Christopher Wood
A Manual For Students
The Waiting Room
By Mary Morris
Hamish Hamilton 273p £12.99
Mary Morris, like many American authors, pursues an academic career in tandem with an authorial one, in her case at Princeton University and more recently as a ‘writer-in-residence’ at the University of California at Irvine. The idea of having a campus scribe or redbrick bard on tap at an academic establishment is still more prevalent in American than here, and while one can only applaud a system prepared to put money into enterprises regarded in this country as wasteful and inessential, the award of such a post can be a mixed blessing. Vladimir Nabokov teaching at Cornell University wrote Lolita; Mary Morris, on the other hand, has come up with The Waiting Room.
Morris’s writing gives the clear impression of being learned, and is presumably teachable too, given her pedagogic successes. Certainly The Waiting Room displays so many studied narrative and descriptive effects that one is tempted to think it was intended primarily as a manual for students of ‘creative writing’. Sentences of the type: ‘Somehow Badger knew as he turned and walked away ... that they would not see each other again’ – appear so often and with such minimal variation in wording that I was forced to check page numbers to be sure that they hadn’t mistakenly been included twice.
The Badger mentioned in this quotation is, by default, the focus of the book. Badger is in a hospital by Lake Michigan, having taken too much of too many drugs, suffering from an obscure mental condition which causes him to use a lexicon consisting entirely of baseball terms. A visit
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Of the siblings Gwen and Augustus John, it is Augustus who has commanded most attention from collectors and connoisseurs.
Was he really the finer artist, asks Tanya Harrod, or is it time Gwen emerged from her brother’s shadow?
Tanya Harrod - Cut from the Same Canvas
Tanya Harrod: Cut from the Same Canvas - Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
literaryreview.co.uk
As Apple has grown, one country above all has proved able to supply the skills and capacity it needs: China.
What compromises has Apple made in its pivot east? @carljackmiller investigates.
Carl Miller - Return of the Mac
Carl Miller: Return of the Mac - Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee
literaryreview.co.uk
We are saddened to hear of the death of Edmund White.
We've lifted the paywall on Richard Davenport-Hines's 2014 review of White's Paris memoir.
Richard Davenport-Hines - Scenes from a Literary Life
Richard Davenport-Hines: Scenes from a Literary Life - Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris by Edmund White
literaryreview.co.uk