The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 174

SPECTRUM BOOKS lis THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD SATURDAY. OCTOBER 26, 1996 El)c jNlrtu ijork eimcs (ktolxr (i, eview Birthday marks its edition words lMM CrrM lW 11 Nr Yrt Ttam 11 A A mere 18 per cent of the reviews are of non-fiction; 6 per cent of poetry; 22 per cent of books reviewed are by women. There is one review of a book by an Australian Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch On the evidence of its centennial edition, the Review would appear to wish to immortalise itself as a vehicle of Mainstream High Culture. What non-fiction is included appears to satisfy the criterion of "news" if not of notoriety. There is no mass-cult, which gives such pleasure not to the general reader alone: no Chandler, no Hammett, no Agatha Christie, no Elmore Leonard, no James Ellroy, no Sara Paretsky, no Stephen King.

Many distinguished American writers of the past 30 years are ignored: Barth, Barthelme, Gad-. dis, Gass, Hawkes, Sontag. To have included but one of these would have been a nod towards the post-modern era. This centennial collection demonstrates that there is something constraining about the review form, and even by distinguished hands Reynolds Price or Stephen Spender, say, who are included there is something essentially transitory about these pieces. Perhaps the centre-page colour spread might have been devoted, not to an ad for a novel which is a "romantic testament to love's enduring but to a reproduction of a plate of fish-and-chips.

Or, should 1 say, a hamburger. Writers Aloud OCTOBER 27 Robert Drewe reads from his new novel, Vie Drowner, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, West Circular Quay, at 1 1.30 am. Herald readers can present the Word on Sunday ad from elsewhere in Spectrum for reduced $5 admission. OCTOBER 28 Ken Follett speaks about his latest book, Tlie Third Twin, presented by Mosman Library and Mosman Bookshop at the library at 1.30 pm. S4S2 pensioners.

Bookings essential: 9978 4098. OCTOBER 29 Lesley McKay's Bookshop Literary Breakfast with travel writer and humorist Bill Bryson at Caffe Agosti-ni's, enr Queen St and Moncur St, Woollahra, at 8.30 am. S20. Bookings: 9327 1354. Bill Bryson speaks at a Herald Dymocks Literary Luncheon at the Wentworth Hotel, noon for 12.30 pm.

S49S43 members. Bookings: PO Box 202, Pymble 2073. Constant Reader Bookshop presents Writers at Stanton. Ken Follett talks about his new novel, The Tliird Twin, at Stanton Library, 234 Miller St, North Sydney, at 1 pm. Free.

No bookings required. Info: 9438 1763. Club Read presents Helen Hodgman (Passing Remarks) and Beth Spencer (How to Conceive of a Girl), reading from their books at Better Read Than Dead, 265 King St, Newtown, at 6.30 pm. Free. Bookings essential.

9557 8700. Mosman Bookshop Mosman Daily Literary Lunch with Gerard Windsor giving an account of his time with the Jesuits, Heaven Wlxere the Bachelors Sit. Capers Restaurant, 936 Military Rd, Mosman Junction, 12.15 for 12.30 pm. S45. Bookings 9969 9736.

OCTOBER 30 Audrey Oldficld, winner of the C. H. Currey Fellowship, presents a talk, Louisa and Henry Lawson and the Great Republic of the South Seas, at the State Library of NSW, 5.30 for 6 pm. SI0 non-members. Bookings essential: 9230 1500.

OCTOBER 31 Robert Drewe reads from his novel, 'Hie Drowner, at Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe, 6.30 for 7 pm. $634. Bookings: 9660 2333. NOVEMBER 2 The Australian Geographic Society presents Don and Margie Mclntyre, discussing their book Two Below Zero: A Year Alone In Antarctica, with slides and film footage, at the Sir John Clancy Auditorium, University of NSW, Kensington, at pm. SI 3 AGS members $15 non-members.

Bookings 9450 2300. Compiled by Joel Becker If you have a literary event, reading, seminar or forum on in the week starting Sunday. October 10. fax (02) 9360 1757 or e-mail jbecker3v.net. Details no later than 5 pm, October 29.

How do you ensure that you have a happy birthday, especially if you are a centenarian? Throw the party yourself. Congratulate yourself. Give yourself presents. This month, the Book Review section of The New York Times turned 100. The paper itself was founded in 1851 and is famous for its masthead, "All the News that's Fit to a boast which implies that there is news that is not fit to print.

Doubtless Richard Nixon felt that in the 1970s, as did John Howard and Amanda Vanstone last week. Originally published on Saturdays, the review moved to Sundays in 1911. Its first children's book column appeared in 1921; the best-seller list began in 1942; the first crimemystery column appeared in 1945; from 1949, all reviewers were named; in 1951, the first section devoted entirely to children's books appeared. In December 1962 a 1 14-day newspaper strike began, provoking the great American man of letters, Edmund Wilson, to observe: "The disappearance of the Times book section at the time of the printers' strike only made us aware that it had never existed." As a result, the independent New York Review of Books, a very different kettle of fish, was born in 1963. The Times Review is sufficiently celebratory on its 100th birthday to record this.

John Gross, author of The Rise and Fall of the Man of MORE BEAUTIFUL LIES Edited by George Papaellinas Vintage, 343pp, SI 6.95 "Al'STRALIAN history," once wrote Mark Twain "is like the most beautiful lies but they are all true, they all happened." An enigmatic and incorrect claim, but one that appealed to an earlier compiler of Australian fiction. Brian Kiernan's The Most Beautiful Lies appeared in 1977, with stories by Peter Carey, Michael Wilding, Murray Bail, Morris Lurie and Frank Moorhouse. Time has certainly favoured Kiernan's collection will it also vindicate Papaellinas's choices? Anna Kay, Chloe Hooper, Jay Krani and Mark Panozzo feature in More Celebrating 100 years, that is, of Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Freud, Kafka, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Orwell, Salinger, Mailer, Bellow, Updike, Morrison, Rushdie, Woolf, Wolfe, Wolfe, Wolf and thousands more, authors who changed the world and authors the world forgot. This special centennial issue of the Book Review includes more than 70 significant reviews as they first appeared (only shorter), with a historical introduction by John Gross, a chronology of literary events and selections from reviews that now seem a bit misguided. of the century.

(which for some reason has not been acknowledged). Inside is a story of a man who is wounded physically and emotionally, and is possibly going mad, with a plot involving a murdered academic and an unfaithful wife. A cool, tight, stylish piece of writing, especially if you like short sentences, replete with literary references (characters called Ernest Hemingway and Hurtle Duffleld) that are sometimes successful, sometimes not. But the three-stranded narrative isn't woven tightly enough; the mysteries aren't properly solved. Filled with surreal conversations and some puzzling sentences, eg: "I woke like a novelist and panicked." Pardon? Happy birthday to Review celebration shows fine powers of prediction with Thomas Pynchon's first novel, in 1963: "A young writer of staggering promise." The cover of this centennial issue boasts that it offers the reviews "as they first appeared (only Thus we have Lolita done over in five paragraphs, Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysts in the same space.

This is not so much editing as vandalism. It is the editorial expression of the vulgarity of the reviewer's final sentence apropos Marcel Proust's Hie Guermantes Way: "In spite of the piquant nature of much of his material, Proust will never be a widely popular writer." Some statistics: 60 per cent of the reviews in the centennial volume are of American books. One never ceases to be amazed at how so powerful and large a nation manages to be so insular, at times isolationist (which is why Henry James renounced his United States citizenship during World War I). Twenty per cent are of books from the British Isles, 8 per cent from France and Germany, and 2.5 per cent from Russia. But it is significant that reviews of the two Russian books open and all but close the magazine: Dostoevsky's (Gar-nett's translation) The Brothers Karamazov in 1912 by Anon, and Solzhenitsyn's Rebuilding Russia in 1991 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

There's a pair of book-ends for an American review of books. poems, essays, stories) who writes versatile, elastic prose which is at once witty and elegant, lively and colloquial, intellectual and passionate. Some essays border on stories, like Washington Square, 1946, when she's 17 and when "there is no feminism and no feminists. I am, I think, the Another about antagonists C. P.

Snow and F. R. Leavis puts their polarised debate into the context of contemporary literary moat-building. Topics are diverse yet connected the Book of Ruth, Trollope, speech in America and New Criticism; or, in the title essay, Mona Lisa's smile and fiction writers. Open this book at random, there's something to capture your attention.

Even the stuff on H. J. leading Australian designer manufacturer of FORGED- I emm DAVID I WILLIAMSON Behind the Lines don anderson Letters, who has been editor of both the New York Times Book Review and of the London Times Literary' Supplement, a weekly that exists separate from its parent paper, contributes an informative historical introduction and asks the question that must vex any editor of any newspaper's book pages: "How do you reconcile high literary standards and specialised literary interests with the needs of ordinary readers who may not share those interests and standards, but who still want to learn something about books?" This becomes even more vexed when the flagship paper's management insists, as the Times's did, that "books be treated as One answer is to employ the best people. The Times's birthday issue of more than 70 reprinted reviews includes Joan Didion on Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin on Christopher Isherwood and the importance of "minor John Updike on J. D.

Salinger's Karl Shapiro on W. H. Auden as the "Great George Plimpton, novelist and editor of The Paris Review, Paperbacks debra adelaide Beautiful Lies, which reverses the gender bias of the earlier collection and takes a greater punt by showcasing much younger writers. Watch out for these writers they may not have quite found their subjects yet, but they've certainly found their style. And worth reading anyway for Papaellinas's splendidly astringent introduction which, inter alia, puts the boot into critics succumbing to market forces and categorising young writers as PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A BAD CHARACTER And Other Essays on Writing By Cvnthia Ozick Pimlico, 330pp, S25 ANYONE who can claim Henry James is angelic, immortal or even alive deserves a serious second look.

"Few essayists," says Ozick, "essay fiction. Few novelists hazard essays." But not so this inspiring author (novels, A and Hibberd, et al, after the late '70s there's nothing on Williamson's career in context, with Nowra and Hewett mentioned twice, Enright just once, Rayson not at all. By the 1990s, says Kiernan, the media's "almost exclusive, and frequently trivialising, preoccupation with Williamson, not only as The Australian Playwright but also increasingly as The Australian Writer was itself a cultural phenomenon inviting some critical Good point worth someone taking up. ANYTHING CONSIDERED By Peter Mayle Hamish Hamilton, 247pp, $19.95 MAYLE'S indulgent attitude towards things French is either irritatingly patronising or endearingly fond, depending on your point of view. This novel from the author of A Year in Provence fortunately abandons its attitude early on, and develops into a colourful, fast-moving comic thriller set in the south of France.

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