“She would rather have had him flare into a worthless popularity than flicker down into total extinction.”
There is a bit of Rosamond Vincy from Middlemarch in Amy Reardon, except here Amy’s thinking is much less veiled than Rosamond’s. Or, perhaps another way to put it is that Gissing wrote without any veil.
“How can Mr. Reardon do this if he shuts himself up in the house?”
It’s up to an outsider, Edith Carter, who has no experience with any kind of literary endeavor, to point out astutely that Reardon is bound to fail in his career as a novelist: he’s seeing little, hearing little, feeling some (but not much).
“But what’s the good of talk that leads to nothing?”
“It’s a bit of real life.”
“Yes, but it has no market value. You may write what you like, so long as people are willing to read you.”
A conversation that happens in every generation of writers. It’s refreshing to know that no one is spared.
Join us on December 13 for a virtual discussion of New Grub Street with Yiyun Li.
Edith exhibits her adroit emotional intelligence in response to Amy's comment that when Edith mentions her novelist friend Reardon, undoubtedly no one recognizes the name:
'Well, my dear, you don't expect ordinary novel-readers to know about Mr Reardon. I wish my acquaintances were a better kind of people; then, of course, I should hear of his books more often. But one has to make the best of such society as offers. If you and your husband forsake me, I shall feel it a sad loss; I shall indeed.'
Actually I think Shakespeare in his comedies was the first to do this well:
'I want, among other things, to insist upon the fateful power of trivial incidents. No one has yet dared to do this seriously....The mere fact of grave issues in life depending on such paltry things is monstrously ludicrous. Life is a huge farce, and the advantage of possessing a sense of humour is that it enables one to defy fate with mocking laughter.'
Since, it was a preoccupation of Javier Marias in his fiction.