Self-Effacers
John Lanchester
- Chicago Loop by Paul Theroux
Hamish Hamilton, 183 pp, £12.99, April 1990, ISBN 0 241 12940 0 - Lies of Silence by Brian Moore
Bloomsbury, 194 pp, £12.99, April 1990, ISBN 0 7475 0610 8 - Amongst Women by John McGahern
Faber, 184 pp, £12.99, May 1990, ISBN 0 571 14284 2 - The Condition of Ice by Christopher Burns
Secker, 170 pp, £12.95, April 1990, ISBN 0 436 19989 0
It’s sometimes easy to forget that good writing is not necessarily brilliant on the surface. There are talented novelists who eschew local flourishes in favour of a tonal evenness which they believe better serves the purposes of structure, characterisation and plot. Their prose seeks to be transparent rather than dazzling. If one could plot writers on a continuum which measured the extent to which a prose style forces its brilliance on our attention, the four novelists here under review would be clustered towards the self-effacing side of the spectrum, with colleagues such as Burgess, Nabokov and Amis fils huddling together for warmth at the far end.
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