A Man of ActionIt’s hard to celebrate national diversity, though, without neglecting the diversity of the individual, and anyone who turns to these novels in search of psychological depth will be disappointed. The Parisian hero of two of Furst’s novels graduated, we are told, from “the most exclusive college in the Sorbonne … France’s Harvard, Yale and Princeton all rolled into one.” Yet here is his mind at work: Albertine, tonight. His big, ugly treasure of a farm girl. Something good to eat. Vegetables, cow food—but garlic, salt, a drop of oil, and the cunning way she chopped it all up. Jesus! Was it possible that he’d reached that ghastly moment in life when the belly was more important than the prick? No! Never that! Why, he’d take that Albertine and spread her … (The World at Night, 1996) Like an engine that knocks when you take your foot off the pedal, Furst’s prose cannot slow down without lapsing into this sort of waggishness and bad taste. Our age is such that he is considered a master wordsmith anyway. The New York Times Book Review recently called him “one of the few espionage writers who knows how to write sex scenes,” but that’s nothing; anyone who studies the blurb page before moving on to one of these novels of Nazi-roiled Europe is in effect getting two tales of a world gone mad. The Providence Journal assured readers that Furst “can’t write a bad sentence.” The San Francisco Chronicle spoke of a “style both gracious and unobtrusive.” A New York Times reviewer wrote that some passages in Furst’s fiction “could be passed off as the work of both a meticulous narrative craftsman at the top of his game and a symbolist poet.” The rest of the review makes clear that he did not mean to imply spuriousness. Another New York Times reviewer expressed her appreciation of “Mr. Furst’s famously succinct eroticism.” She also singled out as “poetry” a sentence in which he describes someone as “reading a slim, filthy novel in beautifully marbled covers.” Just how much contemporary literature does one have to read—and how little of the other kind—to be so easily impressed? The Foreign Correspondent
by Alan Furst
When it comes to discussing the arts, all opinions are completely subjective and thus equally valid, or so the orthodoxy goes. But surely there are limits. To assert that reading one of Furst’s novels is like hearing “Kafka, Dostoevsky and le Carré … talk to each other” (Kirkus Reviews) is just plain wrong, as wrong as any literary judgment can be. As for the claim in Men’s Journal that “Flaubert would have liked” The World at Night, it is no less preposterous for being hypothetical; I’d have an easier time arguing that he would have liked Men’s Journal. All this nonsense bespeaks a certain consistency, if nothing else. Gone, it seems, are the days when literary critics had a lax standard for the prose of the artsy writer and a rigorous one for that of the “genre” storyteller. They now appear ready to praise a certain kind of bad writing wherever they come across it. What they will not tolerate is the slickly lucid, Barbara Cartland kind. A writer must slow the eye and furrow the brow. Whether he does so through clumsiness or deliberate incoherence, through a “playful” flouting of punctuation rules or a simple ignorance of them, is evidently no longer important. A fierce hostility to cliché was once a glimmer of good sense in the postmodern aesthetic, but here is a novelist who describes a woman as “afraid of neither man nor beast, rich as Croesus, cold as ice”—and the critics couldn’t be happier. The only thing holding firm in the chaos of values is that great constant of American taste, the equation of the stodgy with the serious. Furst’s latest novel, The Foreign Correspondent (2006), tells the story of Carlo Weisz, an Italian who works for an anti-fascist press in France while dodging Mussolini’s spies. Even fans may groan to see pre-war Paris again, where all of Furst’s heroes seem to land at some point, but the struggle against Mussolini is a fresh and fascinating topic. With the dictator’s image now undergoing something of a rehabilitation in Europe, it would have been nice to see more space devoted to the anti-Semitic legislation that forced so many Jews to flee Italy. Still, Furst’s research findings are especially interesting this time. Who would have thought that the Italian resistance produced over 500 journals and newspapers in Paris alone, or that OVRA, the acronym for Mussolini’s secret service, was meant to remind the dictator’s subjects of the word for a giant octopus? Unfortunately, the narration is lackluster; the same shallow stream of consciousness flows through a succession of European characters, with no variation in the all-too-American tone. (“Sit on this,” Carlo curses silently. “And spin.”) As usual, the sentences have been cast with a view to maximum comma use. “He … stood there, hands in pockets, until, five minutes later, she appeared, had been watching, apparently, from some vantage point.” The plotting is solid, though, and the sheer accumulation of incident ultimately engenders an affectionate familiarity with Carlo even if the pallid characterization does not. Olivia Manning does a much better job of evoking the tension of a continent on the brink of war, not least because she experienced it firsthand. But for all its stylistic brilliance, her 1960s Balkan Trilogy has none of the turns that keep the reader of The Foreign Correspondent wondering how it will end. In an interview in 2002, Furst said that he had difficulty understanding why none of his best-selling novels had yet been filmed. With no apparent preciousness about what might be lost in a transfer to the screen, he added, “These really are movies.” In a sense, this is true. He has the ability to invent plots that work all on their own, which is, as Somerset Maugham once pointed out, a very rare gift indeed. B. R. Myers is a contributing editor of The Atlantic and the author of A Reader’s Manifesto.
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