Anxious Pleasures 
James Wood
- Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man by Claire Tomalin
What is this? ‘Two miles behind it a jet of white steam was travelling from the left to the right of the picture.’ It is a train, viewed across a valley, in Jude the Obscure (1895), and it is the only sentence offered there about this train. Flaubert is always described as the great cinematic novelist, the great novelist of detail, and indeed Flaubert has his own described train-steam too – similarly seen, in L’Education sentimentale, across fields, but ‘stretched out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away’. But where Flaubert turns his train-steam into writing, flourishing his fine literary simile, Hardy, flirting with the pictorially gnomic, seems to want to resist that conversion; Hardy would like to preserve the visuality of the detail.
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From the LRB letters page: [ 25 January 2007 ] Rachel Ware.
James Wood’s How Fiction Works is just out. He is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Other articles by this contributor:
Bohumil Hrabal · the life, times, letters and politics of Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal
Puffed Wheat · How serious is John Bayley?
The Slightest Sardine · a literary dragnet
Addicted to Unpredictability · Knut Hamsun
A Frog’s Life · Coetzee’s Confessions
Gossip in Gilt · John Updike’s Licks of Love
Credulity · ‘Life of Pi’
Damaged Beasts · Peter Carey’s ‘Theft’
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