Books in Brief: But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?

But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: Homage to Qwert Yuiop and Other Writings, by Anthony Burgess (McGraw-Hill, 589 pp., $24.95)

Anthony Burgess offers this collection in evidence of the claim that the novel as a serious art form seldom provides the novelist with taxable income; hence the continuing need to produce reams of consumable journalism. There are enough fugitive pieces gathered here to wish that more of them had made good their escape. Still, if you are addicted to highly literate and intelligent flippancy and appreciate the use of style as a weapon against the cant of an age, then this is all very much worth preserving. Burgess is one of those writers who simply come alive on the page, and one reads him for that kind of delightful encounter. Though he cannot always guarantee like amounts of thought and substance, the gift is always there by way of personality and style. The title essay sets the tone for a group of pieces designed to aggravate the professional feminists. The inelegantly titled “Grunts from a Sexist Pig” is one of these; and there are devastating reviews of Marilyn French’s Shakespeare’s Division of Experience and Ellen Moers’s Literary Women, and a predictably favorable one of Kingsley Amis’s Stanley and the Women. Interviews with famous writers have become commonplace today, in both quantity and content, but in Burgess’s short conversation with Graham Greene there is an exchange between equals that tells you more about writing than any five or six volumes of Paris Review interviews. Also, in a separate essay, it is good to have Burgess confirm the master Greene’s late spy novel, The Human Factor, as a work that oughtn’t to be “mentioned in the same breath as Mr. Ie Carre’s best-selling deadweights.” In sum, there are almost two hundred pieces merged into blocks of related interests, with unidentified sections on lexicography, foreign-language fiction, the works of James Joyce, books on music, and so on. And if you’re still wondering about that very odd personification in the subtitle, Burgess suggests you look at the second bank from the top on your typewriter’s keyboard.

TM

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Thomas P. McDonnell

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But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: Homage to Qwert Yuiop and Other Writings, by Anthony Burgess (McGraw-Hill, 589 pp., $24.95)

Anthony Burgess offers this collection in evidence of the claim that the novel as a serious art form seldom provides the novelist with taxable income; hence the continuing need to produce reams of consumable journalism. There are enough fugitive pieces gathered here to wish that more of them had made good their escape. Still, if you are addicted to highly literate and intelligent flippancy and appreciate the use of style as a weapon against the cant of an age, then this is all very much worth preserving. Burgess is one of those writers who simply come alive on the page, and one reads him for that kind of delightful encounter. Though he cannot always guarantee like amounts of thought and substance, the gift is always there by way of personality and style. The title essay sets the tone for a group of pieces designed to aggravate the professional feminists. The inelegantly titled “Grunts from a Sexist Pig” is one of these; and there are devastating reviews of Marilyn French’s Shakespeare’s Division of Experience and Ellen Moers’s Literary Women, and a predictably favorable one of Kingsley Amis’s Stanley and the Women. Interviews with famous writers have become commonplace today, in both quantity and content, but in Burgess’s short conversation with Graham Greene there is an exchange between equals that tells you more about writing than any five or six volumes of Paris Review interviews. Also, in a separate essay, it is good to have Burgess confirm the master Greene’s late spy novel, The Human Factor, as a work that oughtn’t to be “mentioned in the same breath as Mr. Ie Carre’s best-selling deadweights.” In sum, there are almost two hundred pieces merged into blocks of related interests, with unidentified sections on lexicography, foreign-language fiction, the works of James Joyce, books on music, and so on. And if you’re still wondering about that very odd personification in the subtitle, Burgess suggests you look at the second bank from the top on your typewriter’s keyboard.