Buckets of Empathy

James Wood

  • On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion by Gabriel Josipovici
    Yale, 294 pp, £18.95, October 1999, ISBN 0 300 07991 5

If innocence were a family business, a terraced saga like Buddenbrooks, our age would be the sickly generation that abandons the firm and takes up the piano. We would seem to have nothing left in the innocence bank; we are rich on suspicion. In literature, contemporary examples abound. Martin Amis, for instance, offers his own brief allegory of the writer’s modern suspicion in The Information. Richard Tull, a novelist, hears birds singing in his garden, and thinks, mournfully: ‘say birds were just parrots and learned their songs from what they heard: those trills and twitters were imitations of mountain rivulets, of dew simpering downwards through trees. Now the parrot had left its jungle and stood on a hook in a pub shouting “Bullshit!” ’

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Vol. 22 No. 7 · 30 March 2000 » James Wood » Buckets of Empathy (print version)
Pages 21-23 | 3863 words