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February 5, 2002
SYNDICATED: Testament of a literary dustbin
“It seems inconceivable to me,” writes Elizabeth Young at the opening of her introduction, “that a critic would enthusiastically compile a volume of their old book reviews and then expect anyone to want to read it.” My dear thing, I want to say, you do yourself a disservice. She goes on: “Personally I have a fondness for the form and can read any amount of reviews and criticism but, being a sort of literary dustbin, I’ll read anything.”
Oh yes, she will read anything; but she will also know what the good stuff is and how to tell it apart from the bad. And, if I may speak personally, a book full of criticism is my idea of heaven; as long as it is good criticism. And this is very good indeed. It is also, before you get put off by your half-cooked notions of lit crit as something necessarily dry and nasty, very often funny as well as being right. Lamenting the way editors remove the jokes from submitted copy, she says: “I think literary journalism should be as funny and entertaining as possible, because otherwise who would want to read it?”
Let us just see how right she was. An expert on modern American fiction both by inclination and luck (an uncle who gave the 11-year-old Young books by Nelson Algren, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg — this would have been in 1962 or so), she recognized Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho for what it is: “an indictment of the anorexic soul of the eighties. It demands that we attempt moral redefinition”. In 1991 this was a brave thing to say: there were a lot of people who did not twig that Bateman’s narrative is a delusion.
Six years later she acclaims A.M. Homes’ The end of Alice (you know, the one “about” paedophilia) as a similarly intriguing work, albeit heartbreaking in a different way. One reviewer wrote a particularly sneering account of Young’s review, to which Young was moved to reply. The correspondence is reprinted here, and ends: “Certainly I am drawn to the Gothic, but this is surely a matter for my NHS psychiatrist, not some ignorant amateur who feels entitled to castigate me as morally incontinent on the basis of a piece that was concerned solely with textual analysis.” And her own postscript begins: “Books have never hurt me. People have.”
And that is the long and short of it. If you like books, buy this one. If you like reading, read this. The introduction is a primer for the ambitious that deserves anthologization. Her evaluations of authors are bang on the money. Her non-literary pieces — particularly on Britain’s stupid, vicious drug laws — are both passionate and useful. Her piece on the death of her cat attracted an enormous postbag.
I should add that I knew her: not too well, but well enough for us to howl at each other over the phone when our cats were moribund, or to stand in the corners at literary parties, hating literary parties. I say throughout that she “writes” or “goes on”, but she died last March. I miss her. But I promise that even if I did not know her from Adam or Eve, I would think this book terrific and say exactly the same things about it. —Dawn/Guardian news service
Pandora’s handbag: adventure in the book world
By Elizabeth Young
Serpent’s Tail
ISBN 1852425261
384pp. £14
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