Books

Here’s a quiz for you. On the third floor of the New York Public Library is a vast mural painted by Edward Laning in the 1930s. It’s called “The Story of the Recorded Word” and it’s divided into four scenes, each one a pivotal stage in the development of writing. Can you guess what they are? I daresay you managed to picture something resembling the third scene: a bearded Johannes Gutenberg showing off a page of type from his new invention, the printing press. I think you might have got the second one, too: a medieval monk, with quills and inkpot, copying out a manuscript in his scriptorium. Perhaps, if you’re religiously inclined, you even guessed the first: Moses receiving the Ten Commandments carved into stone. But what about the fourth scene?

There’s a chapter in this mostly illuminating and occasionally irritating book in which the author – the award-winning writer of The Hours and other acclaimed novels – explains why he no longer reads reviews of his work. The decision was prompted first by an “excoriating” hatchet job by Michiko Kakutani, erstwhile lead literary critic of the New York Times. “A worse review is difficult to imagine,” Cunningham notes, claiming that he has “mostly repressed the memory” of its contents, though he does share his rather macabre plan for revenge: to slip a copy of the book into her coffin so that “extra-terrestrial archaeologists” will assume she wanted to be buried with it.

In October 2010, when Gabriel García Márquez, by then suffering from dementia, was told that his former friend and rival had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he inquired: “Who is Mario Vargas Llosa?” This tottering, always compulsive biography of the writer who died last year, which has taken 15 years to write (“I completely miscalculated its complications”) is Gerald Martin’s valiant answer. “Is there a life quite like this one anywhere in the western world in the second half of the 20th century?” In Martin’s breathless judgment, “this literary adventurer, politician, diplomat and warrior all rolled into one” was a single-minded workhorse whose sheer intensity, quality and variety of life was “almost literally incredible.

There are novelists who seem to spend their entire careers either apologizing for being themselves or trying to become someone else entirely. And then there’s Dave Eggers, who has spent much of the last quarter century trying – and, it has to be said, as far as one can tell, very happily succeeding – to become Dave Eggers. Ever since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius appeared in 2000, fulfilling almost entirely the audacious promise of its title, Eggers has occupied that peculiarly American position of being not simply Yet Another Novelist, but the Guy, the Man, the yardstick by which all others might be judged and found wanting. He’s a publisher, campaigner, literacy activist, editor, artist, children’s author, philanthropist and impresario.

Homer’s ghost is particularly busy, popping up in the dreams of pretty much every poet going. In fact if you are a poet and haven’t been visited by Homer, you may find yourself wondering why you’ve been left out. The cultural reach of the two major poems that appear under Homer’s name – the Iliad and the Odyssey – is undeniable. I teach my creative writing students that there are only two stories: the siege and the journey, and there they are, right at the beginning of literary history. They’ve been read continuously for centuries. On my shelves is an edition of Alexander Pope’s Iliad which belonged to my great-great-great-grandfather, in which are still bits of paper put in by subsequent family members.