William Skidelsky | The Spectator columnists & writers

Is Serena Williams’s fame as a cultural icon eclipsing her tennis?

Serena Williams is not exactly an elegant tennis player — her game is based overwhelmingly on raw power — but one of her shots is an exception. Her serve is not only one of the most destructive strokes in tennis, it’s also one of the most beguilingly beautiful. Her action begins slowly, even ponderously — as if her limbs are reluctant to emerge from stillness. But from this heaviness comes a sudden gathering, an explosive acceleration, as racket, arm, trunk and legs are flung up in unison towards the ball. Gerald Marzorati devotes a couple of pages to Williams’s serve in Seeing Serena, and he points out something I’d never noticed, which is how ‘effortlessly smooth’ her ball toss is. No one, he writes, not even Federer, has ever used their non-dominant arm so efficiently on serve.

‘How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’, by Mohsin Hamid – review

In the classic rags-to-riches narrative, a boy born into poverty attains respectability by dint of hard work, clean living and moral courage. Mohsin Hamid’s third novel — his eagerly awaited follow-up to The Reluctant Fundamentalist — updates the genre for the 21st century, transplanting it to ‘rising Asia’ but stripping it of all sense of uplift. We first encounter Hamid’s unnamed protagonist in his filthy village compound, ‘huddled, shivering on the packed earth’, wracked by hepatitis E. His father, a cook with a ‘voracious sexual appetite’, soon moves the family to the city (‘the first step to getting filthy rich in rising Asia’), where our hero lives in equally squalid conditions but does acquire the vital ‘second step’ of an education.

Rich pickings | 29 November 2012

Despite its playfully obfuscating title, the rationale behind this anthology is pretty straightforward. A ‘fake’ is a fictional text that purports to be — or, perhaps more accurately, is presented in the guise of — a non-fictional document. Of course, there’s nothing new about stories of this type: the epistolary novel has been around for centuries. However, as the editors point out in their introduction (itself a kind of fake, being presented as a ‘how to’ guide), ours is an age awash with different types of written communication, from texts, blogs and emails to marketing mailshots, application forms and end-of-year-reports. Any writer inclined to fake it, therefore, has a wide variety of formats to choose from.

Wit and wisdom

‘To enclose the collected works of Cocteau one would need not a bookshelf, but a warehouse,’ W. H. Auden wrote in 1950. The same isn’t quite true of Auden — a warehouse wouldn’t be necessary — but it has to be said that only a bookshelf of substantial proportions would be capable of accommodating the entirety of his work. Auden wrote a lot of poetry; but he wrote an awful lot of other stuff as well. That other stuff included plays (with Christopher Isherwood), opera librettos (with long-term partner Chester Kallman), song lyrics, lectures, radio broadcasts, record-sleeve notes, introductions to other writers’ work, essays, theological tracts and reams of journalism. This is the third volume of his collected prose, and it takes us only up to 1955 (Auden died in 1973).

A world without frontiers

Alberto Manguel, the dust jacket informs us, is an ‘anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor’ who was born in Argentina, moved to Canada in the 1980s and now lives partly in France. A generous gloss on this would be to say that he is an intrepid crosser of boundaries, someone whose identity is too open-ended for him to confine himself to any one profession or place. Less charitably, one might say that he is a man who doesn’t like to be pinned down. I felt a similar ambivalence on reading The City of Words. It is a work of staggering scope and erudition, packed with interesting information and arguments, and often beautifully written. Yet it, too, is hard to pin down. Despite having read it twice, I am still not sure that I know what Manguel is saying, exactly.

The critic and the novelist

Novelists do not always make the best critics, and vice versa. But there are writers — Henry James, Virginia Woolf and John Updike spring to mind — who are similarly gifted in both fields. Such cases are interesting because of the questions they raise about the relationship between the novels and the criticism. How similar are the two stylistically? Can the judgments of the critic ever be independent of the inclinations of the novelist? (Or, to put it another way, are writers likely to favour those novelists who most resemble themselves?) Trickier still is the question of truthfulness: which, out of the fiction or the criticism, can best be said to represent the real author? Fiction’s domain is the imagination, whereas criticism deals with facts.

Shooting the breeze for free

The Paris Review came into being in 1953, when a group of young Americans living in Paris, among them George Plimpton and William Styron, decided to start a literary magazine. Their intention was to get away from the academic factionalism that then prevailed in literary journals, and simply publish good writing, whether fiction, poetry or plays. In addition, the group came up with an ingenious format — the Q&A — whereby authors would have the chance to discuss the process of writing with a knowledgeable and broadly sympathetic interviewer. Undoubtedly, the format’s appeal was enhanced by the fact that the Paris Review was cash-strapped. Displaying a financial canniness that is rare among literary types, Plimpton and Co.

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