12

ARTS

NOVEMBER 23, 2007 THE CATHOLIC HERALD

Arts Editor: Mark Greaves Tel: 020 7448 3603 Fax: 020 7256 9728 E-mail: mark@catholicherald.co.uk

Watch drama unfold in glass A bad childhood that fuelled 70 years of art

Art of Light: German Renaissance Stained Glass

NATIONAL GALLERY, UNTIL FEBRUARY 17

Art of Lightis the first exhibition of its kind in the National Gallery and one that attempts to treat stained glass as an “art” rather than a “craft”. Indeed, it provides plenty of proof that the hand and spirit of the artist is transferable to any medium. Stained glass has had a patronising, almost dismissive critical assessment for many a year. The Gothic Revival of the 19th century persisted too long into the 20th century to gain any real appreciation from the art cognoscenti of the 1930s to the 1980s. Even Coventry Cathedral was looked upon as a historical oddity by many. Now, perhaps as a result of this very well-presented exhibition, our minds may be inclined to change. How right the National Gallery was to concentrate on those examples of German glass art which have largely been lent by the Victoria and Albert Museum. The technique of actually painting on glass, staining with silver stain (producing a glorious golden colour), enamelling with different colours and occasionally grinding away the colour with metal tools as a kind of delicate etching technique were all associated with the alchemical experiments and discoveries of that time. There are marvellously moving religious scenes, many of them as a result of the draughtsmanship of artists such as Albrecht Düürer, Jorg Breu the Elder

‘Abbot Johann von Ahrweiler and St Norbert’, from the Abbey of Steinfeld

and Hans Baldung Grien. The psychology of the drawing in the tiny faces and heads has to be looked at for quite a long time. The longer the act of contemplation, the more the feeling grows that we are looking at the unfolding of a drama. It is a case of having a one-toone experience. The painting in these panels is of the

utmost sophistication and technical brilliance. But we must remember that the hands which drew these may also have engraved wood and worked with precious metals such as gold and silver. In medieval Germany the guilds were exclusive but the artists were still on speaking terms with one another. There were no laws of copyright. The stimulus

for creation took place as each contemplated the achievements of the other. But there were other matters in late 15th-century Germany and the Netherlands. The stimulus for these panels, for instance, can be found in the growth of private contemplative prayer and in patterns of devotion such as the Rosary. The adoption of the Stations of the Cross by churches across Europe contributed to the idea of contemplation (helped enormously by visual imagery) in the lives of ordinary people. Another reason for the creation of these tiny panels of glass was the invention of printing and the subsequent death of manuscript illumination. It is only my guess, but I suggest that all the talent that would have been employed by the illuminators’ studios had to try their hand at painting on glass in order to make a living once the great books of hours went out of fashion. We are apt to forget the close links between artists in England and those in the Netherlands, the Rhine basin and, occasionally, France. The Reformation came and split up the easy interchange which was taken for granted in the 15th century. Heraldic exhibitionism and the growing self-confidence of individuals in their armour and their aggressive authority had found an ideal instrument in glass. Individual self-assurance, as well as faith, had found a marvellous means of expression. Go to see this tiny but unique exhibition and marvel at panels and paintings which seem to anticipate the minute accuracy of the watchmaker, the miniaturist and even the painter of porcelain. Patrick Reyntiens

Welcome to a Guardian reader’s nightmare

FILM REVIEW Freddy Gray

Jesus Camp

PG CERT, 84 MINS

Jesus Campis a horror film disguised as a documentary. From the opening shots, the viewer is thrust into America’s red state dystopia. The highways are decorated with stars and stripes, golden arches and Protestant propaganda. The airwaves are thick with evangelical preaching. Obese people wear very bad clothes and drive big cars. This is a Guardianreader’s worst nightmare: welcome to Bible Belt hell. Meet Pastor Becky Fisher, the very large woman who runs the “kids on fire” summer camp. She suppresses a wince as she berates the younger generation for being fat. We are intro

duced to Levi, an eloquent preacher boy with a hillbilly mullet. “I was saved when I was five,” he says. “I just wanted something more from life.” Levi is home-schooled, of course. His mother teaches him that the theory of evolution is wicked and global warming a myth. Next up is Rachel, who wants to run a beauty salon where she can tell clients about the evil of abortion as she paints their nails. She is shy, but the Holy Spirit compels her to evangelise. “Do you know exactly where you are going when you die?” she asks a group of black men. “Heaven,” replies an old fellow in a chair. “Are you sure?” persists Rachel. “Yeah.” Rachel walks away. “I think they must be Muslims,” she says under her breath. Then there is energetic Tory, who likes to dance in her room to Christian heavy metal. She confesses that her style sometimes becomes “of the flesh”. “I am notthe only one who makes that mistake,” she insists. The bulk of the film is taken up with long, painful scenes of Christian indoctrination: preachers raging against Satan, entranced children weeping and talking in tongues and gesticulating wildly towards the heavens. We hear

bizarre God-squad chants (“Dance! We’re kicking it for Christ” was my favourite). This is all disturbing enough in itself. Yet, in case we miss the point, the filmmakers employ creepy, electronic music to convey a sinister mood and remind us that we are more sophisticated than the God-fearing simpletons. Mike Papantonio, a lawyer and talkshow host, offers relief from the exhausting evangelical zaniness. In the sober calm of his studio, he warns America about the dangerous rise of the Religious Right. He is a Christian, yet he fears that under President George W Bush the boundaries between church and state have been significantly eroded. Certainly, the evangelicals do seem to elevate Bush to a quasi-divine status. In one of the most alarming scenes, children pray before a life-size cardboard cut-out of the president. Pastor Ted Haggard, then an adviser to the White House, spells it out. “If the evangelicals vote, they determine the election,” he says with a triumphal sneer. InJesus Campthe older evangelicals come across as zealots, fanatically imposing their warped spirituality on the younger generation. The film poses

as neutral reportage on fundamentalist Christianity in the United States, but it has a nagging preachiness of its own. The directors, Heidi Ewing, a Catholic, and Rachel Grady, obviously feel that the pupils of Jesus Camp are being mentally abused. They may well be right. Yet too often the editing clumsily nudges the audience towards agreeing with Papantonio and objecting to the evangelicals. The trouble is that, for all the mad indoctrination, the children are not deranged Bible robots. They are actually sweet, polite and level-headed. Levi speaks a lot of sense. “This world, all it feeds you is trash,” he says, with calm assurance. “That’s what a lot of people are in this world: they are sick. They are looking for something.” Rachel tells the camera: “I have been teased several times...They think I am weird. Go ahead. They are not the ones who are going to be judging me.” Her frank opinions prompted superior sniggers among the press audience at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts. But the journos didn’t seem to appreciate that, with all the twinkling, clever-clever music and choreography, the Jesus Camp kids were not the only ones being brainwashed.

ART REVIEW Georgina French

Louise Bourgeois

TATE MODERN, UNTIL JANUARY 20

The Louise Bourgeois retrospective at Tate Modern displays over 200 works spanning an incredible seven decades. Bourgeois is now 95 years old and still works incessantly. The penultimate room in this exhibition displays a work on paper on which she has scribbled: “It is not so much where my motivation comes from, but rather how it manages to survive.” Despite recent critical acclaim, Bourgeois’s career blossomed late in her life. She exhibited irregularly in America in the 1940s and 1950s before being rescued from relative obscurity by feminist art historians. In 1975 the American writer Lucy Lippard described her as an artist who had “survived almost 40 years of discrimination, struggle, intermittent success and neglect in New York’s gladiatorial art arenas”. It was not until 1982 that Bourgeois received international recognition when she became the first female artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. However, Louise Bourgeois does not set out to please. In the 1994 Arenavideo portrait of the artist (on loop at the end of the exhibition, it makes enlightening and amusing viewing), Bourgeois says: “I do not need fans, that’s not my bag.” For Bourgeois, making art is cathartic, a form of therapy helping her to overcome the betrayal and abandonment that she experienced as a child. Bourgeois grew up in Choisy-LeRoi just outside Paris, the site of her parents’ prosperous tapestry and antique repair business. During this time her father began a 10-year affair with Sadie Gordon Richmond, who had been engaged to teach Bourgeois English. The anger and resentment that she felt towards Sadie and her father still rages inside her and fuels her creativity. “All my work in the past 50 years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood. My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery and it has never lost its drama,” she wrote. The Destruction of the Father, Bourgeois’ first enclosed sculpture now displayed in Britain for the first time, depicts the family dinner table. The father sits at the head dictating conversation until the mother and children grab him, throw him on to the table, dismember and devour him. Bourgeois’ art allows her to revisit the past and unleash her anger and frustration.

In the first room of the exhibition Bourgeois explores the nature of the home and her place within it. A 1990s installation entitled Cell contains a pink marble model of her childhood home encased by a metal cage that refers to the family tapestry repair shop. The cell represents an enclosed section of Bourgeois’ past, to which she feels a prisoner. The guillotine suspended above signals the destruction that family life can impose. In 1938 Bourgeois married the art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York, where she had three children. Here, Bourgeois made a series of tall wooden sculptures on the roof of their Manhattan apartment that explore the relationship between people and architecture. These totemic Personages reflect both the New York skyline (her new home) and the loved ones that Bourgeois had left behind in France. Like the skyscrapers that now surrounded Bourgeois, the Personagesare grouped together yet unable to touch. In the late 1960s Bourgeois began to work with marble. Cumul I, for instance, recycles past biomorphic, sensual forms, but to soothing effect. Reminiscent of undulating cumulus clouds, the marble has a softness that belies its hard nature. A similar calming effect is achieved in Ventouse, in which cupping jars, picked up by Bourgeois in a flea market in the south of France, have been set into a block of marble. Bourgeois here recalls nursing her mother with cupping jars, which are applied to the flesh to relieve pain –a parallel to sculpting as a healing process for Bourgeois. In 1980 Bourgeois moved her studio to a large converted garment factory in Brooklyn, which enabled her to work on a much larger scale. Spider, in which a towering spider engulfs a cage containing a chair and tapestry fragments, recalls the family tapestry business, but, in particular, Bourgeois’ mother Josephine. In Ode To My Mother Bourgeois recalls a “friend (the spider –why the spider?) because my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider. She could also defend herself and me, by refusing to answer ‘stupid’, inquisitive, embarrassing, personal questions.” The final room, or “cabinet of curiosities”, reveals the extent to which art is a way of life for Bourgeois, or even a way of surviving. She has lived through the various art movements of the 20th century, and now the beginning of the 21st, yet her work has never really engaged with them. Sticking resolutely on her own path to selfknowledge and acceptance, she has produced a body of work that is revealing yet confusing, abject yet beguiling. In her own words, Bourgeois is a “lonely long distance runner”, and that’s the way she likes it.

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Extraordinary hairdos

THEATRE REVIEW

Hairspray

SHAFTESBURYTHEATRE

Many actors – Cary Grant, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Alec Guinness, Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams among them – have dressed up as women; but they were always men disguised as women. In Hairspraywe have something quite different. The lead actor isn’t in disguise; he’s actually playing a female character. The actor is doing what actors did in ancient Greece and still do in Noh and Kabuki theatre. There’s a nice story doing the rounds, and it may even be true. Michael Ball’s fans are going to the box office during the interval and asking for their money back, complaining bitterly that he’s not in the show. It is then pointed out that the big, fat lady on stage playing the heroine’s mother is Michael Ball. The action is set in Baltimore in 1962, an era of racial segregation and extraordinary hairdos. An obese teenage girl longs to appear on a highly popular television dance programme. She’s a nice girl with a social conscience and believes black kids have the same rights as white kids. The musical has something important to say about racial integration and obesity and says it in an optimistic, simplistic,

warm-hearted, non-hectoring, feel-good way. The show has a great score by Marc Shaiman. It has witty lyrics. Jack O’Brien’s production is dance-driven. The energy is fantastic and Jerry Mitchell’s choreography looks so much better on stage than it does on screen, mainly because in a theatre you get to see the whole cast in one go and not in a series of edited close-ups.

The Giant

HAMPSTEADTHEATRE

Antony Sher’s epic drama – interesting, well-acted and verbose –takes place in hedonistic Florence in 1501, when Michelangelo was 26 and Leonardo da Vinci was 53 and the two were competing to sculpt a giant marble slab. In real life the men had only met once in the street. Here, they meet on a number of occasions and are not only rivals in art but also in love –with a beautiful 18-yearold quarryman. Michelangelo (John Light), a godly man, mortified and frustrated by his sexual feelings, lives in fear of damnation. He puts his passion into his art and remains celibate. Leonardo (Roger Allam), having led a dissipated youth, now finds that sex disgusts him and puts his passion into painting, poetry, sculpture, architecture and science. He, too, is celibate. The lad is Michelangelo’s assistant and model. It says much for Stephen Hagan, who is making his professional

stage debut, that he can stand completely naked in front of the statue of David and not look ridiculous. The superhuman statue is presented as a political statement, a symbol of Florence’s resurgence, pride and cultural superiority: a warning to other cities and nations not to mess with it.

Cloud Nine

ALMEIDATHEATRE

Caryl Churchill writes about sexual and colonial repression in Victorian and modern times, offering audiences a variety of taboo subjects. The first act, set in darkest Africa, is a farcical parody of England, empire and family as portrayed by Rudyard Kipling. The second act is set in the permissive 1970s. Artistic director Michael Attenborough describes Cloud Nine as one of the great plays of the late 20th century, beautifully bawdy, desperately funny and truly touching. It’s certainly bawdy. But is Cloud Ninereally one of the great plays of the 20th century? Surely not. The first act might survive on its own, provided it kept its essential ingredient: crossdressing. Theatre has always been a drag since time immemorial. Robert Tanitch

Robert Tanitch’s lavishly illustrated year-by-year chronicle, London Stage in the 20th Centuryis published by Haus Publishing.

To place an advert on this page Telephone our Display Manager James Quantrill on: 020 7448 3610 THE CATHOLIC HERALD NOVEMBER 23, 2007

Literary Editor: Stav Sherez Tel: 020 7448 3603 Fax: 020 7256 9728 E-mail: stav@sherez.freeserve.co.uk

13

BOOKS

How religion learned to live with its competitors

Charles Taylor recently won the $1.5 million Templeton Prize. Jonathan Wright says his brilliant guide to the rise of secularism shows that he is worth every cent

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, Harvard University Press £25.95 Whenever I visit a city for the first time I prefer to do my own exploring: map-less, in the early hours before the tourist hordes descend. Occasionally, however, I have been bullied into signing up for that bêête noire of the independent traveller: the guided tour. When I first fetched up in Florence, for instance, I put myself in the hands of the charismatic, moustachioed Signor Rossi. His historical knowledge was breathtaking, and whenever we finally reached a noteworthy destination he delighted us with his erudition. The trouble was, he took forever navigating his way through Florentine streets, taking wrong turns, doubling back on himself, showing us things far outside the advertised itinerary. What should have been a onehour excursion took up most of the afternoon and we emerged utterly exhausted and disoriented. Still, in retrospect (also known as the hotel bar), we sensed that ideas and vistas beyond the imaginings of a conventional cicerone had been opened up. The experience had been infuriating but enlightening, and I like to think that this is precisely what Signor Rossi intended. Reading Charles Taylor’s meandering new book brought these memories flooding back. There are many delights within these pages and the workings of an outstanding mind are constantly on display. But, goodness, Taylor takes his time getting to his many insightful points. Whenever there is an opportunity to launch into a digression, Taylor seizes it. The structure of the book seems almost wilfully confused. It is crammed with reassurances that the reader is now back on the trail of the main argument and littered with promises that the author will return to an idea in a few chapters’ time. There are two possible conclusions. Either Taylor could have done a better job of arranging his book or he is deliberately manipulating his readers in order to convince them that a linear route through the book’s subject simply isn’t available. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Sometimes Taylor’s narrative antics are exquisitely well-judged; sometimes he just gets lost in thickets of his own devising. That a philosopher of Taylor’s calibre occasionally loses his bearings only demonstrates that his topic is extraordinarily unwieldy. Most of us would concur with his diagnosis

Bruegel’s ‘Tower of Babel’: An allegory of the splintering of ideas and man’s usurpation of God’s remit

of modern western secularism. We inhabit a public sphere in which fully fledged political engagement can blossom without any reference to God. Political institutions are usually divorced from ecclesiastical institutions in ways that would have flabbergasted people living five centuries ago. There has, unquestionably, been a decline in traditional religious belief and practice, and what Taylor refers to as the “conditions of belief” have been utterly transformed. In the year 1500 the existence of God was, essentially, a cultural given: this was a cosmos saturated by notions of transcendence. Today, however, belief in God “is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace”. A robust alternative, defined by Taylor as “exclusive humanism”, now exists: moralities can flourish and the world can be understood without once invoking the concept of a supreme being. How, Taylor asks, did we get here? In many ways, the trajectory of his argument is uncontroversial and all of the usual suspects make an appearance. We hear about the process of disenchantment, whereby new scientific paradigms took hold and nature became comprehensible on its own terms. The Reformation, in Taylor’s account, provided damaging critiques of a magically enchanted (sacrament-driven) world, and (apparently) introduced

the abiding notion of individual responsibility for moral conduct. The natural law theorising of Grotius, Locke, et al soon entered the mix and, during the 18th century, the tenets of Deism –not least the rejection of an interventionist creator and a dismantlement of traditional notions of Providence –created a bewildering philosophical landscape. Old news, you might be tempted to suggest. What singles Taylor’s analysis out, however, is his painstaking interrogation of such familiar historical developments. He constantly rebukes simplistic analyses: he derides what he calls subtraction theories, according to which various religious assumptions simply fell away to be conveniently replaced by secularist alternatives, and he offers a spirited assault on the glib idea that the rise of modern science simply supplanted religion. Things, as Taylor opines, were never quite that uncomplicated. In the second half of his book, Taylor refers to the state of flux that emerged from these earlier developments as a cultural supernova. Things exploded. Suddenly, an unprecedented range of alternative philosophical postures was available, and Taylor’s survey of the polemical squabbles that defined the modern age is masterful. Unbelief matured and produced the splintered moral universe we all inhabit. The philosophical concerns of an intellectual elite began to

permeate the wider populace and what Taylor calls our “age of authenticity”, in which there is an almost obligatory duty to seek out one’s own, idiosyncratic moral code, arrived. Not that Taylor is a fan of teleology or of some grand march towards an entirely secular age. He offers ample proof that intimations of transcendence (easily construed as the hallmarks of a religious sensibility) are still very much in evidence. It would seem that religion is neither dead nor moribund: it has simply had to learn to live with its competitors. This philosophical work sometimes recruits woefully reductive analyses of entire historical periods to bolster its arguments. The charitable conclusion is that, in order to provide his thesis with cogency, Taylor had little choice. After all, he is simply positing a speculative theory which obliges us to revisit a seemingly straightforward historical process. On that level –and it is a lofty one –the book works very well. It will charm and aggravate you in equal measure and, along the way, you will be forced to think very hard –which is why, all of my cavils aside, Charles Taylor is worth every cent of the $1.5 million Templeton Prize he was recently awarded. I only hope he invests part of his windfall in a trip to Florence where he might encounter Signor Rossi, who shares his love of intellectual mischief.

Might and right

Garry O’Connor on a timely and innovative contribution to the age-old Just War debate

Just War: The Just War Tradition: Ethics in Modern Warfare by Charles Guthrie and Michael Quinlan, Bloomsbury £10 Even when the reason is palpably obvious and unjust, leaders have always tried to justify going to war by finding the “just cause”. About the underlying reason for the Iraq War (prepared long in advance but kept a secret), Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, stated recently: “It is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” To back up this point, it has been calculated the projected cost of the USled invasion is one trillion dollars, but the value of Iraqi oil is estimated at $30 trillion. In terms of supply of a dwindling resource, this would make the war justifiable in its cost, assuming a cynical US government keeps its hands on the oil with military bases well into the future. But will it ever make it just? Charles Guthrie and Michael Quinlan, the authors of this timely and well-reasoned book, answer with an innovation in the age-old controversies over justifications for going to war: “Simply to have,” they argue, “the balance of right clearly on our side is not on its own a good reason for taking up arms.” There has to be a margin of benefit, “big enough to warrant incurring the risks and penalties of armed conflict –and not just the penalties to ourselves”. There is also a duty to “weigh the costs to everyone”. Their margin of benefit is not trillions of oil revenue. To apply their reasoning to Iraq, the problem of benefit can be simplified: do you punish a whole country and its people just because it has a cruel and corrupt leader who needs removing? In 2002 and 2003, before the invasion, no one asked questions about disproportionate suffering. Then, the tenuous and subsequently unconvincing possibility was that Iraqi weapons of mass destruc

Alan Greenspan: ‘The Iraq war is largely about oil’

tion might one day come into the hands of international terrorists, who might use them to inflict terrible damage on the US heartland. It was 9/11 that gave the US “just cause” to invade Afghanistan, and then its follow-up, Iraq. Dwindling numbers still find arguments to justify the invasion of Afghanistan but, with the passing of time, far fewer people are justifying the foray into Iraq. As President Chirac said to Blair before the invasion: “Leo [Blair’s infant son] will not thank you in the future if you lead Britain into war.” And here we have perhaps the main value of these authors’ thesis, keeping as they do to strict impartiality. Had the leaders any notion beforehand of the criteria for fighting a just war, and a sense of the recent military and political history of the regions involved –and what would happen in making these regions theatres of war – they would have seriously mitigated their involvement, by making reasonable follow-up plans. T E Lawrence, writing in Revolt of the Arabs of the 1919 capture of Damascus from the Turks by irregular Arab forces (supported by the British) said: “Rebels, especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and worse governors. [King of Iraq] Faisal’s sorry duty would be to rid himself of his warfriends, and replace them by those elements which had been most useful to the

Turkish government.” Citing examples from recent experiences of war, the point Guthrie and Quinlan convince you of is that you cannot have just one good reason to go to war. You need all six good reasons they put forward. So even if there arguably was “just cause” for the Iraq war in the first instance, then there was still not “sufficient and proportionate cause”, “right authority” (the UN motion failed), while the “last resort” principle also failed –there could have been other means of resolving the issues at stake. It fails on three counts of the six. Not only the politicians, in their worked-up states of mind, but many others, such as George Weigel and Lord Alton, still argue from a Catholic viewpoint with “just war” justifications for the Iraq invasion. They should consider these new criteria. Inquiring, as I did, into the authors’ present views, Lord Guthrie told me: “History will confirm one way or another whether it was unjust and a great mistake, as many people judge it today.” Quinlan is unequivocal: he said his own position, both before and since, was that the invasion was “criminal folly”. For a lucid display of the issues at stake The Just War Tradition: Relic or RoadMap? should be read by everyone who wants to get straight his or her thinking about war.

Unfathomable power

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Exit Ghost by Philip Roth, Jonathan Cape £16.99 Nathan Zuckerman, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s latest novel, has lived in isolation for 11 years. Holed up in a rural retreat 100 miles from New York, he focuses his energies entirely on his writing. He doesn’t read newspapers; he doesn’t watch television. Two or three days can go by when he speaks to no one. At the age of 71 he has almost managed to eradicate the distraction of other human beings. The novel begins with Zuckerman back in New York. He has returned to have an operation on his bladder and does not intend to stay. But, after enduring a muted, solitary existence for so long, he finds it difficult to resist the exhilaration of being back in the city, and agrees to a year-long house swap. The decision, he believes, is a foolish one –his habitual caution swept aside by the giddiness of the moment. Within days he has developed a desperate infatuation for a young married female writer and been drawn into a savage scrap with an aspiring biographer. The pleasant equilibrium of his former life has been shattered. His return to society has another consequence: it makes him feel old. His attempts to assert himself again in the world expose

Philip Roth: Forceful

his frailty, his weakening memory, and –most painfully –his incontinence. So Zuckerman is not just a disinterested ghost paying his last visit to the land of the living. His long deprivation has not resulted in wistful detachment, but has instead heightened the trauma and excitement of the return. All through the novel I kept on asking myself: what makes Roth’s prose so good? Some of the sentences, I thought, were clumsy; some of the language was strangely flat and anaesthetic. He generally avoids metaphor, or at least metaphor that is obtrusive. Despite all this, his prose has the kind of intensity that makes most other writers feel bland and insipid. But while the writing itself is exhilarating, some of the novel’s preoccupations are not so wildly exciting.

Zuckerman’s frustrated infatuation with 30-year-old writer Jamie Logan leads him to compose long scenes of dialogue between the two of them; these scenes allow him to imagine an intimacy that is never achieved. He even gets her to laugh flatteringly at his jokes. The project, to me, seems quite silly and adolescent, but Zuckerman elevates it to lofty heights. At one point he questions the value of such “fictional amplification” when it only adds to the pain, and answers: “For some very, very few, that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.” The sentence is breathtaking, yes; but surely Zuckerman’s situation is actually rather comic. There is also something annoyingly alpha male about Zuckerman. He notes that returning to the human world means once again being “trapped” in “vainglorious self-assertion” –an endless struggle to conquer women and fight off younger men. Yet the force of Roth’s writing still makes Exit Ghost a terrific novel. He breaks all the rules of good prose –using boring adjectives like “small” and “large”, and packing sentences full of mundane details –but his words still hold an unfathomable power. Mark Greaves

The Kindly Light

John Henry, Cardinal Newman

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