Stuff I’ve Been Reading: November 2005

BOOKS BOUGHT:

• A Little History of the World—Ernst Gombrich
• What Good Are the Arts?—John Carey
• What I Loved—Siri Hustvedt
• Death and the Penguin—Andrey Kurkov

BOOKS READ:

• The Trick of It—Michael Frayn
• Housekeeping—Marilynne Robinson
• Over Tumbled Graves—Jess Walter
• Unnameable comedy thriller—Anonymous

On my copy of Michael Frayn’s The Trick of It, there is a quote from Anthony Burgess that describes the novel as “one of the few books I have read in the last year that has provoked laughter.” Initially, it’s a blurb that works in just the way the publishers intended. Great, you think. Burgess must have read a lot of books; and both the quote itself and your knowledge of the great man suggest that he wouldn’t have chuckled at many of them. So if The Trick of It wriggled its way through that forbidding exterior to the Burgess sense of humor, it must be absolutely hilarious, right? But then you start to wonder just how trustworthy Burgess would have been on the subject of comedy. What, for example, would have been his favorite bit of Jackass: The Movie? (Burgess died in 1993, so sadly we will never know.) What was his most cherished Three Stooges sketch? His favorite Seinfeld character? His top David Brent moment? And after careful contemplation, your confidence in his comic judgment starts to feel a little misplaced: there is a good chance, you suspect, that Anthony Burgess would have steadfastly refused even to smile at many of the things that have ever made you chortle uncontrollably.

Sometimes it feels as though we are being asked to imagine cultural judgments as a whole bunch of concentric circles. On the outside, we have the wrong ones, made by the people who read The Da Vinci Code and listen to Celine Dion; right at the center we have the correct ones, made by the snootier critics, very often people who have vowed never to laugh again until Aristophanes produces a follow-up to The Frogs. (I haven’t read James Wood’s collection of essays The Irresponsible Self: Laughter and the Novel, but I’m counting on Woody to provide a useful counterbalance to that sort of high moral seriousness. So I’m presuming that all the comic greats—P. G. Wodehouse, the Molesworth books, George and Weedon Grossmith, and so on—are present and correct between its covers.) The world is a lot more complicated than this diagram allows, of course, but sometimes it’s easy to forget that the Frog people don’t know everything. If I had to choose between...