book #2

[realthog]

I've been reading, giggling over and in general thoroughly enjoying Elise Blackwell's 2007 novel Grub, an ARC of which I picked up from the Toby Press stand at last year's BookExpo America. Any time I can get to BookExpo I make a point of going by this stand: Toby has to be close to my favourite publisher, if not the favourite. They just seem never to publish duds. I'm sure there must be other publishers out there who achieve the same, but I haven't yet found them.

Anyway, Grub is a quasi-updating of a novel that occupies a special place in my own personal literary pantheon, George Gissing's scathing 1891 portrayal of the contemporary literary and not-so-literary landscape, New Grub Street. I must confess I was slightly nervous of Blackwell's version for precisely this reason -- and envious of her courage in attempting it: when the source is such a masterpiece, the creator of any homage is likely to find the effort drawing nothing but unflattering comparisons, even from people who haven't in fact read the original. I needn't have worried, though. Grub stands up as a wonderfully funny and astringent piece of work in its own right; Blackwell pierces the pretensions and corruptions of today's supposedly literary scene with the same zeal and precision that Gissing directed towards the one he knew.

I kind of wish Blackwell had retained Gissing's names for the central characters rather than marginally changing them; "Jasper Milvain", for example, far better conjures up the somewhat sleazy, mercenary opportunist who's a focus of both books than does "Jackson Miller". I also wish she'd spent a bit more time directing her satirical laser towards the book-trade side of the equation, towards the devastation of fiction publishing by (a) the monopolistic market dominance of bookselling by the chains and (b) the very similar situation in publishing, where a few massive conglomerates attempt to control our reading tastes. When Blackwell does do this in the book, she's very effective at it -- a young novelist's first lunch with her agent and editor, Lane and Lana, both of whom are identical and identically ghastly, is wonderfully funny and depressingly recognizable at the same time, and a highlight of the novel. In reality, writers' lives today are very much coloured by the existence of these commercial behemoths; the writers in Grub escape much of it. As a final minor criticism, I had a certain unease on occasion with the book's internal chronology: sometimes, while a mere weekend passed for one set of characters, in the next chapter it'd seem that months had rushed by for another.

These are small quibbles. Overall, an excellent book that I may very likely be drawn to reread in years to come.

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[realthog.livejournal.com]

*grinning*