Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant – the third in the Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player series – has not yet hit the clay courts of Paris, but it is already causing a minor fracas between two esteemed literary critics. Here’s Dr. Harriet Blore’s riposte to C.W. Bramble’s response to her:
To the Editor,
Mr Bramble’s florid defence of Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant — printed in your previous issue — deserves a response, if only to remind your readers that literary criticism is not a branch of interpretive dance.
I am grateful, in a way, that Mr Bramble has chosen to reveal the full extent of his infatuation with chaos. His attempt to salvage coherence from a narrative built upon gibbering metaphor is impressive in its gymnastics, but ultimately unconvincing. He writes of “deliberate form unravelling itself” — I suspect he might say the same of a dropped pavlova.
Let us speak plainly. Les Conquêtes Normandes is not a novel of philosophical depth, but of literary cosplay. Its protagonist is not Camus’s Meursault with a racket, but a man-child staging an internal Wimbledon with imaginary friends and a goat. That Mr Bramble chooses to frame this as an act of theatrical courage rather than symptomatic overreach is revealing.
There is a growing trend — and Mr Bramble exemplifies it — to mistake the absurd for the profound simply because it resists paraphrase. A goat appears. A coach quotes Proust. The net whispers. None of this is difficult to understand. It is simply not serious.
What we are witnessing is not the resurgence of the European novel’s surreal tradition. It is the monetisation of eccentricity. Mr Bramble may enjoy watching the emperor serve underarm in his invisible clothes; I prefer literature that dares to wear trousers.
Sincerely,
Dr. Harriet Blore
Senior Critic, Times Literary Supplement
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