On the evening of September 11, 2001, the American writer Susan Jacoby overheard two men talking in a New York bar. "This is just like Pearl Harbor", one said. "What is Pearl Harbor?" the other asked. "That was when the Vietnamese in a harbor and it started the Vietnam War", the first man replied.Macmillan doesn't provide a citation for the Jacoby account and there's no context, so we're unable to determine whether the speakers were Harvard Law grads, illegal immigrants who unaccountably skipped US History 101 while growing up in Fujian (the Boston Tea Party involved bombs being dropped into the Pearl River?) or rednecks from Skokie. I was reminded of the lack of a cultural reference when buying Jonathan Littell's much publicized - but probably, like Hawking's Brief History, less read - novel The Kindly Ones (London: Chatto & Windus 2009).
The salesperson, seeing Le Nouvel Observateur's "A new War & Peace" on the spine, asked "is that the book by the Russian guy ... the one with lots of characters". "Uh huh", said I, thinking that I should indeed have bought that copy of The Anatomy of Corporate Law: A Comparative & Functional Approach.
The Littell has been much praised. It is a winner of the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman de L'Academie Francaise. Publication "is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in London". Le Monde says that it is a "staggering triumph". Figaro describes it as "a monument of contemporary literature". Lire says it's "a book which leaves you haggard and breathless. One of those rare novels destined to become a classic". And on and on ...
I finished it in one sitting, last night, because after the first two hundred pages I just wanted to get the exercise done with and never return ... breathless, indeed, but with distaste rather than admiration. For me it is a bad book.
Bad in the sense that it's poorly written, with cardboard characters and implausible plotting unredeemed by an interminable dream sequence and recurrent reports on the state of the protagonist's bowels or allusions to Greek literature. If you want Grand Guignol - mandatory description of death-throes ejaculations - read William S Burroughs. If you want frenzy read Celine. Straight literateurs wanting a frisson over back door action - can't have too much transgressive mist, it seems - could stick to Norman Mailer fantasies about Pharaonic Egypt, aka Fun With Ra In the Bat Cave.
Bad in the sense that writing - at length, and with dollops of matricide, sodomy and incest - about the Holocaust doesn't turn what in my view is a pedestrian and very laboured account into Art, at least into art that's worthy of enthronement by the Academie. It's a long but tacky little book, punctuated by appearances from detectives who resemble characters from Tin Tin rather than from Sophocles and action by people who are either automotons or at best are 'severely conflicted' (ie the exculpatory 'Nazism = mental disease' meme). If you want humour you could always turn to Günter Grass or, more bravely, to Tadeusz Borowski (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen). Endorsement by critics isn't surprising, given the reception of authors such as Genet and Kosiński and acclaim for schlock such as The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, Life Is Beautiful or The Hand That Signed The Paper.
I've mentioned length because concision is one measure of artistry. The Kindly Ones lacks the anguished lucidity and austere concision of more modest works such as Viktor Klemperer's diaries, matter-of-factly reporting on mass murderers and their accomplices, and The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944 edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki. In a world where people seem confused about whether it was tea or bombs, in 1941 or 1841, we might be better off consigning Littell's work to the remainder bin and looking instead at Klemperer or Horwitz. Adorno has been [mis]quoted as saying that after Auschwitz poetry wasn't possible. The example of Paul Celan demonstrates that's incorrect. We should, however, approach the Holocaust, and other horrors, with great circumspection rather than using them to animate cardboard cutouts in a commercial peepshow.
