A tremendously exhilarating book, John Sutherland’s history of fiction in English from John Bunyan and Aphra Behn to Patricia Cornwell, Alice Sebold and Rana Dasgupta is less a work of scholarship than it is a catalogue of pleasures.
Indeed, there’s something distinctly gossipy, almost salacious, in Sutherland’s fascination with the messy lives of authors. Sexual indiscretions, alcoholism, ill health, financial desperation and early death are virtual leitmotifs, running throughout these 800 pages of potted literary biography. For example, toward the end of his entry on Edith Wharton, he quotes a steamy passage from an unpublished sketch called “Beatrice Palmato.” Who knew that the corseted grande dame of American letters could write stuff so hot and graphic it can’t possibly be quoted in a family newspaper?
More from Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
Ostensibly, Sutherland’s title — “Lives of the Novelists” — alludes to the biographical-critical masterwork of Samuel Johnson, “Lives of the Poets.” But Sutherland is less an interpretative genius than he is a literary entertainer. In some ways, his book might be better likened to the lip-smackingly scandalous “Brief Lives” of the 17th-century eccentric John Aubrey or even to the “Curiosities of Literature” of that snapper-up of unconsidered trifles Isaac D’Israeli. This means you can read Sutherland for fun as well as for (cultural) profit. Daniel Defoe, he tells us, once failed in a scheme to harvest musk “from the anus of cats,” and Laurence Sterne’s corpse was stolen from its grave and “recognized — just before dismemberment — on a medical school dissection table at Cambridge.”
Despite his taste for the louche and eye-popping, Sutherland — the retired Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London — unquestionably possesses the proper academic bona fides. His earlier works include “The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction” (a 900-entry biographical encyclopedia that he wrote from scratch), important books about Thackeray, Walter Scott and Mrs. Humphry Ward, and several studies of bestsellers and the popular fiction market. For decades now, he has also been a fixture in Britain as a reviewer for the top literary periodicals and newspapers.
As if he were its custodian, Sutherland seems to know every room in the House of Fiction, from the dank basement where the chained monsters slaver to the formal drawing rooms of Jane Austen and Henry James. Although a critic like Harold Bloom disdains Stephen King, without, perhaps, having done more than glance at one of his books, it’s clear that Sutherland has read nearly all King’s novels and grasped his storytelling genius: “What sets King apart from other super-selling authors is his constant straining against the limitations of genre.”
I really can’t underscore enough the range and sprightliness of “Lives of the Novelists.” Sutherland discusses the cowboy novelists Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Max Brand and Louis L’Amour; writes shrewdly about the mystery-thriller specialists Edgar Wallace, Eric Ambler, Margery Allingham, Leslie Charteris (creator of “The Saint” and a founder of Mensa), Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, Dick Francis and Trevanian; and emphasizes the sociological influence of such classic children’s authors as L. Frank Baum, Kenneth Grahame, Enid Bagnold, Richmal Crompton and Captain W.E. Johns (creator of Biggles). Although he covers “good” bestsellers such as Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” and Marilyn French’s “The Women’s Room,” he doesn’t neglect influential “bad” ones, such as Harold Robbins’s “The Carpetbaggers,” Jacqueline Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls” and, even, William L. Pierce’s rancid “The Turner Diaries.” There’s something, in short, for every taste and, implicitly, an invitation to try some new or exotic items from fiction’s smorgasbord.
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