New James Wood

The good James Wood that likes to dissect the workings of new and interesting books (as opposed to the big-game author-hunting version) has published a rather enlightening essay in the LRB:

Pilcrow is a peculiar, original, utterly idiosyncratic book.
It is admirably courageous, both in what it heaps on us, and in what it
holds back. While it drops us deep into the everyday, it boldly refuses
the everyday consolations of plot and dramatic structure. John’s
brother and sister barely appear. His father and mother, though vividly
drawn, are somewhat arrested in their 1950s roles – quiet breadwinner
and anxious, emotional housewife. A larger question – of what these
five hundred or so very talented pages amount to – is not quite
answered by the book in hand. The problem with the parodic patina is
that you are still reading a conventional coming-of-age gay fiction,
and a conventional story about an English boys’ school, with all the
usual stuff about wet dreams and wanking and flogging, and bottoms and
trouser-bulges. Mars-Jones’s desire to make John’s disability seem
normal – itself no small fictional triumph, since we entirely inhabit
this invented world – is in danger of cancelling out the originality of
that disability, and hence half of the novel’s raison d’être. If John
seems too pathetically disabled, then the novel comes uneasily close to
the pessimism of ‘One Arm’ – homosexuality and disability unpleasantly
twinned; but if John becomes too healthy in his disability, then the
disability seems a little pointless, and the battle against the
moralism of ‘One Arm’ a hollow gesture.

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