Theo Tait

Even Michael Ondaatje’s most ardent admirers admit that there’s an act of faith involved in reading his work. Words like ‘precious’, ‘portentous’, ‘a struggle’ and ‘slightly implausible’ regularly crop up in even the most enthusiastic reviews – but are then explained away as necessary sacrifices to his higher purpose. His books are designed on grand, operatic lines; and they take everything – from love and death to 1940s pop music and bowling – very, very seriously. As a consequence, they risk pratfalls and sniggers. Is he poetic or ‘poetic’? Are his metaphors daring and striking, or patently absurd? Are his lyrical interludes spellbinding or stultifying? Does he turn out prose of Biblical grandeur or thumping pomposity? Is his narrative technique beautifully oblique and prismatic, or disconnected and frequently preposterous?’‘

Haruki Murakami’s translator, Philip Gabriel, describes him as a ‘one-man revolution in Japanese fictional style’. His early novels and short stories of the 1980s – playful, wry, experimental, saturated in references to Western culture – made him the spiritual cheerleader of a new generation of writers. They rejected the prevailing naturalism of ‘pure...

Richard Yates faced some formidable obstacles: a broken home, tuberculosis, rampant alcoholism, divorce (twice), lack of recognition and manic depression – a combination that sent him, as he put it, ‘in and out of bughouses’. Even his triumphs seemed only to cause further distress. Though his first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), was a critical success, sales were...

In 1986, a postal employee in Edmond, Oklahoma ran amok with a gun, shooting 14 co-workers dead and wounding six others before killing himself. Nearly twenty similar incidents occurred at American post offices during the 1980s and 1990s, though on a smaller scale. As a result ‘going postal’ came to be used as a synonym for a berserk outburst of violence. Charles Bukowski’s...

For a long time, Paul Auster’s novels were much more popular in France than in America. Perhaps this is because he sounds more convincing in French. ‘Ecrivain de la mégapole, de l’errance et du hasard, Paul Auster est devenu un auteur culte,’ one Parisian blurb-artist writes, catching the appeal in a way that his English-speaking counterparts find difficult....