After April 9, 2024's 'Mulligan Stew' janan.ganesh@ft.com reverts to type: framing his essay via Ian McEwan, Proust, Martin Amis & 'the Ganesh Motivational Bootcamp'
Literary Observer wonders...
Mr. Ganesh begins his essay with these evocative paragraphs:
In the novels of Ian McEwan, a pattern recurs. The main character makes a mistake — just one — which then hangs over them forever. A girl misidentifies a rapist, and in doing so shatters three lives, including her own (Atonement). A man exchanges a lingering glance with another, who becomes a tenacious stalker (Enduring Love). A just-married couple fail to have sex, or rather have it badly, and aren’t themselves again, either as individuals or as a pair (On Chesil Beach). Often, the mistake reverberates over much of the 20th century.
This plot trick is said to be unbecoming of a serious artist. McEwan is accused of an obsession with incident that isn’t true to the gradualism and untidiness of real life. Whereas Proust luxuriates in the slow accretion of human experience, McEwan homes in on the singular event. It is too neat. It is written to be filmed.
Well, I am old enough now to observe peers in their middle years, including some disappointed and hurt ones. I suggest it is McEwan who gets life right. The surprise of middle age, and the terror of it, is how much of a person’s fate can boil down to one misjudgement.
https://www.ft.com/content/fa1a5780-b8ca-45ae-a09e-46e95737bda7
Some how this Literary Framework… something goes wrong, and The Reader encounters the trite, the shop-worn detritus of the ordinary. Repeated as if those repetitions offers insights, about lives scared by one misjudgement: Ganesh supplies the ‘evidence’ of that one ‘mishap’ as a singularity that cannot be overcome. It seems that Life, as lived, is not full of opportunities, indeed second chances, third, fourth etc.? I can recall reading the collected literary reviews of V.S. Pritchett with pleasure: a link to The New York Review’s collection of his essays:
V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) was a British essayist, novelist and short story writer. He worked as a foreign correspondent for the The Christian Science Monitor and as a literary critic for New Statesman. In 1968 Pritchett was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire; he was knighted in 1975. His body of work includes many collections of short stories, in addition to travelogues, reviews, literary biographies and novels.
https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/vs-pritchett/
Some times reading a Critic can offer insights, that had originally escaped the Reader attention. In the final paragraph of the Ganesh’s essay ‘A profane cast of mind’ reads as self-congratulation, afloat in cavalier cynicism!
But it is also the one that most approximates life outside the stadium. I am now roughly midway through that other low-scoring game. Looking around at the distress and regret of some peers, I feel sympathy, but also amazement at the casualness with which people entered into big life choices. Perhaps this is what happens when ideas of redemption and resurrection — the ultimate second chance — are encoded into the historic faith of a culture. It takes a more profane cast of mind to see through it.
Literary Observer