I am a book nerd but I tend to read old books more often than new ones. Sometimes that means I miss out on the new hot thing but more often it means I’m reading an old thing and thinking, “Hey. This is just like that new thing, that we think is new but in fact kind of isn’t. Huh, I wonder why no one thinks of this parallel.”
I got to thinking this about Elizabeth Taylor, lately.
The standard opening paragraph of a piece about Elizabeth Taylor is usually an elaborate joke where the writer says Taylor is a favorite writer or theirs and waxes rhapsodic about Taylor’s literary genius, flabbergasting the reader who keeps thinking, “You mean, Larry-Fortensky-Elizabeth-Taylor?”
Let’s cut that short by saying no, I do not mean Larry-Fortensky-Elizabeth-Taylor. I mean the British novelist, who died in 1975, and whose name condemned her to eternal confusion in the age of Google. New York Review Books has been, of late, reissuing her work. I had thought that I was an Elizabeth Taylor completist. (I went on this Virago-reissue buying spree in 2006-2007, let’s never speak of it again.) But I’ve not read A Game of Hide and Seek, the latest reissue, yet. The other book NYRB has got out, Angel, is widely acknowledged to be Taylor’s masterpiece.
I’ll try to whet your appetite for Angel by mentioning that the titular Angel Deverell is an aspiring novelist, then backtracking and saying this is not your standard aspiring writer novel. As a teenager, Angel lives above a grocery shop, and as if to make up for the profound ordinariness of her life, her fantasy life is grandiose and cliché-driven. Which, inevitably, makes her a tremendously successful writer of the kind of pulp romance novels that sell very well, but are curiously unfeeling. “Curiously unfeeling” also describes Ms. Deverell herself. We talk a lot these days about these novels where the narrator has a conflicted relationship with her unlikable protagonist — and we claim “revolutionary” status for writing about women and self-absorption — well, if you want to see how a virtuoso did that all the way back in the 1950s, you should read Angel.*
And then you should read Blaming, which is even better.
* If you’ve heard of Taylor at all before I’ll be surprised, but it’s probably either because a few years ago the French filmmaker François Ozon made a (not terribly good) movie of Angel. Film, as it turns out, is not always an ideal medium for exposing the absurdities of melodrama.
