William Skidelsky

In the classic rags-to-riches narrative, a boy born into poverty attains respectability by dint of hard work, clean living and moral courage. Mohsin Hamid’s third novel — his eagerly awaited follow-up to The Reluctant Fundamentalist — updates the genre for the 21st century, transplanting it to ‘rising Asia’ but stripping it of all sense of uplift. We first encounter Hamid’s unnamed protagonist in his filthy village compound, ‘huddled, shivering on the packed earth’, wracked by hepatitis E.

Despite its playfully obfuscating title, the rationale behind this anthology is pretty straightforward. A ‘fake’ is a fictional text that purports to be — or, perhaps more accurately, is presented in the guise of — a non-fictional document. Of course, there’s nothing new about stories of this type: the epistolary novel has been around for centuries. However, as the editors point out in their introduction (itself a kind of fake, being presented as a ‘how to’ guide), ours is an age awash with different types of written communication, from texts, blogs and emails to marketing mailshots, application forms and end-of-year-reports. Any writer inclined to fake it, therefore, has a wide variety of formats to choose from.

‘To enclose the collected works of Cocteau one would need not a bookshelf, but a warehouse,’ W. H. Auden wrote in 1950. The same isn’t quite true of Auden — a warehouse wouldn’t be necessary — but it has to be said that only a bookshelf of substantial proportions would be capable of accommodating the entirety of his work. Auden wrote a lot of poetry; but he wrote an awful lot of other stuff as well. That other stuff included plays (with Christopher Isherwood), opera librettos (with long-term partner Chester Kallman), song lyrics, lectures, radio broadcasts, record-sleeve notes, introductions to other writers’ work, essays, theological tracts and reams of journalism.

Alberto Manguel, the dust jacket informs us, is an ‘anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor’ who was born in Argentina, moved to Canada in the 1980s and now lives partly in France. A generous gloss on this would be to say that he is an intrepid crosser of boundaries, someone whose identity is too open-ended for him to confine himself to any one profession or place. Less charitably, one might say that he is a man who doesn’t like to be pinned down. I felt a similar ambivalence on reading The City of Words. It is a work of staggering scope and erudition, packed with interesting information and arguments, and often beautifully written. Yet it, too, is hard to pin down.

Novelists do not always make the best critics, and vice versa. But there are writers — Henry James, Virginia Woolf and John Updike spring to mind — who are similarly gifted in both fields. Such cases are interesting because of the questions they raise about the relationship between the novels and the criticism. How similar are the two stylistically? Can the judgments of the critic ever be independent of the inclinations of the novelist? (Or, to put it another way, are writers likely to favour those novelists who most resemble themselves?) Trickier still is the question of truthfulness: which, out of the fiction or the criticism, can best be said to represent the real author? Fiction’s domain is the imagination, whereas criticism deals with facts.

The Paris Review came into being in 1953, when a group of young Americans living in Paris, among them George Plimpton and William Styron, decided to start a literary magazine. Their intention was to get away from the academic factionalism that then prevailed in literary journals, and simply publish good writing, whether fiction, poetry or plays. In addition, the group came up with an ingenious format — the Q&A — whereby authors would have the chance to discuss the process of writing with a knowledgeable and broadly sympathetic interviewer. Undoubtedly, the format’s appeal was enhanced by the fact that the Paris Review was cash-strapped. Displaying a financial canniness that is rare among literary types, Plimpton and Co.