Leo Robson
Rodents’ Rights
When the Killing’s Done
By T C Boyle
Bloomsbury 369pp £18.99
Just as Dostoevsky remarked that his generation of Russian writers ‘came out from Gogol’s “Overcoat”’, so the modern American novel has been said to have two fathers, its copious splendours springing either from Hawthorne’s letter or Melville’s whale. Frank Kermode saw them as divergent: ‘one lean and self-absorbed, the other heavy, expansive, determined to contain a world’. Like any loose net, this one misses a great number of small and exotic creatures, but it catches some big fish too, and we can confidently identify novels of Hawthorne-like stringency or Melvillean splash in the work of E L Doctorow (The Waterworks; Billy Bathgate), Philip Roth (Everyman; Portnoy’s Complaint), and Joyce Carol Oates (Black Water; them).
T C Boyle’s new novel displays its debt to Melville in its milieu, its character drawing (or daubing) and its vocabulary. Melville liked to invent negatives, as Boyle does with ‘lipstickless’, and you can scarcely read a phrase such as ‘crabs infinite’, or a flinty archaism such as
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
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk