Ian Sansom

A few years ago a friend of mine, a writer, attended a conference with Kurt Vonnegut. During coffee breaks and intervals my friend would sneak outside with Mr Vonnegut, Vonnegut to smoke his famous unfiltered Pall Malls and my friend to smoke a couple of Marlboro Lights. ‘What was he like?’, I asked, as if I didn’t already know the answer. ‘To be honest,’ said my friend, ‘he seemed pretty miserable.’ There was nothing funny about Kurt Vonnegut. Like a goyische Woody Allen, all of his wisecracking was really a form of serious intellectual inquiry. He was a satirist, an ironist, a cynic, but above all he was rueful. He was a man who stared hard at misfortune and who tried to understand it, and when he couldn’t understand it, he shrugged.

This, in my experience, has been completely unprecedented, and I doubt will ever happen again: three members of the same family reading the same book at the same time. We had to read the book in shifts: it was like waiting on the docks to hear the plight of Little Nell, or gathering together to read samizdat in the former Soviet Union. Even more extraordinary, having read this book I voluntarily went back and read all of the others in the series. Thirteen books by the same author: I’ve read more Lemony Snickets than I’ve read Iris Murdochs. For the uninitiated, among whom I proudly counted myself until the past few weeks, The End is the 13th and final instalment in a series of novels by the American author Daniel Handler, writing under the nom de plume Lemony Snicket.

Five years on, and the 9/11 books begin to mount up: we’ve had Philip Roth doing it as historical allegory in The Plot Against America; John Updike doing it as a thriller in Terrorist; Jonathan Safran Foer doing whatever it is that Jonathan Safran Foer does in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Ian McEwan’s Saturday; and now, Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance. You can already hear the sound of university critics drawing up the reading lists for their ‘Post- 9/11 Fiction’ courses: undergraduates, pay attention to what follows. Raban’s book should certainly be required reading rather than a secondary source.

You know the famous story about Freud and Einstein? Freud writes to Einstein, sending him one of his books and asking for his opinion of it. Einstein writes back, saying he enjoyed the book very much, that he thought it was outstanding, exemplary even, but that, alas, he was in no position to judge its scientific merits. To which Freud replied, if Einstein couldn’t judge its scientific merits, then the book could hardly be judged exemplary. About this, Freud, as in a number of other things, was gloriously and absolutely wrong. Greil Marcus is no scientist, but we shouldn’t hold that against him.

Nothing much to report here, no news and no surprises: dog bites man; Philip Roth writes another masterpiece. What would be truly shocking at this stage in the late, great unfolding of Roth’s genius would be if he were to write a bad book, something as bad as The Breast, his last bad book, and that was published in 1972. We expect — and rightly — intermittency of genius: Roth, in an effort which already seems like the stuff of myth and legend, defies our expectations.