Review: A Fine and Private View
Reviewed Work(s): A Private View by Anita Brookner: Felicia's Journey by William
Trevor: The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee: The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
and
Güneli Gün
: East, West by Salman Rushdie
Review by: Dean Flower
Source: The Hudson Review , Autumn, 1995, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 485-492
Published by: The Hudson Review, Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/3851857
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Hudson Review
This content downloaded from
103.59.198.110 on Sat, 14 Oct 2023 12:54:11 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
DEAN FLOWER
A Fine and Private View
What place is left for serious novels? An occasional Toni Morri?
son or Anne Tyler reaches the best-seller list, but the majori
readers still feed on those fat romance-spy-drug-sex thrillers. W
worse, the old respect that novels once had has been deeply und
by film and televisual substitutes. Why read Marilynne Robin
Housekeeping or Josephine Humphreys' The Fireman's Fair when
can rent perfectly good videos of the film versions? For the price
average hardcover novel, you can see at least ten enterta
videocassettes?a few of which might even be artful. Why s
through Martin Chuzzlewit when "Masterpiece Theater" lets you
it in four compact installments? Soon, given the proliferati
multimedia computers, there will be pixilated fiction of some so
view on CD ROM or do-it-yourself "interactive" narratives o
Internet?only mouse clicks away. Why go to all the troubl
expense of reading complex, demanding novels, done up in
fashioned print? And why take the special risks of reading r
fiction, so much of which seems to evaporate in a month or tw
Anita Brookner's latest novel gives an eloquent answer to t
gloomy questions.1 It does what serious fiction continues to do b
that is, to take us deeply into the mind of a complex character, a
embody his consciousness?whatever its flux of emotion
thoughts may be?in language. Unlike film and television which
show us the face of suffering or provide visual metaphors
subjectivity, the language of fiction allows us to know that suffe
or to enter that subjectivity, immediately. It gives us a private
Even when the protagonist's mind is inarticulate (Faulkner's Ben
rudimentary (Stein's Melanctha), the language that represents it
be richly poetic, subtle, and complex. Brookner prefers sens
modest, thoughtful narrators; they are never geniuses or daunt
smart or paragons of introspection. They are all-too-human, rid
by doubts and second thoughts, capable of great self-understand
(which often comes too late) but rarely of any liberating chang
themselves. They are mainly spectators in life, more acted upon
acting, never aggressive, which may be the reason some critics
them "limited" and complain of the "sameness" of Brookner's no
But what she relishes?and what I am saying modern fiction
1 A PRIVATE VIEW, by Anita Brookner. Random House. $23.00.
This content downloaded from
103.59.198.110 on Sat, 14 Oct 2023 12:54:11 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
486 THE HUDSON REVIEW
best?is to articulate the actions of a person's mind, mom
moment, conveying the very texture of human self-awarenes
Brookner is out to prove that the minds of her characters c
exceptionally interesting, and affecting, no matter how bland
may seem from the outside. So?defying her critics?she nam
protagonist George Bland. A disappointed man in his sixtie
has just retired from a routine job in London and is at loose en
best friend?a man with whom Bland expected to share his
years?has died suddenly. His other longtime friend is Lo
woman he could never quite feel passionate about although th
lovers once; but she is too much like him?conventional, decen
prosaic. Vague romantic desires stir in him sometimes: "he wa
some stronger emotion," "some part of him . . . [was] waiting
ignited, consumed." But he keeps such desires?like everyth
in his life?at a safe aesthetic distance. Enter the tawdry Katy
who tries to play Daisy Miller to Bland's Winterbourne. But Ka
innocent girl: she is greedy, brash, and dishonest. She freeload
apartment next door while the owners are on vacation, having
Bland into giving her a key. She uses Bland at every oppor
deploying cheap cosmetics one day and self-righteous anger th
Bland sees through Katy Gibb at once and is appalled, but he
to her every demand. The interesting question, and he asks it o
himself, is why does he? Partly he is flattered by such a young wo
attention. Partly he is too well-mannered to say no. And he has
of time and money, with little else to do. But the deeper reason
he's frankly "stimulated by the sight of the girl's appetites." N
Jamesian phrasing here, italics mine. "He wanted, he thought, t
her further." "Her cheeks were no longer an angry and, he th
rather splendid red . . ." There's a taint of perversity in these r
tions, which Bland does not yet sense. He sees her dolled u
work of art," or without make-up as an "empty canvas." It even
to him once that "she might be a slut." Whatever this might
about Katy, it tells us much more about Bland. And that after a
focus of the novel: the shock that she is to his system, the dis
"private view" she gives him of himself.
One such shock comes in a moment of overpowering anger,
Bland realizes that he would like to wring Katy's neck. T
refines that, chillingly: "What he suspected now, and it made h
beat faster, was the fact that in visiting some kind of violence
in actually manhandling her flesh, he might experience a pow
erotic satisfaction." This produces still another unwanted recog
that the vital element that has always been missing in his carna
hostility. "The knowledge hit him like a stone hurled by an u
assailant." Brookner is at her most masterful in such deva
moments. You feel all Bland's horror at himself, and the head
of his darkest impulses: he would like to throw off inhibitions
virtue," and be at one with the gods, "those ancient heedless g
This content downloaded from
103.59.198.110 on Sat, 14 Oct 2023 12:54:11 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
DEAN FLOWER 487
pagan, hedonistic, and selfish. Brookner does not offer any com
not even an ironic nudge, yet one senses that her detachm
compassionate. Who would have thought that George Bland wo
brought to these depths? The fascination is in seeing him get
watching it all happen from the inside, and wondering wh
might be capable of going next. Brooknerian suspense is wond
depending as it does on such complicated and risky self-explor
I rank this book, along with Dolly and A Closed Eye, as her ve
work.
Another master of the private view is William Trevor, whos
recent novel is stretched on a much larger canvas than Brookn
Trevor's story shifts between points of view, chiefly tho
pregnant unmarried Irish girl, Felicia, and a corpulent En
hypocrite, Mr. Hilditch, who pretends to help her. Earlier ver
Felicia may be found in "Kathleen's Field" (story, 1989) and "R
Turgenev" (nouvelle, 1991), grim tales of female abuse in some
nasty Irish families. Felicia tries to escape all that?tyrant
cloddish brothers, merciless community, punitive church?by
to England in search of her seducer, Johnny. But he rem
hiding, having betrayed more than Felicia by joining the E
army. Instead of the "lover" she hopes for, Felicia meets the l
some Mr. Hilditch?although she is too innocent to recognize h
perversity. Pretending sympathy, he steals her money, then of
a place to stay. You know at once that he has done this sort of
before. A serial killer, the dust jacket tells us, showing a lurid p
rumpled women's clothing in a dark street.
But Trevor is not Patricia Highsmith, and Hilditch is n
talented Mr. Ripley. When the story begins to linger in Hi
point of view, not Felicia's, his monstrosity lessens. Trevor m
see his pathetic lies, his squeamishness and privacy, his frail e
miserable memories of a promiscuous mother and boyhood hu
tions, his sexual fright, his favorite rituals of consolation?foo
music?and his deepest hungers: "Each time he hoped that a
ship would last forever, that two people could be of help
another . . ." Hilditch is evil all right, but also terribly hum
pathetic, as helpless in his way as Felicia is in hers.
In fact the novel suggests repeatedly that individuals are pow
driven by social and biological forces beyond anyone's cont
tween the merciless pressures of Felicia's Ireland?a community
will certainly crush her?and the merciless indifference of Hil
England, represented by an anonymous city in the industr
lands where nobody much cares about anybody else, there is l
choose. Felicia might as well be, like Dreiser's Sister Carrie,
amid forces"; Hilditch with his American records might as
2 FELICIA'S JOURNEY, by William Trevor. Viking. $21.95.
This content downloaded from
103.59.198.110 on Sat, 14 Oct 2023 12:54:11 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
488 THE HUDSON REVIEW
Frank Norris' McTeague, playing the same five tunes on his m
every night. Never before has Trevor been so sociological as t
"I'll go for a Kentucky," someone passing by on the pav
says. "I'd rather a Kentucky."
Cartons are thrown down outside the Kentucky Fried Chic
and Colonel Sanders is reassuring in the window, his honest
his white goatee, Finger Lickin' Good. The voice of Sheena E
on a ghetto-blaster is drowned by Michael Jackson's. Bright
sparkles: Coca-Cola is a Way of Life, it says in the sky.
Note the heavy contempt. Normally Trevor would jump fr
character's head to another, but this time he allows frequent
into the impersonal or the purely documentary. At any point h
drop the pretense of Felicia's point of view to describe a B
landscape ("Factories seem like fortresses, their towers protec
ancient realm of iron and wealth") or to deliver an essay on th
of street people ("Already, hours ago, the homeless of this to
found their night-time resting places . . ."). In another scene
no human observer at all, only a prowling cat and a dead m
novel has an edge of stridency and impatience unprecede
Trevor's fiction. He conjures up a Jamaican black wom
born-again Miss Calligary, to be a gadfly to Mr. Hilditch, pest
him with zealous pamphlets and questions. But the characteriz
fizzles because Trevor makes her a symptom, not a person. He
message to convey, a rhetorical purpose that overrides h
patient curiosity about people. It comes to this: there are no m
spiritual guides for either Felicia or Mr. Hilditch. There is th
hit-or-miss fundamentalism of Miss Calligary, or else the sham
of modern industrial capitalism?that "Coca-Cola is a Way o
Curiously, it is the awful Mr. Hilditch who in the end comma
deepest respect. Two people were supposed to help one anot
knew that. Seeing him from the inside, we know why his suf
becomes more than he can bear.
It is harder to be moved by J. M. Coetzee's inside view of
Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg, but the novel has passages of
uncanny power and interest.3 The daring idea?a writer's challenge,
clearly?is to imagine the exiled Dostoevsky of 1869, a famous figure
by this time but troubled by gambling and marital problems, drawn
guiltily back to St. Petersburg by the death of his twenty-two-year-old
stepson, Pavel, whom he hardly knew. He comes to mourn for Pavel,
and for his own failures as a father, but quickly loses control. He
becomes obsessive about the boy, occupying his shabby room, smell?
ing his clothes, growing enamored of the landlady who protected him,
3 THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG, by/. M. Coetzee. Viking. $21.95.
This content downloaded from
103.59.198.110 on Sat, 14 Oct 2023 12:54:11 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
DEAN FLOWER 489
trying to win over her young daughter whom Pavel befrien
getting entangled with the radical reformers and fanatics that
knew, casting suspicion upon himself with the police. Coetz
master of political fables, but it would be a mistake to abstract
here. His purpose is more complicated, and disinterested: to ima
the mind of Dostoevsky the novelist, just before he wrote The Posses
This is less a linear narrative than a compendium of motiva
paradoxes, of emotions no sooner performed than questione
ideas reversed and turned inside out, of desires indulged reck
and then suspected, of desires rejected and then foolishly indul
Coetzee manages to portray this paradoxical mind, with its
aggressive passivity and chameleonic susceptibility, convincingly
Who after all does not imagine Dostoevsky as somethin
Dostoevskian character?
But there is the problem. Coetzee has such a tough act to follow
How can we not measure his success against Dostoevskian models?
There is Maximov the cagey police interrogator, Sonya the tenement-
mother-prostitute, Matryona the innocent possessed by a demon
Nachaev the fell opponent who foreknows every move. There are
guilty moments of getting rid of things?incriminating clothing, an
illicit gun?that become nightmarish public displays. There is the
destitute Ivanov, an alter ego who shadows Dostoevsky and is killed.
There is the compulsive gambler, and the quarreler with God. Even
when these materials are plausible they smack of parody. And then
the comparison suggests what's painfully missing, beyond Coetzee's
reach: the rhetorical extravagance, the crowded scenes, the wild
irruptions of humor. Coetzee is such an austere writer, trying in this
novel to be another sort. He almost succeeds, but I kept wishing that
once at least something funny would happen?the appearance, say, of
an unauthorized pimple on someone's nose.
Orhan Pamuk takes his reader on a different sort of interior
journey, into the labyrinths of Istanbul and the puzzles of mode
Turkish identity.4 It is not an easy trip, partly because Pamuk
sentences are long, crowded with details, interruptions, and slangy
riffs, and partly because the narrative is beset by reflexivity an
regression. But once you get past the initial difficulties, the experien
is extraordinary. Pamuk's narrator is Galip, a young lawyer who
wife, Riiya, an addict of mystery stories, has unaccountably vanished
Then Galip discovers that his cousin Jelal, an influential newspaper
columnist whom he greatly admires, has disappeared as well. In fact
Riiya is also Galip's cousin, Jelal's half-sister. Galip begins to look f
them both, feeling like a poor parody of a detective at first until h
hits upon the Borgesan strategy of re-reading Jelal's old columns f
clues. The reader must do the same, since every other chapter consis
4 THE BLACK BOOK, by Orhan Pamuk. Trans, from the Turkish by Gilneli Gu
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.00.
This content downloaded from
103.59.198.110 on Sat, 14 Oct 2023 12:54:11 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
490 THE HUDSON REVIEW
of a column written by Jelal. Galip comes to know the style so wel
eventually he starts writing columns himself, submitting them
cousin's name, and nobody is the wiser. This leaves the
wondering whether Galip might in fact have written all
columns in the book, or whether Jelal has not in effect "writt
character that Galip becomes as the book progresses.
Indeed, the central issue of the book concerns who, or what,
constitutes the individual self. Someone asks Jelal, "Is there a way a
man can be only himself?" The question comes to obsess him: he tries
to shake off the role that popular journalism has created for him; he
claims to detect a parallel universe shadowing this one, governed by a
secret sect whose codes and signs may be only the figments of his own
imagination, his own desire for difference. Galip meanwhile blames
Jelal as the usurper of his own identity: "You are the reason why I
could never be myself. . . . You are the reason I believed in all these
fictions which managed to turn me into you." Emulation runs
rampant in this novel; mannikins and actors and their unwitting
imitators are everywhere; derivative fashions and gestures define
them all. In one particularly Dantean scene Galip goes with friends
into a subterranean museum of Turkish history, filled with effigies:
They saw film actors who could not be themselves playing movie
heroes who could not be themselves, because they could neither be
themselves nor anyone else, and they saw the Turkish superstars
and actors who simply play themselves. They saw the poor bewil?
dered souls who dedicate their entire lives to translations and
adaptations in order to bring home Western arts and sciences, and
they saw the dreamers who die and whose grave sites are obliterated
before any of their dreams come true, who have worked their entire
lives with magnifying glass in hand in order to turn the jumble of
streets in Istanbul into the linden-lined streets of Berlin, or the
boulevards of Paris radiating outward like a star, or the bridged
avenues of St. Petersburg. . . .
Despite such visions of sameness the novel teems with oddities ancient
and modern, with spin-off stories, endless parables, and madly
repeating details. Its air of surreality comes from a lavish realism, not
from its introspective narrators. Among its many fabulous settings,
my favorite is Aladdin's Store, which sells a little bit of everything?
Tom Mix comics, tricolored shoelaces, pornography, cigarettes, pink
backgammon dice, plaster of Paris statuettes of Atatiirk with blue
light bulbs for eyes?catering to all the fads and whims of demotic
Istanbul. Among the novel's plethora of collateral figures, I liked
especially Master Bedii, the mannikin maker. He is a great artist of the
Turkish figure, a fastidious and passionate craftsman, but an utter
failure with the public because his mannikins are not the stylized
skinnies of Paris and New York. Nobody wants to be reminded of
This content downloaded from
103.59.198.110 on Sat, 14 Oct 2023 12:54:11 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
DEAN FLOWER 491
what they really look like. Humor of course is not the prevailing
of this pointedly "black book"; savage indignation might describ
better; but Pamuk has an inventive exuberance that dazzles and
delights, canceling out all the grimness.
I wish I could say the same about Salman Rushdie's latest work.5
The dust jacket proclaims it "his first major work of fiction since The
Satanic Verses," which is not only unfair to that ebullient fable, Haroun
and the Sea of Stories, but an outright lie about the present book. It is
in plain fact an uneven collection of nine stories, somewhat miscella?
neous in manner, arranged to suggest more coherence and sequential
design than it actually possesses. Plainly, Rushdie is casting about for
new voices and methods, even while serving up some of the old-
fashioned magic. In fables like "Good Advice Is Rarer than Rubies"
and "The Free Radio" Rushdie uses alarmed and skeptical narrators
who miss the point of their own tales. The cheerful irony of these
entertainments can darken unexpectedly, however. The poor fool
who gets himself sterilized, hoping for a free radio from the govern?
ment and then pretending he has it, is remembered at the end for
"the expression which came over his face in the days just before he
learned the truth about his radio, and the huge mad energy which he
had poured into the act of conjuring reality, by an act of magnificent
faith, out of the hot thin air between his cupped hand and his ear."
The sub-text here may be Rushdie's longing to recover the "huge mad
energy" that once generated novels like Shame and Midnight's Children.
But note how eloquent are the "hot thin air" and the "cupped hand."
Several of these stories run to excess, driven by feverish ingenuities
and schemes that belittle their characters. "The Prophet's Hair" is a
fable of greed that should have commented tellingly on religious
fanaticism, but no character in it is interesting enough to justify all the
violence and hyperbole. "Yorick" is literary stunt, a monologue in
manuscript that revises Hamlet in the manner of a priapic Tristram
Shandy, while "Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella" is the
leering story of a would-be explorer and the woman who must be
taken to bed if he is to realize his dreams. Much more successful is the
futuristic fable, "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers," where Dor?
othy's famous footwear from Oz are auctioned off and the world bids
billions. The story begins flippantly, but grows increasingly sober and
heartfelt. At the end Rushdie's narrator mulls over two lessons to be
drawn from the demented auction, both about the invasive power of
stories:
In fiction's grip, we may mortgage our homes, sell our children,
to have whatever it is we crave. Alternatively, in that miasmal ocean,
we may simply float away from our desires, and see them anew,
5 EAST, WEST, by Salman Rushdie. Pantheon. $21.00.
This content downloaded from
103.59.198.110 on Sat, 14 Oct 2023 12:54:11 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
492 THE HUDSON REVIEW
from a distance, so that they seem weightless, trivial. We le
go. Like men dying in a blizzard, we lie down in the snow
Fortunately for us Rushdie has not yielded to that impulse h
although you feel something of his post-fatwah discourageme
words.
The last three stories in the collection suggest that Rushdie may be
ready to abandon The Wizard of Oz as his model, the film which he
once said "made a writer of me." None of the final stories are fables;
two of them have narrators that resemble Rushdie himself; all are set
in modern England. "The Harmony of the Spheres" portrays the odd
friendship of a disturbed English intellectual, Eliot, and his Indian
school chum, an ambitious man whose mixed envy and admiration
leads to sexual and racial betrayals. "Chekov and Zulu" has a comic
veneer, but its two Indian friends?both undercover agents in Lon?
don?disagree profoundly about their ultimate loyalties. The final
story, "The Courter," sounds the most autobiographical and may be
the best of all. The speaker remembers growing up in a big houseful
of Indian emigrants, including his childhood ayah from Bombay who
develops a romance with the building's porter, an old inarticulate East
European. His speech is impaired by a stroke, hers by inept pronun?
ciation so that her jfr's become/'s or c's. Hence she makes him "the
courter." The narrator remembers being a callous teenager, hooked
on sixties music and his own erotic needs, during this sad and tender
courtship which comes to a painful end. The ayah falls ill, and her only
cure is to return home to Bombay. Powerfully now the narrator
recognizes that he has no such home, and no freedom either: "I, too,
have ropes around my neck. I have them to this day, pulling me this
way and that. East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding,
choose, choose." Here Rushdie seems to have found a new way to voice
his own identity, without any simplifications or screens. He may too
have found a new way to give depth and dignity to seemingly limited
characters. The dim old porter trounces the narrator at chess, and
when he teaches the ayah to play, she trounces him as well. May I
moralize? By risking this private and unflattering view of himself,
Rushdie reaps the largest rewards.
This content downloaded from
103.59.198.110 on Sat, 14 Oct 2023 12:54:11 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
