Book description
Where do novelists get their 'ideas' from? How do they develop an
idea into a narrative with a specific and individual form? How far is
the reception of a work of fiction conditioned by factors outside the
writer's control?
In the first part of this book, in revealing and often amusing
reminiscence, David Lodge traces the history of his recent novel about
Henry James, Author, Author, from the very first mention of the
basic idea in his notebook, through the processes of research and
writing, to the publication and reception of the finished book, which
was adversely affected by the appearance of another novel on the same
subject some six months earlier. These two were not the only novels
inspired by Henry James in circulation in the year 2004, a phenomenon
which Lodge sees with hindsight as 'a coincidence waiting to happen',
with ironic consequences that the Master himself might have invented.
The essays in the second part pursue the themes of genesis,
composition and reception in the work of other novelists. There are
studies of key works by James himself, H. G.Wells, Vladimir Nabokov,
J. M.Coetzee and Umberto Eco, and essays on the literary sources of
Graham Greene's imagination and on a significant anthology of the
'Best of Young American Novelists'. Collectively the contents of this
book throw a brilliant light on the dominant literary form of the last
two centuries, in its twin aspects as work of art and commodity.
David Lodge's novels include
Changing Places
,
Small World
,
Nice Work
,
Therapy
,
Thinks ...
and, most recently,
Author, Author
. He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of
literary criticism, including
The Art of Fiction
,
The Practice of Writing
, and
Consciousness and the Novel
.
