his friends an arbitrary martyrdom (the relationship was open, but only at Chester's end). As a young man Spender was relatively frank about his interest in his own sex, but encouraged the idea that this was some sort of phase after he married Natasha Litvin in 1941, by whom he had children, Matthew and Lizzie.

It's a bit of a jolt to read in this new selection from Spender's journals (5 August 1980) that Tony Hyndman, with whom he had a difficult affair, "was the visible manifestation of something which was the deepest thing in my nature – my loyalty to the 'queer' world, the gay". And later in the same entry: "In the long run, I did, of course, ditch Tony – but I never lost my loyalty to a commitment which he represented. I know what Christopher Isherwood means when he writes unforgivingly of his 'queer' friends who get married." This passage was understandably omitted from the 1985 selection of journals, and appears here (along with a number of unambiguous entries) almost literally over Natasha Spender's dead body. Her name is given in the new book as having edited it alongside Lara Feigel and John Sutherland, but Feigel's introduction records that she was "reluctant" to include such entries. If you're reluctant you can be won over in time, but given that the decision to include the material wasn't made while she was alive (she died in 2010) the word "opposed" might be more exact.

No one reading the journals could reasonably think that the marriage was a fiction, but if there was an element of wishful thinking on both sides, Natasha paid most of the price for it. It would be odd for her to want the world to read about Spender's ecstatic involvement in the 1970s with a man 40-plus years younger than himself, and the humiliation it caused her at the time, when her husband made declarations over the phone without realising that an acoustical peculiarity of the building made them perfectly audible to her, two rooms away.

You could make the case that Spender wouldn't have kept those journal entries if he hadn't wanted them published, and that Natasha could have destroyed them herself if that had been her deepest need. It may be that the children have given their blessing – but it's still a decision that needed to be justified by the editors, not smoothed over by describing the passages as essential and fascinating.

It has to be said that Spender's journals aren't as entertaining as Isherwood's diaries. The word "journal" itself has a whiff of pretension, even before it gets a capital letter, as it often does here: "My life is getting absurdly social, and now it is worse because I am stimulated by curiosity about experiences to put in my Journal" (July 1955). Sometimes the style of referring to intimates is oddly stilted, seeming more appropriate to a public speech than any sort of private utterance: "Matthew (aged 9), who was sleeping in the twin bed during my wife's absence…" Referring to "Sundrin Dutta, the great Bengali writer" may be well-meant, but repeating the phrase exactly in a later entry makes it look as if you haven't actually read a word.

Isherwood had the advantage of prose being his primary product, so that a diary could double as a workshop. When Spender reports a conversation about the candidness of his journals he refers to "one or two things in my life I would not write about because I did not understand them myself". This category includes "experiences of falling in love which seemed almost hallucinatory". Isherwood would have been baffled by this impulse to retreat rather than examine, and to ban the richest samples from the laboratory.

Still, keeping a diary is a sort of yoga, a stretching exercise almost guaranteed to promote suppleness of mind, and Spender's sensibility opens up unpredictably. He becomes better company as the book goes on. No one ever accused the later Auden of suppleness, though as Spender puts it with rather desperate gallantry, "if Wystan […] seems a bit fixed, it is in a fixed direction, not that he is stuck."

Right to the end, Auden remains a mystery to him, almost on a par with sex and death. As late as 1979 Spender is troubled by both the character and the working methods: "I did not think of him as having human feelings and I felt about his early poetry a lack of a personal 'I' at the centre of it." This could be rewritten in Auden's favour by saying that he didn't make a fetish of subjectivity in those poems, and this is part of what made them durable – the sense of their being full of electrical activity but not charged in the conventional ways.

Spender returns to the argument a few months later, suggesting that in Auden's case "the poet at once knows his lovers and friends more completely than they know him, because of his very intelligent powers of analysis, and less well because he never lapses into that mutuality which is shared knowledge of each other by the other". The lapse into mutuality as something Auden instinctively opposed is a strong and rewarding idea.

As for Spender's feelings towards someone who simultaneously pushed him forward and hampered him, they could only be a tissue of gratitude and suppressed resentment. In March 1995, only months before his death, he tells a story as if it was discreditable to Cyril Connolly when actually it is Auden who is shown in a bad light (it's to do with the appropriation of a valuable book). He can only express a grievance against Auden with a cover story.

In an earlier pair of entries, he garbles something Auden said on a visit, so that "he surprised me by saying he thinks endlessly about what form would best suit his subjects" (this recorded at the time) soon becomes "Auden said 'What obsesses me is form. So I put poems into them arbitrarily and make them as abstruse as possible'". Passing on both a true copy and a corrupted file, he can be both the faithful disciple and the betrayer.

In 1979 Stephen Spender spent a sleepless night asking himself "did I really like Wystan?" Part of his answer is to discuss Auden's jealousy of his endowment (not the poetic one). "To be totally honest now," he writes, "I should ask whether Auden was not a bit envious of me because I had a large penis. He was certainly affected by this and mentioned it mockingly on many occasions." There's a certain mutuality of abasement here, with one poet's littleness being put on record, while the other is diminished by having needed to mention it.

Autobiography and memoirPoetryLiterary criticismWH AudenChristopher IsherwoodAdam Mars-Jones
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Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism by John Updike – review

Golf, gay sex and the fate of faulty footballs are some of the subjects tackled in this final pillar of Updike's wisdom. If only he'd been alive to compile it himself

Higher Gossip, edited by Christopher Carduff, is a posthumous selection of John Updike's prodigious output, matching six substantial previous volumes mainly of critical or personal prose. The set amounts to seven pillars, if not of wisdom then something not far off, of warm scrupulous attentiveness. To salute Updike's professionalism, though, is to insult something more important, as he pointed out when accepting an award for a previous selection (Hugging the Shore) in 1984: "to be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is aesthetically boring – an anti-virtue where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."

Once or twice in the book Updike excels himself, once or twice he falls short of his own standards, and once or twice he produces work which stands at an odd angle to his usual preoccupations. One example is The Beloved, a story accepted by the New Yorker in 1971 but then withdrawn after the editor, William Shawn, expressed "qualms", as Updike puts it, "about the theatrical background I had concocted". Shawn wasn't the most confrontational of editors (his successor, Bob Gottlieb, referred to him as "the White Rabbit"), and it may have been something not exactly theatrical that bothered him.

The story, about an actor who can't escape from the spell he casts on others, is unusual for Updike in the negativism of its sexual psychology. The hero, Francis, has dealings with both sexes and feels a certain amount of disgust for each. Leaving one woman, he realises that "in some way, physically, she had always repelled him. There had always been in the texture of her buttocks a faint and disturbing grittiness, like sand on a damp day at the beach, and a panicky sweatiness in the yellow soles of her little high-arched feet." Updike's gaze is never exactly gallant, but it's usually more forgiving than this.

With men, Francis enjoys the sex but dislikes the people ("They dominated the company, and aspired to the dignity of a culture"). Even after he has returned to heterosexuality he is "inwardly bent" by remembered details, "the fleshy freedoms, amid a rub of planes satisfyingly solid and flat and rank, that, carried to the porch of pain, could never be reestablished on the body of a woman, however corrupt". His final verdict on the world he has been exploring is that "there was a sourness here Francis could not help relating to the sourness of the male rectum". You might think that the rectum was not strongly gendered in its attributes, but this is a world away from the rapt descriptions of women's bathroom smells in Memories of the Ford Administration (1992).

In one of his finest late novels, Seek My Face (2002), Updike's refusal to enter the gay world imaginatively compromised his achievement – you can't write seriously about the post-war New York art scene while neglecting this constituency. His conflicts are nearer the surface in The Beloved, and it's clear that his attitude was closer to a willed withholding of interest than an untroubled dismissal.

Few people want to read about gay sex but even fewer, surely, want to read about golf. Yet the pages on this subject provide some of the book's high points. The friend or functionary who approached Updike for a contribution to a centennial volume (celebrating the Massachusetts Golf Association) must have been incredulous at the richness of what he turned in, not a thin sketch or slack reminiscence but something packed with social texture and novelistic detail. He describes, for instance, his move from public golf courses to private ones: "Gradually I acquired a country-club manner, at ease with chits and caddie tips, and an expectation of lush green spaces populated by discreetly scattered golfers, of three- or even four-level tees and carts equipped with grass-seed ladles that make replacing divots a faux pas, of clubhouses whose walls shone like those of Byzantine churches with gold-lettered walnut plaques proclaiming tournament results from bygone ages and with silvered clubs and balls of intense historic interest, and of pro shops stocked as densely as flower shops with bouquets of high-tech multi-metal clubs…" This is an America not much written about in the last half-century, not even by Updike.

With another golf piece, written for the Talk of the Town section in 2000, the New Yorker for once received short measure from a favoured son. Its conceit of falling in love with golf, personified as a femme fatale, has run out of steam even before the passage about her liking guys "(gals too – she's through with gender hang-ups)" who keep it simple. A little later Updike comes up with one of the few cloth-eared sentences he ever wrote: "When you connect, it's the whistle of a quail, it's the soar of a hawk, it's the sighting of a planet hitherto unseen; it's mathematical perfection wrested from a half-buried lie; it's absolute."

This would be embarrassing even if there wasn't a loving discussion earlier in the book of You're The Top, exactly the Cole Porter lyric that is getting such a catastrophic makeover here, and in which (as Updike puts it) "something tender, solemn, nonsensical and absolute seems to be being said". If Updike himself had been compiling the volume, rather than Carduff, it's hard to imagine In Love With a Wanton making the cut.

There's one piece with obvious formal problems, The Football Factory, which still earns its place in the book. It's neither quite article nor quite story, describing the visit of a "dignitary" to, yes, a football factory (the one Updike visited was the Wilson Sporting Goods factory in Ada, Ohio). The dignitary isn't characterised but is given a full page of romantic fantasy in which he imagines settling down ("Their first years, he sat home with the babies…") with one of the women who work the die-cutting machines. The piece is described by Carduff as antedating and "perhaps" inspiring Rita Cohen's visit to the Swede's glove factory in Philip Roth's American Pastoral, though it would be nice to have some evidence beyond the theoretical possibility.

Updike describes the face of the factory's floor manager as "slightly plump, with a disagreeable deep dimple in the center of his chin, and an asymmetry to the eyes that would have led an inspector to toss his head into the reject barrel". The narrator knows, though, that rejected footballs aren't thrown away but marketed cheaply to relatively undemanding customers. He imagines these as "old-fashioned poor boys in patched knickers" or "inner-city high schools on slashed budgets".

Updike acted as his own agent, and presumably made his own choice of journalistic placement for this not-quite-reject of his own making. Let's hope he didn't think his marvellous imperfect product had come down too far in the world, consorting with ragamuffins or sink schools, when it appeared in the Observer magazine in 1989.

John UpdikeEssaysAdam Mars-Jones
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Seven Years by Peter Stamm – review

Iconic buildings figure strongly in this story of love among architects

The seven years of Peter Stamm's title are part of its chronology but also carry biblical resonances that surface in the text – the seven years Jacob worked to earn the right to marry Rachel and the two periods, of plenty and famine, in Pharaoh's dream. Alexander, a young architect based in Munich, lives through the turbulent period after the reunification of Germany, through success, bankruptcy and tentative recovery. Outside this business perspective it would be hard to be sure which were the fat years and which the lean.

In Genesis, Jacob wanted Rachel but was tricked into marrying her sister Leah, so that he had to work for another seven years to get what he wanted. Alexander's emotional life is less dramatic but more divided. While he's still a student he becomes involved with the beautiful Sonia, an architecture student at least as talented as he is. They marry and set up a firm together.

There's another woman, though, who has nothing to offer except her devotion, either a doglike instinct or something comparable to religious conviction, requiring no corroboration of its truth. This is Ivona, a Polish Catholic who isn't physically attractive, interesting or emotionally expressive. She makes no demands of him, which is another way of saying that her demands are total. She will never have enough of him. There is nothing else in her life.

Alexander and Sonia visit a mismatched pair of buildings in or near Marseille just when they're getting involved: Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse and the Château d'If. It's hardly surprising in a book narrated by an architect that the buildings should have such strong symbolic associations. Sonia is the one who admires Le Corbusier, and though Alexander can recognise the quality of the building when he's inside it, he's doubtful about the underlying assumptions – "machine for living, I mean, the very expression. You might as well say battery farm." The Château d'If, on the other hand, though built for a single oppressive purpose, is unexpectedly soothing. "I tried to imagine what it would be like to be imprisoned there. Oddly, I had a sensation of shelter and protection rather than confinement."

Ivona's name and nationality were presumably chosen by Stamm as a nod to Witold Gombrowicz. Her abject passivity is not so much a Polish characteristic as a Polish literary reference. In Gombrowicz's absurdist play Princess Ivona, a prince marries an almost mute, unmemorable girl and finds that she excites aggression and shame in others. Stamm's Ivona too has little to say for herself, and nothing revealing. She and Alexander spend a single night together, and Ivona doesn't speak until morning. Then she asks if he'd like milk in his coffee.

Sonia's present to Alexander, when they spent their first Christmas together, was a cardboard model of a house, very carefully done. In front of the house stood two little human figures, a man and a woman. She had even done sketches and rough designs.

As a fellow student of theirs had once remarked, though, you can plan a building but you can't plan a life. There are times early on in Seven Years when it seems more like Sonia's model than is good for it, or like one of those architectural drawings done from a diagonal perspective so that every element becomes clear, an axonometric. Even so it has its own deceptiveness. It hardly seems to have a plot, until one wriggles into life after the halfway point.

The book is cool and immensely accomplished, told retrospectively in a way that seems to flatten suspense (we know, for instance, that the marriage survives one bad patch, and that Alexander and Sonia have a young daughter) while bringing out the half-tones that shadow even the most apparently clearcut decisions. Alexander too is passive in his own way, needing a prompt from a third party to make a play for Sonia, and only talking to Ivona as a result of a sort of dare.

Sonia chose Alexander over a rival because he loved her less, leaving her more control. The two of them look at themselves in the bathroom mirror of Alexander's flat ("two beautiful people in a beautiful apartment, said Sonia, and laughed"), and when they kiss he is more excited by the idea of the couple in the mirror kissing than by the kiss itself. In a novel of the 1950s, this moment of bad faith would be the key to his character and his compromises, but that seems a naively doctrinaire judgment now. If it wasn't for bad faith, he wouldn't have any faith at all, while Ivona has her religion to console her, whether or not her god has the power to keep away.

FictionLe CorbusierArchitectureAdam Mars-Jones
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At Last by Edward St Aubyn – review

Privilege and damage continue to fight it out in the final part of St Aubyn's elegantly bleak Melrose series

Edward St Aubyn's series of novels about the Melrose family (Patrick Melrose above all) seemed to conclude as a trilogy in 1994, but was taken up again in Mother's Milk (2006). That book didn't resolve at all conclusively, so the arrival of At Last isn't entirely surprising.

There's even a certain appropriateness to the proliferation of endings, since St Aubyn's literary career had two not quite synchronised beginnings. In conventional terms it started with the publication of his first book Never Mind (1992), a bleak satire about privileged people in the 1960s, which won a Betty Trask award. In another it started the moment he answered an interviewer's question by saying that Patrick Melrose, the five-year-old boy raped by his father in that book, was – in that respect at least – a self-portrait.

Without benefit of that statement the next instalment of the Melrose saga, Bad News, in which Patrick, now in his early 20s and addicted to almost everything, goes to New York to visit his father's body and collect his ashes, might be read as an exercise in nihilistic bravado – a fairly prominent strain in modern British writing, consecrated by Martin Amis in the 1980s and taken up in different ways by younger writers like Will Self and DBC Pierre. With personal trauma in the background, and the implication that both writer and character were writhing their way out of narcissistic bleakness, it acquired a desperate resonance.

St Aubyn is a sophisticated novelist, and knows very well that however saturated fiction may be with autobiography, the process can't be reversed by the reader, however apparently licensed to do so. You can't turn the cider back into apples nor the heroin back into poppies. In the third instalment, Some Hope, Patrick achieved a breakthrough by telling his best friend what his father did to him. His mother, Eleanor, had been too damaged herself to offer protection, and deserted him even more profoundly by turning herself into a philanthropist, mothering any fantasy sufferer in preference to him. Yet the book was dedicated to St Aubyn's mother, as well as to a sister who seemed to have no Melrose counterpart. There are little discrepancies across the five books, a name that changes spelling, inconsistencies about ages, which may be accidental but are more likely to be little stumbling-blocks placed in the path of the identifications the author was the first to suggest.

In the pseudo-egalitarian world of literature, social privilege (let alone inherited wealth) is a drawback, but childhood trauma at this gothic level is an unassailable form of capital. The Melrose novels exploit these ironies of birthright, while also fighting to be free of irony, a disintoxicant which can become so grievously addictive itself.

At Last takes place, with flashbacks, on the day of Eleanor Melrose's funeral. In this respect it's a companion piece to Bad News, though it also contains extended sequences away from Patrick's point of view. Satirical passages of this sort were integral to the texture of the first book, presumably because a five-year-old, even without being raped, can't adequately follow the adult currents around him, yet it's the weakest element of the series. The withholding of sympathy here is shown up as two-dimensional by its alternation with Patrick's savagely conflicted dealings with his surroundings. The cheap knife of satire quickly loses its edge, but the precision blades of Patrick's mind are always being sharpened against each other as they grind their slow way away from damage. There seems no end to the perverse richness of negative psychology: "Suicide wore the mask of self-rejection; but in reality nobody took their personality more seriously than the person who was planning to kill himself on its instructions." (The clashing choices here, "their", "himself", mark a rare departure from elegance.)

The compression within individual Melrose books (Mother's Milk, for instance, was set in the Augusts of four successive years) multiplies the intensity of the drama, but also makes possible some startling developments between books. Johnny Hall, for instance, was a fellow addict on his first appearance (in Bad News), another languid spectator of his own destruction: "I've been shooting some really disreputable speed… the kind that smells of burnt test-tubes when you push the plunger down…" In Some Hope he was far enough from the brink to be able to hear Patrick's confession, and by the time of Mother's Milk he had become a child psychologist. It's quite a transformation, from minor demon to stand-in for Adam Phillips, and almost exclusively managed offstage, between books. There's only a passing reference (in Some Hope) to what made Johnny an addict in the first place: a mother who was determined to be disappointed by him. Featherweight trauma, almost.

Even more surprising was that Patrick at the beginning of Mother's Milk should be a husband, and father of two boys. He had negotiated a truce with his self-destructive sexuality, or at least a lucid interval in it. In fact he had created a new set of problems for himself, inversions of the old ones, Mary being so devoted a mother that Patrick felt excluded from the family he wanted so badly to shelter. But he did finally have something to protect as well as endanger.

The children, Robert and Thomas, are so precocious they make Salinger's Glass family seem developmentally delayed. Robert at five (in Mother's Milk) could remember being born and was psychically tuned to the feelings of others, and now Thomas at six holds his own in conversation with academic philosophers. These are very different literary conventions of childhood from the ones that were in force when Patrick was a little boy in Never Mind, and although he is consumed with tender paternal worry, Robert and Thomas seem to have impressive new sets of powers compared to the previous generation, like upgraded models of toy.

Towards the end of the book Patrick uses the formula "when I had sons of my own", as if sons brought out different responses from "children". In this he may be revealing the over-identification that is the chief danger of his parenting, the projected egotism of his need for his children's happiness, or a residual class assumption. He has after all produced "an heir and a spare", and although he is impoverished he is no less posh. He is a new man but will never be a New Man.

Patrick's two patrimonies, privilege and damage, continue to fight it out between them. There is some elaboration of his father's evil: David Melrose, a doctor, encouraged Eleanor to have their first child at home but overrated his medical competence. The baby died two days later – so there was, briefly, a Melrose sister, though her birth wasn't registered and she was informally buried at sea. Patrick's start in life was more conventionally managed, at least until David, drunk, decided to circumcise him on the kitchen table. This hyper-gothic scene breaks off inconclusively, but if (as Patrick thinks) "his body had a memory of its own which it continued to narrate without any reference to his current wishes", then there is more of his story for him to learn.

Halfway through At Last, Patrick learns that despite all his mother's insistent neglect she has failed to disinherit him completely. He will receive slightly more than $2m, something he takes very much in his stride ("his pleasure co-existed peacefully with his disapproval"). It's a sign of the success of these books that most readers will feel, not that it's lucky for some, but that this neo-Dickensian last-gasp windfall is the least the family could do, for someone who had a right to envy every orphan he ever met or read about.

Edward St AubynFictionAdam Mars-Jones
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New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families by Colm Tóibín – review

In mapping out literature's family tree, Colm Tóibín can't help but bend a branch or two to his will

New Ways to Kill Your Mother examines writers and their attitudes to family, though it's hard to say whether such patterns of conflict are different in kind from what happens in unliterary families or just unusually well documented.

Thomas Mann's brother, Heinrich, and his son, Klaus, were both novelists, for instance, while his favourite child, Erika, achieved semi-autonomous celebrity in American exile, lecturing against Nazism. Does the Oedipus conflict mutate when there's a literary lion in the house? Perhaps not, but it was hard for Klaus to outgrow a father who has effectively been declared immortal by the Nobel Academy.

Though Thomas Mann's conduct before his exile (first to Switzerland in 1933, then to the US in 1938) was rarely honourable – Klaus and Erika, by contrast, were admirably decisive – the washing cycle of history exonerates him. Even Colm Tóibín can't muster much sympathy for Klaus, whose self-destructiveness becomes essentially a literary failure (though suicide, too, ran in the family): "instead of writing about death as his father did," Tóibín notes, "he allowed the aura of death to enter his own spirit." Better not to have written at all than to be remembered for "a few almost interesting books". The Mann who needs no first name to identify him will always have the last word.

The first essay in the book, "Jane Austen, Henry James and the Death of the Mother", takes on a broad stretch of literary history to show that mothers are absent from a number of important novels, with aunts claiming their function. Of course, many mothers of the period did die, but Tóibín makes clear that something else is going on here, in books which include Mansfield Park and The Portrait of a Lady. It's important that the heroines here should not have a maternal model available to them, or else what would be their adventure and achievement? He suggests this aspect of the books was "impelled by the novel, not the novelist", as if the genre was sending out tendrils on its own account. The idea that "a novel is a set of strategies, closer to something in mathematics or quantum physics than something in ethics or sociology" is striking but enigmatic (is mathematics a matter of strategies?), and likely to alienate both humanists and theory boffins.

In any case, if you take Harold Bloom's line about the "anxiety of influence", then writers' families aren't blood kin but ink kin, their predecessors in art. The domineering relative who must be overcome is a book. Tóibín mentions Henry James reading Daniel Deronda with disapproval then nicking what he could use, effectively treating George Eliot as a redoubtable aunt whose treasured ornaments would look better in his drawing room. When Edith Wharton reworked themes from The Wings of the Dove in The House of Mirth, she may have been doing something similar, taking issue with a serenely bossy older brother, seeking to show that she was the one who really understood women's lives.

These are mainly substantial pieces, and they need to be, to examine knotty relationships in the necessary detail, to mount satisfying arguments. Many were first published in periodicals with "Review" in the title, whether in the UK or in America, and most started with the assignment of a book, or (in the language of the trade) a "peg" for a critical article.

The biography of a writer is the hardest type of book to review, requiring as it does the deployment of three elements. There must be an account of the life, which is likely to draw on the material supplied in the book being assessed, so that the book may be used as a springboard even by a critic who comes down hard on it. Then there must be a reckoning with the writer's work, and judgment must be passed on the book which connects the two. This is hard to manage in a few hundred words. Reviews may aspire to be essays, but they're drastically weakened by the pressure of production. Weekly reviewers are the battery hens of essayists. Tóibín has a lot more space, but the element of judgment on the book is minimal. Biographical information is used as if it were common property, though at least in the original periodical the book being reviewed was credited at the head of the article. Tóibín is spectacularly knowledgeable about Borges, for instance, but it's doubtful he could write a biography of his own to match Edwin Williamson's. Certainly he doesn't criticise Williamson's accuracy, just small points of emphasis.

It's the same with Blake Bailey's biography of John Cheever. At one point Tóibín quotes Cheever saying that Saul Bellow and he shared not only a "love of women but a fondness for the rain", following on immediately with a comment from Cheever's wife: "They were both women haters." This shock effect is not original Tóibín (it's how Bailey ends a chapter) and where could the second remark come from if not from Bailey himself, who interviewed Mary Cheever? It seems cheeky for a reviewer to appropriate a glittering effect, but perhaps this, too, counts as a family struggle.

The magazine version of Tóibín's piece about Yeats and his wife George (whose peg was a biography of George by Ann Saddlemyer) described it as "short on analysis and long on meticulously researched detail, at times verging on the unreadable". That judgment has disappeared, leaving only the remark that it's more "taxing" than Brenda Maddox's earlier book on the same subject. This bare stub of a verdict will hardly be claimed by either writer, since being taxing (hard to read) and untaxing (lightweight) are equally unappealing qualities in a book.

Yet the piece contains an overwhelming paragraph, evoking one of the strangest incidents in literary history, when – on her honeymoon – George Yeats did some "automatic" writing, without conscious control, founding her marriage on a mystery and bringing her husband's poetry a rich dowry of images. Tóibín speaks for George directly ("What happened was that her needs and her reading converged as she began to eroticise the occult and its attendant forces…"), as if he needed the help of a biographer only as a spiritualist needs an old glove to materialise the departed soul. It's a thrilling moment of mediumship, if not mediumship squared, but the lady who brought the glove along might feel a bit put out by the performance.

Colm TóibínEssaysLiterary criticismJane AustenHenry JamesEdith WhartonWB YeatsAdam Mars-Jones
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Adam Mars-Jones: 'The only bad review is one whose writing is soggy'

Adam Mars-Jones, winner of the first Hatchet Job award for a book review in the Observer, reflects on his craft

I'm delighted that the Hatchet Job of the Year Award exists, as well as glad to have won it in a state of innocence, with a piece written before it came into being. From now on, any energetically negative review is likely to be seen as playing to the jury of the award, just as people write wince-making bedroom encounters (or perhaps claim they did after the fact) with an eye to the Bad Sex award. I'd be more comfortable with the phrase "scalpel job", since a review, however unflattering, should be closer to dissection than hackwork, but I have no illusions about it catching on.

A book review is a conversation that excludes the author of the book. It addresses the potential reader. A reviewer isn't paid to be right, just to make a case for or against, and to give pleasure either way. I didn't enjoy Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, which I thought structurally defective and basically novelettish. Its winning the Booker in 2000 didn't prove me wrong, any more than it would have proved me right if I had liked it.

Both my parents were lawyers, and you could hold that accident responsible for something forensic about my approach. I don't set out to put a book in the dock, but perhaps I do put it in the witness box and rake through its testimony. In the review of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall which brought the Golden Hatchet my way I grilled the book fairly intensively, but I tried to play by the rules. It always seems a good idea to quote freely from a book, to back up points with solid evidence. The only "bad" review in my book is one whose writing is soggy, its formulas of praise or blame off the same stale shelf. A reviewer and a critic play different roles, though the same person can take them on at different times. A critic has some sort of authority, a claim to long experience or deep immersion, a marination in a certain class of literary product. A reviewer has no necessary knowledge, even of other books by the same author – there's no shame in flying blind. If a book isn't rewarding to read in isolation, then there's no point in invoking any larger perspective. Forget the hinterland! It's a mistake to imply that readers are being inducted into a mystery. They're being guided to pleasure or warned against disappointment.

I expect this principle can be taken too far, but I haven't reached the end of it yet. I recently wrote an admiring book about a single film by the Japanese director Ozu, without feeling the need to see all his other work. I'd rather be an attentive amateur than an expert. Expertise so often becomes a sort of impregnable fortress, inside which the passionate subjectivity that first made the choice of specialism wastes away.

I'd had fiction published, and had duly been reviewed, before I wrote my own first review. I suppose that means I was blooded, being on the receiving end of summary judgment before I dispensed it. I remember one reviewer saying that it was to be hoped this junior member of the McEwan/Amis school had exorcised his sillier fantasies.

It's a fact that writers remember the bad reviews they have had. Those outraged synapses stay bright, in MRI scans, even when the rest of the brain goes dark. It follows that a non-sycophantic reviewer will make enemies. Nothing could be more natural. I was very thrown when Gordon Burn came up to me with a smile after I had reviewed his novel Fullalove for the London Review of Books, a piece with a fairly high wither factor. He explained that he'd been advised not to read it, that it might kill him, but he'd gone ahead anyway and thought I made my points very clearly. All I could think of, while he shook my hand and made these friendly noises, was that he had hired an assassin to take me out, and that this physical contact was how he was identifying me to his hitman as the mark.

I'd prefer not to to review books published by Faber, which puts out my own fiction, but if you have a retainer with a newspaper you don't get to choose. I certainly can't resort to preferential treatment. I do my best to think that this book has arrived not by my letter-box but through a portal from an alternative universe, so that everyone connected with publishing it is at least a wormhole away from the world I live in. This mental discipline finally frays to nothing when I attend Faber HQ, say to give a presentation on a forthcoming book of my own. At such times I'm tempted to carry a note in my pocket, in case I'm found multiply stabbed in the basement, saying "Let me save you some time here, Poirot – it's the Orient Express caper all over again."

My first reviews were for the Times Literary Supplement, which has always been a good place for beginners to cut their teeth. The day a piece of mine appeared there without all the jokes and idiosyncrasies removed I remember feeling quite light-headed. At one stage the TLS sent me a book for review (stories by Penelope Gilliatt) which I couldn't engage with at all. I could as easily have written a positive assessment as a negative one, and so I sent it back. At the time this seemed the only honourable course, but I'm sure the reaction in-house was bafflement. Wouldn't it be more professional to just grit your teeth, toss a coin and write away? I still don't think so.

I wish I wrote enthusiastic reviews more often, but that's just another way of saying I wish more books deserved a rave. As it happens, my last couple of pieces for the Observer were hatchet-free: I didn't like the way Roberto Bolaño's The Third Reich was packaged, as if it was new rather than an unpublished early work, but I tried to point readers towards a better book of his, and I gave a warm welcome with a few reservations to Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding. Even so, a personal mellowing is only on the cards if standards rise across the board. It seems unlikely.

I take it for granted that reviewing is a secondary activity – but one that needs to be primary while you're doing it. The prize awarded to the hatchet job winner is a year's supply of potted shrimps. I'm looking forward to seeing how they calculate normal dosage. I'd rather have won something for a book of my own, but there's no nicer consolation than a little pot of crustaceans in seasoned butter.

Adam Mars-JonesAdam Mars-Jones
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