John Osborne
Simon Gray's How's That for Telling 'em, Fat Lady? (Faber, £5.95) is not only the funniest book ever written about the American theatre, but a billiously accurate memoir of the inescapable beastliness of modern life. It splutters with instantly hateful comic characters like snooty hotel clerks, vile shop assistants, subversive elec- tricians, as well as Yankee theatre grotes- ques. Richest of all these is the self-portrait of the author, whose bellicose melancholy and fortitude is so ripe and raw that it makes a TV shadow like, say, Rumpole, seem almost insipid. For those who dread grease-paint anecdotalism, don't be put off. It's a terrific comic adventure, terrifi- cally told with exquisite ill-temper.
The funniest Barmy Book of the Year may have been Letters From a War Zone by Andrea Dworkin (Secker, £7.95), a sort of truck-driver's guide to American femin- ism, which, from the cover photograph of the author, appears to be her own calling. Or maybe a popular late-night TV wrest- ler. A writer she is not. Idiotic but less funny was the paperback Look Back in Gender by Michelene Wandor (Methuen, £5.95). Not so exotically ill-written, but palpably misleading young students with received daftness, it cries out for the swift kick of Clause 28.
Michael Holroyd deserves every penny one hopes he gets for Shaw: The Search for Love (Chatto, £16). Our Song by Keith Waterhouse (Hodder, £10.95) should not only have been short-listed for the Booker Prize, it should possibly have won. But that's the way with these glittering baubles. It was ever the same in my own trade.
Previous page
