Critical response to the critical response

Following my earlier post seeking reviewers for my next book, Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant, one of the literary critics who graciously sent me a review of their own, has taken exception to the views of another critic (bizarrely from the same literary stable). I sense a literary spat in the making…. It goes like this:

To the Editor,

May I express my astonishment (not unmixed with despair) at the review of Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant offered in your April 25th issue by Dr. Harriet Blore?

Dr. Blore, whom I have long respected as a reader of dispassionate clarity, has on this occasion seemingly mistaken irony for incompetence, surrealism for incoherence, and literary audacity for narrative wandering. Her dismissal of the book as “a man talking to himself on a court no one else can see” is not merely ungenerous, it is, I would argue, wilfully obtuse.

What Dr. Blore sees as fragmentation is, in fact, deliberate form unravelling itself. What she regards as literary affectation – talking goats, spectral coaches, Proustian forehands – is the very grammar of the novel’s philosophical ambition. Lord Andy does not hallucinate; he dramatizes. He does not lose touch with reality; he relocates it, absurdly and precisely, on the baseline of Roland-Garros.

It is no coincidence, I think, that Dr. Blore invokes Beckett. But the comparison would serve her argument better if she recognised in this book not parody, but inheritance. The tradition of existential sport-as-mirror runs not only through Beckett but through Camus, Duras, and Nabokov. Lord Andy is not ridiculous because he believes himself noble: he is noble because he dares to be ridiculous.

I invite Dr. Blore (and your readers) to reread the novel with less resistance and more imagination. It is a mirror cracked, yes: but who among us dares to look at ourselves in one that is whole?

Yours,

C. W. Bramble
Literary Correspondent, Times Literary Supplement

Here’s to a response!