About halfway through reading this collection of essays I had one of those hall-of-mirrors moments. These are mostly book reviews, you see: high-toned, long-form New York Review of Books-type review-essays, given — but book reviews nevertheless. There I was, dutifully noting what David Lodge wrote about what Martin Stannard had to say about Muriel Spark, for instance. At once I found myself entertaining the baseless, pleasing notion that, some years from now a collection of my own book reviews would appear in an edition called something awful like Writing Things Down or Twelve-Point Garamond. And that in due course some whey-faced stripe would, in The Spectator’s books pages, apply himself to noting what Sam Leith wrote about what David Lodge wrote about what Martin Stannard had to say about Muriel Spark. And that in due course, whey-face would publish his own collected — Wheys of Seeing, or similar — and The Spec would assign it to Streaky O’Piss for review, and so on and so on.
All this is not to say that we shouldn’t reprint book reviews, nor I suppose that reviewing them is a waste of time. But there can be a sense, particularly when reviewing a review of a literary biography, that the original object of study might have made its excuses and quietly slipped out of the room. Nevertheless…
The title of Lodge’s collection gives it a loosely unifying theme: here’s a critic and novelist writing about the interface between life and writing in different ways. Here are reviews of literary biographies; memoirs and biographical essays of writers; and memoirs of Lodge’s own life in writing. For critics in general — and especially for critics of Lodge’s generation, brought up under the austerities of the New Criticism — this has a pleasant flavour of intellectual truancy about it.
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