Good Bad Writing

A couple of submissions to Britain's Spectator, which asked for "toe-curlingly" bad analogies:

"The main course was as sinful as if loin chops cut from the Beast of the Apocalypse had been marinated in ambrosia and then flambeed over the fires of Hell itself."

"Watching this film is like snuggling amorously down into a warm four-poster and then finding that the other occupant is the unwrapped mummy of Rameses II."

What Paul Meant

By stripping away centuries of varnish applied to Paul's letters, and by discarding the false ones, Garry Wills reveals an apostle who hardly merits being called a "corrupter" (Jefferson) with a "genius for hatred" (Nietzche). What Paul meant, Wills shows, is what Jesus meant: that love is the only law.

The Loser

Thomas Bernhard's triangular character study includes an unnamed narrator, a fictionalized Glenn Gould, and the loser of the title. The three are pianists, but only Gould succeeds in becoming a piano artist. The loser kills himself, and the narrator writes endlessly about Gould. Stylistically, the novel thrums with repetitions, bald sincerity, and blazing judgments. On Page 1, the narrator steps toward an Austrian inn; by Page 100 he is barely inside, the intervening 10 seconds having been stuffed with surreal characterizations. The final 99 percent of the book consists of a single paragraph, or perhaps more accurately, no paragraphs. The reader may tire of Bernhard's rashness in expressing his loves and (many more) hates, but the author does not permit attention to flag.

What the Gospels Meant

Garry Wills's choice of tense is instructive: He is not explaining what the Gospels might mean to us today; he is excavating the writers' purposes. He translates the original Greek himself, clearing away centuries of holy smoke clouding the original intent. Even the Lord's Prayer looks fresh as taken apart by Wills, who writes with scholarship, clarity, and brevity.

Room at the Top

The theme of a young man on the make had already been done better by Thackeray and Dreiser when this novel by John Braine was published in 1957, but Braine succeeds as an agreeable stylist with a sharp eye for the details of human behavior. The dated rendering of some of the dialogue into overblown, faux adult flirting can be excused given the novel's timelessness in other aspects, such as demonstrating the eternal and related pulls of greed and love.

Then We Came to the End

It shouldn't take 200 pages to warm up to a novel; it should take two or three. Joshua Ferris's decision to write most of this book in the first person plural is damned by the fact that the only effective section, starting around page 200, uses the third person singular. The rest is stuffing.

Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light

To submit to a tyranny or to challenge it head-on are the binary choices. The Czech writer Ivan Klima's novel follows a character who takes a third, less comfortable way: accommodation combined with revulsion. The book falls within the tradition of Darkness at Noon and contains that predecessor's psychological insight and cold realism.