Michael Wood

We all know what a Euro-novel is. It’s clever and shallow, full of allusions to fashionable figures, and elaborately interested in its own making. The home product, by contrast, is solid and deep, staunchly unaware that there are any other cultural products in the world, and firmly convinced that the art which conceals art is the next best thing to having no art at all. On my left, Umberto Eco; on my right … there are too many contenders, I can’t make out any individual faces in the crowd. I’m not suggesting there are no British Europeans, or that all Continental Europeans write Euro-novels; or that there aren’t solid and unfashionable novels which are distinctly shallow as well. But what if behind this caricature of a comparison there were genuine literary differences? What if there is a European habit or tradition, and our suspicion of it is chiefly a failure to recognise it for what it is?

Slugging it out with Diana Trilling in the pages of Commentary, Robert Lowell remarked: ‘Controversy is bad for the mind and worse for the heart.’ Mrs Trilling, for all the world like Dorothea Brooke or some other 19th-century heroine of the strenuously examined life, replied: ‘I have never thought controversy bad for either the mind or the heart.’ She missed the grace and weariness of Lowell’s phrase, as well as the sense of genuine damage which lurked in his irony, but she had found a triumphant definition of what she herself was about. She was a controversialist not out of belligerence or righteousness or arrogance, but out of cultural conviction. There are things we don’t need to argue about, she would say, but not many. Argument is the visible, sequential life of ideas. Controversy is good for the heart, and indispensable for any but the lazy mind.

‘And so,’ Bréhal said, ‘love would be time become available to the senses.’

When asked what part of the Middle West he comes from, Jay Gatsby says: ‘San Francisco.’ This is usually taken as a sign of his shaky geography or his eagerness to cover up his origins, or both. But the response seems too blunt and broad for that – too blunt and broad for either Gatsby or Fitzgerald. If Gatsby were at all given to making jokes, we might think this was one.’

‘Logic is doubtless unshakeable,’ Joseph K. thinks towards the end of The Trial, ‘but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living.’ He is wrong, of course, since he is killed within a page by the brutal logic of the novel he is in. But there is a logic that resists such logic, and one of its masters is Joseph H., author of Catch 22 and other objections to the absurdity of dying.