Opening paragraph:
“Jasper, listening before he cracked an egg, remarked with cheerfulness.”
George Gissing is not a particularly poetic writer, but I love the detail that Milvain waits for the church bell to finish ringing before cracking an egg. It takes a character with a certain degree of aesthetic sense to do that; or else, a certain degree of greediness.
One hundred pounds in 1882 would be 15,000 pounds in 2023. One absorbs the details of every character’s financial situation with eagerness. These characters share a similar fate with many of Jane Austen’s characters, though here fate is much more menacing: life is never a garden walk or a tea party for Gissing’s characters. Breakfast is cold with the news of a hanged man.
“I tell you, writing is a business… We talk of literature as a trade, not of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare… I speak only of good, coarse, marketable stuff for the world’s vulgar.”
Rather refreshing to open a novel with such an unpalatable character, and unapologetically so.
Join us on December 13 for a virtual discussion of New Grub Street with Yiyun Li.
I loved the detail of the bell, too. Another favorite: Jasper's clean-shaven look that is "of bureaucratic type." Reminds me of John McPhee once writing that someone's mustache "seems medical, in that it spreads flat beyond the corners of his mouth and suggests no prognosis, positive or negative."
I recently read Spark’s “A Far Cry from Kensington,” which feels like it was an apt prelude to this! “To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity”--akin to Mrs. Hawkins’s favorite epithet (“pisseur de copie”). Love the tensions at work from the jump: between Jasper and his sisters, Maud and her mother, Reardon and Jasper, “Sunday-school prize books” and George Eliot (!), literature and trade. As a writer and a bookseller I am gleefully all in!