Great expectations dashed

Philip Hensher

CHARLES DICKENS by Jane Smiley Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99, pp. 214, ISBN 0297607774 0 h dear. This is a book I've been looking forward to all year, and in the event my disappointment is so keen that I wonder whether the author is the Jane Smiley I was thinking of, or if this one is another woman of the same name. My admiration for Jane Smiley is so high that I only reluctantly review this book at all. It is the one blot on a brilliant career.

The point of reviewing it, however, is that Jane Smiley ought to be able to write an extremely good book about Dickens. From the evidence of her novels, one would easily have concluded that she had carefully studied Dickens's methods, and had understood his complex and virtuoso techniques. Her books, particularly the recent ones, have a real mastery over Dickensian style. Horse Heaven, a sublime book, takes on a big Dickensian idea, of economic exchange and its human implications, and explores it with magnificent gusto through dozens of stories and a world of peculiar physical profusion. It really is a serious challenge to Bleak House.

She has that native Dickensian exuberance; she has, too, an admirable and very effective willingness to yield to sumptuous, shameless sentiment and thunderous melodrama. Like him, she is highly prone to fou rire over things which most people don't notice. Moo must he one of the most seriously funny books written since the war, and very few novelists have ever had the technical resourcefulness to sustain a comedy on such an enormous scale. She must have learnt from Dickens, surely, that the funniest jokes are all in the timing, that the best punchlines are always perfectly innocuous in isolation. In Moo the thing which increasingly reduced me to cushionchewing helplessness was quite simply the innocent word 'hog', which just got funnier and funnier. It is the same mastery evident when the Fat Boy in Pickwick says, 'I wants to make your flesh creep', when the barometer falls off the wall in Hay Fever, when the character in Ben Travers says, 'Arrest several of these vicars,' or the line from Fawhy Towers, 'He's from Barcelona.' There is no real reason why these things should be so funny, and anyone would like an explanation from someone who can do It.

Everything in Jane Smiley's best work shows that she has learnt an enormous amount from Dickens, and has made his methods her own. The physical concreteness, the mastery of scale, the big controlling idea and the vivid, grotesque miniatures are all recognisably Dickensian; on a more technical level, the ruthlessly effective recapitulations come from the heartbreaking moment when Joe, in Great Expectations, says, 'What larks, Pip,' one last time, and the interlacing narratives of her best books are the work of someone who really understands the intricate structure of Our Mutual Friend. She is a wonderful novelist, and has used Dickens's techniques to write books which are entirely her own.

The views of one great novelist on another ought always to be interesting; novelists are interested in matters which few critics have pondered, like form, cadence and point of view. Henry James's critical essays, or Pritchett's, or Nabokov's, don't have an especial authority, and are often quite wrong, but they do have an especial inter est. Jane Smiley on Dickens ought to be unmissable, but this is a serious disappointment.

The very strong impression the book gives is that it has been written by someone conscious that they ought to be on their best behaviour, and rather nervous about the prospect. It feels very much like someone who is trying her best to write in an uncongenial mode, and saying the sorts of things which she thinks she ought to be saying. In this case, a novelist of the first order is trying to write orthodox literary criticism and biography. One feels — one hopes — that she has suppressed her real interest and insights into Dickens in favour of the sort of things a literary critic would say, and in many cases already has said. We get a great deal, therefore, about Dickens's ideas about society, which no one since Orwell has really thought a fruitful subject for inquiry — they are ridiculously flimsy variations on 'Wouldn't it be nice if, and only interesting because they are effective, simple assertions on which great novels can be based. There is an amazing amount about whether characters are lovable or memorable or delightful, a line of inquiry which may have been at the cutting edge of criticism in the reign of Edward VII, but is distinctly embarrassing now. And there is a nervous feeling that she ought to be giving the novels marks out of ten and summing them up. What we want is what intrigues her, the moments which have struck her, and not whether Bamaby Budge is inferior overall to Martin Chuzzlewit.

One reads the book with a constant sceptical voice in the head, saying, 'Oh, come on, you don't mean that, surely?' The tangible nervousness emerges on almost every page, with judgments which accord with conventional wisdom and not the inquiring magpie reader Jane Smiley must be. 'The Pickwick Papers is not a book which holds much appeal for the modern reader.' Has she gone mad? The Old Curiosity Shop 'is now impossible for many to read, even those who are devoted Dickensians'. Miss Smiley, your pants are on fire and you are talking about the maddest extravaganza the unconscious mind ever committed directly to paper.

The nearest she gets to controversy, or revealing what she really thinks, is conceding that though Our Mutual Friend is not universally admired, for her it 'is Dickens's perfect novel, seamless and true and delightful in every line'. There are various objections to that judgment. The first is that nobody is going to say. 'Yes, that's true, I never thought of it like that,' because it doesn't actually mean anything.

The second is that it's so banal and unengaged that if a sixth-grader wrote the sentence in a book report, the form teacher would instantly start wondering whether the book had been read at all. The third is that it's not true, and obviously not true; Our Mutual Friend fascinates me more than anything else in Dickens, too, but far from being 'seamless', it is structurally chaotic.

And as for 'true and delightful in every line' come on, this is the novel where a child dies whispering 'a kiss for the boofer lady' and Bella is made to inform her husband that she's in the club with a lot of guff in blank verse about ships bearing wee cargoes, or something. True and delightful in every line is the one thing it is not.

The insistent crackle of wit present on every page of Jane Smiley's novels has baf

flingly been replaced by the vaguest and least thoughtful phrases of reviewers. She hardly dares to risk any more enthusiastic or evocative word than 'interesting'. 'One of the most interesting things about Dickens . . . .' The dialogue in Pickwick is 'simultaneously interesting and economi cal'. Mantalini's conversation in Nickleby results in 'an interesting twist'. Balzac and Stendhal, it is conceded, wrote 'interesting novels'. Dickens's silence over why Domhey pere is so ghastly is 'interesting'.

Chatham was an 'interesting place to grow up in'. Even Agnes in David Coppetfield is 'interesting' and not the ghastly boring sim perer we all remember. There are other nervous and unspecific commendations which recur. notably 'delightful', but 'inter esting' is particularly unfortunate. The one thing you don't need to say about any aspect of Dickens's life or any page of his work is that it is interesting.

This must all come from a writer on her best behaviour. The signs of nervousness are everywhere, from dutifully reporting what David Lodge said once about Bakhtin to the weird fixation on posh subjunctives.

There's a sentence beginning, 'That Dick ens now chose to' on practically every page. There is the sense of duty, of having to cover the ground conscientiously and not frighten the reader off with anything eccentric or individual. The only sign at all of what must be a serious passion for and a profound engagement with Dickens comes when she quotes him, which she does bril liantly, showing him at full stretch. She does see; but for some unfathomable reason, she has written a book which anyone could have written.

I must say. I never thought I would have to be unkind about a book by Jane Smiley, and I hope never to be so again. Only someone of the highest merits can exasperate a reader to this degree, and, my good ness, you want to know how Dickens has shaped Jane Smiley into the wonderful novelist she now is. Instead, we find our selves listening to the startlingly unoriginal insight that Little Dorrit 'is an exceptionally dark view of human nature'. Let's all forget about it as quickly as possible.