BOOK REVIEW : Writer Takes Revenge on Haughty Literary Critics in Academia

THE TRICK OF IT by Michael Frayn Viking $17.95, 172 pages

Michael Frayn has worked up the same blood lust against academic pretentions that Kingsley Amis did when he wrote “Lucky Jim” 35 years ago. Amis’ blood lust is funny to this day. I don’t know whether Frayn’s will still be funny circa 2025, but it certainly is now.

“The Trick of It” is a novelist’s revenge on the reigning practitioners of the higher literary criticism. Not the pragmatic sort employed by newspapers such as this one--no doubt, Frayn has quarrels with us as well--but those who swarm out of the universities to transmogrify literature much as locusts transmogrify wheat: Into locusts, that is.

The protagonist in Frayn’s comic impalement takes the view that literature’s purpose is to provide the raw material for criticism and analysis; the lumber for the Chippendale chair, in other words. This protagonist and narrator--Whom a Novelist Would Destroy He Makes His Narrator--holds his own chair; not Chippendale but English studies, at a nameless British university.

It is a narrow chair; he specializes entirely in the work of a woman novelist named M. On the other hand, it seems fairly solid. There are only two other authorities on M, he tells us, and one is mad, and the other is a woman and lives in Pennsylvania. All three attributes are essentially disqualifying, he hints with a kind of wink winked in Senior Common Rooms.

The narrator’s downfall comes, like Lucifer’s, when he seeks to elevate himself. He invites M to lecture to his seminar in M studies. She is something of a letdown, perhaps; pleasantly ordinary-looking, rather like the Queen, he tells us. Her notions about writing are distressingly down-to-earth and non-intellectual. No more than one major and one minor climax per novel, she advises the gathering of budding scholars.

Our narrator sees her to her lodgings, comes in for a drink and finds himself spending the night. An artless mutual impulse? He is too pleased with himself to let us think so for long. He has, it seems, provided himself with three condoms beforehand.

And so begins the story of the Deconstructionist’s supreme and fatal bid for power. Our professor will not simply exercise authority over the writer’s work; he will possess the writer herself.

“Those soft bulges beneath my hand were not just part of a woman,” he crows, “they were bits of an author, of (as I believe) a very fine author.” It is a splendidly comical delusion of grandeur.

Even funnier is the narrator’s conviction that he must not only possess his subject but improve it. Almost from the start, informing us that M’s bra doesn’t match her panties, he begins to put her down and raise himself. He tries to straighten out her hilariously chaotic household; he goes on to marry her. He moves her from London to a cottage near the university, where he can protect her from mail, phone calls and visitors.

What he really itches to do, though, is rewrite her. After all, he reflects, achieving tenure is a lot harder than getting published. And M’s writing, good as it may be, could clearly benefit from his expertise.

Accordingly, he sets to work to improve the manuscript of her new novel. It is too spontaneous, too instinctive, too straightforward. What it needs is a currently fashionable authorial distancing, moments in which the writer intervenes ironically to disclaim her fiction and raise questions about her characters.

Pressured, M momentarily gives way. Crying a lot, she types a halfhearted ironic insert or two. Her publisher and agent agree: The new manuscript is the best thing she has done--all but the inserts.

The narrator urges resistance. He even begins to write the inserts himself. His slogan: “Provide lots and lots more of what they don’t like until they learn to like it.” He is fighting the battle of the new criticism.

It is a losing battle, though. Despite M’s brief docility, she possesses an artist’s iron; the book will be published as she had conceived it. Increasingly, the narrator finds that he is talking only to himself. Even when he takes a professorship in Abu Dhabi and moves his wife into a shuttered and air-conditioned apartment there, she goes on imperviously writing.

In fact, she is writing a biography of the narrator’s mother. The tables are turned. It is his life that is taken over. The artist has outgunned the critic.

With his gloriously unsound narrator--the professorial voice gloats, whines and spins fantasies of deconstructionist supremacy while his literary shoestrings are being snipped--Frayn has struck a splendid witty satiric blow in the battle of the books. He is now available for deconstruction, but I prefer reading him.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews Gabriella De Ferrari, “A Cloud on Sand.”