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  The novel is like a two-act play, opening in the year 2000, on ‘a day in April’. It anticipates the Global Financial Crisis more than responding directly to 9/11 (the novel was published in 2003) in that the critique is of western capitalism, rather than American foreign policy. This said, the simplified world-view of Eric Packer is part of the wider geopolitical and economic problem. In Part One, we meet Packer – a man of twenty-eight who appears to be at the height of his powers as an uber-rich investor with a forty-eight room apartment and an heiress wife he hardly seems to know. Packer’s power is pharaoh-like – outside of his house, he is enthroned in a stretch limousine, where employees and doctors are summoned. Packer asks childlike questions that could be profound were he interested in the answers; rather he is a man of rat-like intelligence that so far has allowed him to crush and win. Now doubt, for some reason, has entered his world and in the course of a day, he unra...

  Ian McEwan’s micro novel On Chesil Beach deserves at least a micro review. It is July 1962, and Edward and Florence are on their honeymoon. More precisely, it is their wedding night, and the clock is ticking. Edward has been holding out for this moment throughout the year of their engagement. With typical irony, McEwan writes that ‘Edward’s single most important contribution to the wedding arrangement was to refrain, for over a week’. During this time, he has been ‘chaste with himself,’ since he wishes to be ‘in top form for his bride’ (p.20). That is one side of the matter. Whether it is the expected restraint of the times, ignorance, fear or asexuality, Florence is rather the opposite, dreading Edward’s touch as a wifely duty she would rather not perform at all. There are five chapters in this short novel, and it isn’t until the end of Chapter Three that the near consummation sees Florence fleeing the room and sprinting out into the darkness, down to Chesil Beach where she hid...

The title ‘Sorry for Your Troubles’ suggests something Irish, and indeed it seems as though Richard Ford wishes the reader to follow him over the seas and back (though I, for one, feel he is strongest when the work is grounded among ordinary men and women of the United States). While I'd rather avoid sounding like a critic who likes the old stuff, the rough-and-ready nature of various strugglers in Rock Springs is hard to beat. Here there are lawyers and successful retirees (though, of course, troubles don’t stop with a solid safety-net, and lonely hearts are everywhere).  The first of the stories takes place in New Orleans. A middle-aged, married man Sandy McGuiness is out with business associates when he spies a slender woman in a brown dress, who returns his gaze with something like recognition. Ford switches to the past – thirty-five years earlier, when Sandy and Barbara (the slender woman in a brown dress) traveled together to Iceland. They’d bunked down in a rustic fishing h...

  Seize the Day is Bellow is a bite-sized chunk; not much more than a novella; a story set in a single day you could read in a single sitting. When I first read it, many years ago, 42-year-old unemployed salesman Tommy Wilhelm must have seemed like an ancient mariner. Now I see him as man who should be in his prime, tragically moored by circumstances largely of his own making. His father is a doctor and a success, but also a man lacking any compassion for his two children (and one imagines, formerly for his deceased wife). Maybe Wilhelm thought hard work was for suckers, because he fell for flattery, dropped out of college and moved to Hollywood, thinking show business could be his career. His handsomeness was one thing; an unusual speech impediment is another. At some point he falls into line, marries and becomes a salesman, until he feels an injustice has been done to him by the company and takes his bat and ball home. An obvious comparisons is to Miller's Death of a Salesman , ...

For a time I couldn't decide whether Martin Amis's  Inside Story was a chore to read, or a pleasure (it was both) -- but I persevered. Ultimately I would say it was a pleasure. Or perhaps, in keeping with the style of the novel, I should say something like this: “Geoff Gates, a reader who prided himself on some discernment, had decided that Inside Story was a novel worth bothering with. ”  The Wrap: You can read the way that the novel is equivocally praised in The Guardian by Tim Adams here:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/13/inside-story-by-martin-amis-review-too-clever-by-half.  Or roasted indulgently in the New York Times by Parul Sehgal here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/books/review-martin-amis-inside-story.html Here's some of my own thoughts on the book.  Observation One: ‘The Preludial’ (adjective for ‘Prelude?’) has the cute direct address of playful postmodernism (‘Welcome! Do step on in – this is a pleasure and a privilege’ [opening...

I’m not Scared was a great success for Niccolò Ammaniti, published in 2001 when the author was aged thirty-five. The story is narrated by Michele Amitrano, a curious child living in a dull, hot hamlet where nothing much happens. Exactly where and when Michele is when he recalls the events of that summer is unclear, but some time has passed (‘The wheat was high that year …’[p.1]; ‘ That morning we went off on our bikes’ [p.5]). The narrative opens with the children riding out beyond the boundaries set by their parents. As a storm approaches, they find an abandoned farmhouse, and Michele is dared to enter (an act of selflessness to save the dignity of a girl in the gang). As Michele finds a hidden underground recess, he thinks he has found a corpse. He doesn’t tell the others and returns home with the first terrible secret. Ammaniti’s portrait of boyhood is from a bygone era, when fathers wielded an authority stemming from an accepted level of violence. Beyond the household, worldly i...

\ If you are old enough you will remember the 1985 film -- a huge success, with eight Academy Awards nominations, and so on, and Helen Bonham Carter in her breakthrough role. I'd like to see it again, especially now that I've finally got around to reading the book. There may be little point in writing about a novel published in 1908 with all the critical studies over the decades. However, reading the novel at the start of 2022 has left me with a few thoughts to share.  The first is the simple pleasure of reading this novel after some time among the serious (necessarily so) books of contemporary literary writers. I refer in particular to my last two entries: Don Delillo’s Zero K (2016) and Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020). E. M. Forster's  A Room with a View operates very much like a two act romantic drama, with Act 1 set in Florence, and Act 2 set in Surrey (the setting is a house known as ‘Windy Corner’). A limited set of characters is introduced...