By Nightfall, Pulitzer winner Michael Cunningham's latest. Photograph: GuardianHis "killingly fair-minded and viciously funny" review of the Pulitzer prize-winning author Michael Cunningham's latest book, By Nightfall, has won novelist and critic Adam Mars-Jones the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year award.
Mars-Jones demolished the US writer's story of a middle-aged gallery owner attracted to his young brother-in-law in a 1,000-word review in the Observer last January. Beginning by ridiculing Cunningham's numerous bookish allusions – "nothing makes a novel seem more vulnerable, more naked, than an armour-plating of literary references. If you're constantly referring to landmarks, it doesn't make you look as if you're striding confidently forward" – Mars-Jones then mocks his artistic pretensions, saying "the book's pages are filled with thoughts about art, or (more ominously) Thoughts about Art".
After aligning his Pulitzer-winning novel The Hours to Mrs Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, Cunningham makes a mistake in linking By Nightfall to Joyce, continues Mars-Jones: "If he had chosen softer models he would cut a better figure, the contrast being smaller … Joyce would have begrudged By Nightfall the rationed reading time (failing eyes) he gave so willingly to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes". Later, Cunningham's attempts to draw from Flaubert fail, says Mars-Jones, and sometimes the American author does not even use language correctly. "At the very least, shouldn't a writer try to shield the kettle of language from further cracks by knowing the meanings of the words he uses?" he asks, querying Cunningham's choice of the word "prone".
The Hatchet Job prize is given to the "writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review" of the past year "not to punish bad writing, but to reward good and brave and funny and learned reviewing". It was launched by the Omnivore website, which gathers press reviews of books, films and plays, and judged by the journalists Sam Leith, Suzi Feay, Rachel Johnson and DJ Taylor.
Mars-Jones beat a scorching lineup of reviews to win the prize, from Geoff Dyer's rejection of Julian Barnes's Booker winner The Sense of an Ending ("It isn't terrible, it is just so … average") to Mary Beard's demolition of Robert Hughes's Rome in the Guardian, which sees the classicist advise readers to skip the first 200 pages, calling the first half of the book "little short of a disgrace".
Leith said Mars-Jones's review "had everything a reader could hope for" in a hostile write-up. "The best hatchets, in criticism, are wielded with precision as much as they are with force," he said. "Adam Mars-Jones's review … was at once erudite, attentive, killingly fair-minded and viciously funny. Every one of his zingers – 'like tin-cans tied to a tricycle'; 'it seems to be the prestige of the modernists he admires, rather than their stringency'; 'that's not an epiphany, that's a postcard' – is earned by the argument it arises from. By the end of it Cunningham's reputation is, well, prone."
Mars-Jones was given his prize of a golden hatchet and a year's supply of potted shrimp, courtesy of The Fish Society, in an awards ceremony at The Coach and Horses pub in Soho, where New Statesman reviewer Leo Robson, 26, also received a special mention. Robson was nominated for his write-up of Richard Bradford's biography of Martin Amis, in which he says that "his book fulfils the main duty of a biography - it is informative - while failing to attain any of the possible virtues".
Calling Robson "the best critic of the younger generation: perceptive, astringent and wittily turned", Leith said his "assault" on Bradford was a close runner-up to Mars-Jones. "Robson not only knows what Bradford knows about Amis: he knows what Bradford doesn't know, and amid his barbs are serious and subtle points about what this biography of Martin Amis might profitably have done, and didn't."
No comments:
Post a Comment