This summer I read some early novels by writers I liked. A lot of first novels aren't very good; this may be what happens when very intelligent people don't quite know how to produce fiction, and they try to think their ways into their stories by setting aside sentiment, and blandness, and easy assumptions, without knowing how to produce anything stronger or better. These three writers all produced unattractive characters who behave badly, in a mild way, especially toward ugly or stupid characters, and then fail to be redeemed, or else are redeemed in flat, ironic ways. All of which can be said about my own first novel, which, I'm happy to say, is now only a few chapters away from being finished (i.e., the bulk of the writing will be done, and all I'll need to do will be a final read-through and revision), thanks to a major writing jag this week. However.
Anyway, you all know how much I love A.S. Byatt. But before she was A.S. Byatt The Very Smart and Amusing Novelist of Ideas, she was A.S. Byatt Who Was Very Young. So, in 1967, she produced her second novel, The Game, in which she didn't, quite, have game, yet. The novel is clever, and full of unexpected depths, and well written, and strangely flat, unmoving, and unsatisfying. I tried to get into this novel two times before and wound up putting it down, this time I finished it, and my only real satisfaction was to reach the point at which there was only one Byatt fiction (Shadow of the Sun, her first novel) that I hadn't yet read. (After publishing The Game Byatt published two books of criticism, and then eleven years later, published her third novel, the gorgeous The Virgin in the Garden. The growth between the two novels is really astonishing.) Anyway, back to this one. In case you're interested, it's about two sisters who have, since childhood, been competing in an imaginative game that spills over into the adult lives, encloses them in its power struggles, and effectively spoils them for dealing with "real life," whatever that is. It's a little too conceptual to be interesting, though there are some vivid scenes of social embarrassment (of which Byatt has always been a merciless observer). The younger sister, a novelist, is also at her best when writing scenes of profound social embarrassment involving her sister. That kind of parallelism is mildly clever. Don't read this unless you too are a Byatt completist.
I also love M.F.K. Fisher. In 1947 she produced the very odd novel Not Now but Now, of which I was dubious, but excited by the jacket flap's mention of the lovely meal descriptions to be found within. Well, there weren't enough meals. What there is is the story of Jennie, a beautiful, selfish, absolutist kind of woman with tiny feet, who appears in three or four different places and eras and behaves selfishly and absolutely in all of them. It's got a kind of Jean Rhys-ian appreciation of the soulless despair of the very beautiful woman. Yet the whole time, you get the feeling that M.F. was sitting in her study, scribbling away, and thinking to herself, "What rubbish." Even in the afterward, which I believe she wrote in the '70s when the book was reprinted by North End Press, and which I could verify if I hadn't traded in my copy at Seventh Avenue Books, she remarks that she'd only written the novel because her third husband bullied her into it, and, as for the novel's quality, whatever. The novel is an expression of the kind of personality that, in her nonfiction works, M.F. says was frequently ascribed to her by men she had known. So there it is. Don't read it; it is silly and rather embarrassing.
Peter Carey's first novel Bliss (1981) is much better than either of the previous two novels. While it may actually be a good novel, I didn't particularly like it. In it some normal, bourgeois people--an ad exec, his partner, his wife--get their lives reassessed when the ad exec, Harry Joy, comes back from the dead and realizes he's in actually in hell. The novel's got that seamy-underside-of-suburban-life feel, but what saves the novel from being just banal is that Carey really enjoys depicting character and plot absurdities and major and minor depravities. You can get a real thrill out of the evil and the ugliness and, occasionally, the grossness. The worst bits happen when Harry Joy meets a vegetarian whore named Honey Barbara (ugh), a Beatrice figure who *spoiler* yack redeems him. I don't mind the redemption so much as the ooginess--everything oogie you can imagine about a character named "Honey Barbara" is in there, including the oogie eroticism. The only good thing about it is that she cooks, and I was interested in the cooking descriptions (which disappointed me in the Fisher novel). While on the whole I didn't really like Bliss, Carey delivered on the vigorous writing, the sufficiently complex plot, and the refusal to deliver neat moral homilies. And those are all things that only got better in some of his later novels.
