A novel approach

An interesting phenomenon of recent years is the novel about a real-life novelist. Of course, writers have often included fictitious members of their trade within their work — one thinks immediately of Thackeray’s Pendennis, Anthony Powell’s Nick Jenkins and Waugh’s Pinfold. Often, too, novelists have contrived extended tributes to favoured masters — Fielding features prominently in Kingsley Amis’s I Like It Here — without intruding into their social world.

But, until recently, the novel which openly entered into biographical territory, writing a romance about the private lives of classical novelists or other artists, was rarely taken very seriously. Carl Bechhofer Roberts’s This Side Idolatry on the life of Dickens is long forgotten. Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, about Michelangelo, and the works of specialists like Pierre La Mure (on Toulouse-Lautrec, Debussy and the Mendelssohns) seemed to be heading in the same direction.

Nevertheless, in recent years serious writers appear to be turning their hands to this small genre. Probably most of us became aware of it when at least three novelists in 2004 simultaneously decided to write a novel about the same episode in Henry James’s life, with varying degrees of success. Subsequently, the line drawn between rigour and fantasy, the one belonging to the biography, the other to fiction, became blurred. Approaches to a classic author come in unusual forms these days, whether in Sarah Bakewell’s innovative sort-of-biography How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer, Azar Nafisi’s sociological study-cum-memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran or Kate Taylor’s interesting novel Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen. I look forward, too, to David Miller’s debut novel Today this spring, about the death of Joseph Conrad; there are many good stories about Conrad, and it is surprising that novelists are only now getting round to him.