David Lodge, _Author, Author_

THIS CAME OUT in 2004 within a few months of The Master by Colm Toibin, making for what I am guessing would be a super-saturated market for novels about Henry James. I read and liked Toibin's back in 2005, but gave this one a pass even though I enjoy Lodge's academic satires--I imagine I was in the mood for one novel about James, but not two. However, a friend lent me this to read during my convalescence from surgery, and I haven't read a novel about James for thirteen years, so why not?

Lodge devotes most of his novel to James's brief but unhappy attempt to re-invent himself as a playwright. Frustrated by the disappointing sales figures of The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, and The Tragic Muse (all great reads, I would say, if you like James), he did the 1890s equivalent of turning to screenwriting and decided to write for the stage. An adaptation for the stage of his early novel The American made some headway, without being a hit, but Guy Domville, a costume piece in which an English aristocrat turns down his inheritance to become a priest, was a disaster. James came to the stage after the first performance to be met by boos from the gallery. So back to fiction it was.

Lodge is setting himself a challenge in focusing on an era when James's confidence and his judgement are at a low point. Toibin's James seems a lot more like James, the man who wrote the great novels: acutely intelligent, socially astute, the steward of an enormous gift. Lodge's James, by contrast, mostly seems like a fussy bachelor uncle, obtuse and even deluded. He is so hapless and vulnerable that it's almost painful.

Still, Lodge does a great job of capitalizing on the many intersections with literary history that this episode offers. One of James's great friends, Punch cartoonist George Du Maurier, is about to have a huge transatlantic success with his appealingly amateurish novel Trilby at the very moment the Master is suffering his catastrophe. The son of the Comptons, the theatre couple who produce The American, is going to grow up to be Compton Mackenzie.  Three of the the young aspiring writers who get the task of reviewing the first night of Guy Domville go on to become internationally renowned: George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, and H. G. Wells (James biographer Leon Edel also worked this angle; Lodge's account of the first night maps pretty closely onto Edel's). The play that the producer of Guy Domville has waiting in the wings after the failure of James's play is...The Importance of Being Earnest. And, in the wake of the disaster, James get a supportive note from an admirer of his fiction that he has not met yet, one Mrs. Wharton.

Toibin's novel is also the more Jamesian of the two James novels; Lodge includes quite a lot of wooly exposition. I did appreciate, though, his taking the utterly un-Jamesian tack of addressing the reader in his own voice in the closing pages, explaining how the play-writing experiment, a complete bust as far as restoring James's finances went, nonetheless gave him a whole new world of strategies and tactics for his fiction. As a result, we have The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl--masterpieces that did not sell very many copies, but nonetheless ushered in the 20th century novel as we know it.