While leav­ing a com­ment at Johannes Göransson’s blog today, I remem­bered an essay by Martin Amis that sug­gests another avatar for the Bovary-dandy-hipster daisy chain I assem­bled last Friday. In the midst of a long recon­sid­er­a­tion of Lolita (the last essay in The War Against Cliché) Amis writes:

Shock­able Hum­bert, who finds bad lan­guage so “disgusting.” I shud­der to think how his ghost, attired in its ghostly smoking-​jacket, would round on me for call­ing him a vul­gar­ian and a philis­tine. Actu­ally he is of a more dan­ger­ous and rarer breed (though one very fully rep­re­sented in Nabokov’s corpus): such people, because they cannot make art out of life, make their lives into art. Hum­bert is the artist manqué…The weep­ing Hum­bert sheds above-​average teardrops, “hot, opales­cent, thick tears that poets and lover shed.” He is “her Catullus,” he is “poor Catullus”: “The gentle and dreamy regions though which I crept were the pat­ri­monies of poets—not crime’s stamp­ing ground.” This is all blas­phe­mous flan­nel, nat­u­rally. Who but Hum could refer to the gauged post­pone­ment of his orgasm (on the sofa, with a still inno­cent Lo) as a “nicety of phys­i­o­log­i­cal equipoise com­pa­ra­ble to cer­tain tech­niques in the arts”? “Emphatically, no killers are we,” Hum­bert pleads: “Poets never kill.” But this one does. Before he pulls the trig­ger he recites a poem: a parody—under the cir­cum­stances, a travesty—of “Ash Wednesday.” And Nabokov never had much time for Eliot.

“As a lit­er­ary jour­nal­ist, John Updike has that single ines­timable virtue: having read him once, you admit to your­self, almost with a sigh, that you will have to read every­thing he writes. At a time when the reviewer’s role has devolved to that of a canary in a pre-​war coalmine, Updike reminds you that the review can, in its junior way, be some­thing of a work of art, or at least a worthy vehi­cle for the play of ideas, feel­ing, and wit.”

—Martin Amis, from his review of Updike’s Picked-​Up Pieces.

UPDATE (1/28): Wyatt Mason has more.

Before his Nobel Prize was announced I had never heard of Jean-​Marie Gus­tave Le Clézio, and judg­ing from the notices that fol­lowed the news, nei­ther had many other Anglo­phone read­ers. (Though I did learn recently that writ­ing was his third choice of voca­tion, after sail­ing and archi­tec­ture, his futures in which were doomed, respec­tively, by poor eye­sight and a weak grasp of math­e­mat­ics. And in the search for a pho­to­graph to top this post I have also learned that he thinks the inter­net might have stopped Hitler. I wonder how Keith Gessen feels about that?)

Le Clézio receives his award in Stock­holm on Wednes­day, and so it seemed appro­pri­ate that my igno­rance would be bat­tered, just a little, by the dis­cov­ery yes­ter­day of a decades-​old review of War, his sixth novel.

I’ve been wait­ing for some­one to write a good long piece about the phe­nom­e­non that some have named the New Athe­ism: i.e. the rash of books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christo­pher Hitchens, Daniel Den­nett, and others whose express intent has been to hasten the dis­ap­pear­ance of reli­gion as a cul­tural force. The arti­cle I wanted to read would have less to do with push­ing back against the argu­ments in these books than it would with trying to explain the phe­nom­e­non of their col­lec­tive appearance.

The most obvi­ous ques­tion that this imag­i­nary inquiry would tackle would be the ques­tion of timing: why did so many of these books appear all at once?