The Household Tips of the Great Writers by Mark Crick (Granta, $30.00).

Reviewed by Gordon McLauchlan

Most parodists would agree that the easiest to mimic among modern writers is Ernest Hemingway, with his long uncomplicated sentences mostly stitched together by conjunctions, telling stories that evolve simply and directly elaborated by meticulous descriptions of landscape and action. This is so distinctive many would claim that, with his late-life novels, he parodied himself – and that’s not to demean the bulk of his many novels and short stories.

          The ability to parody the work of top-flight writers takes at least insouciance, perhaps even reckless self-confidence, the sort of attitude that Mark Crick certainly had writing this good-fun book.  But above all it requires an intensely close read of the authors to be parodied, not only of style but of substance.

Crick imagines seventeen ‘Great Writers  in the Kitchen’: among them Jane Austen preparing  tarragon eggs; John Steinbeck cooking mushroom risotto; Vietnamese chicken a la Graham Greene; and cheese on toast a la Harold Pinter. Raymond Chandler’s lamb with dill sauce drips with a weary, sophisticated nonchalance and coq au vin a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez is superbly, magically real.

Crick’s other two imaginative cateogories are ‘Great Writers’ DIY Tips’ and ‘Great Writers in the Garden’. 

I went immediately to ‘Hanging Wallpaper” by Hemingway, in the DIY section, to see how Crick managed the writer I thought would be the easiest to of them all take off. Well, what he does is breathtakingly clever and very funny. He not only accurately parodies the Hemingway style, down to the Biblical intonation, but imagines the hero of The Old Man and the Sea wallpapering. He opens with: ‘The old man had worked for two days and two nights to strip away the old wallpaper and now on the morning of the third day the time to hang the new  paper had come and he was tired….’ It gets better and better.

In fact the DIY pieces are the best to me. ‘Reglazing a Window with Milan Kundera’ mocks the great Czech novelist’s introspective, questioning turmoil thus: ‘All governments oppose transparency. They oppose it because they know that with transparency comes fragility. Such is the nature of glass…’.

Imagine ‘Painting a Panel Door with Anais Nin with her toolkit -- screwdriver and brush -- and her materials -- primer, undercoat and gloss paint. She doesn’t paint the panelled door herself, of course, but watches a man at his work, ‘As she lay back on the couch … her breasts thrust forward, her arms raised over her head.’ One would not expect the painter to complete the task, and he doesn’t. Not the painting anyway

Crick (right) has done this sort of writing before. An earlier book, Kafka’s Soup, was an international best seller, and was followed by Sartre’s Soup and Machiavelli’s Lawn. His literary knowledge makes his mimicry something special. Beyond the laughs and the admiration of the extraordinary guile he demonstrates, a reader who is also a writer will learn a great deal from the way he not only imitates the intrinsic rhythms of prose stylists also but illuminates the way they control their material. So, as well as amusing, this an instructive book.

ENDS