My Best Books

A bestseller at 91, she forged the modern memoir

In the early 1980s, the publisher André Deutsch had an idea for a book I could write about the partition of India. I didn’t take it up, which I regret now because I was wrong to imagine, as I told him, that “everything” had already been written about the subject. Instead, I proposed a thought of my own: a book about Indian railways, part travel account, part technical history and part family memoir. Too many parts, clearly, but Deutsch liked the idea and a few weeks later I went to his office, where he took out a fountain pen and ceremonially wrote a cheque, saying words to the effect that this was his happiest moment since the day he thought he’d signed up George Orwell (as I guess he told many writers of first books) and then stealing a cigarette from my packet to smoke in celebration.

I went to India for a year and did too much research. Soon after I came home to London, Mrs Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi, which meant there was further postponement as I turned back to journalism. Then one day the phone rang and it was Deutsch, wondering how the book was “coming along”. The truth was that it wasn’t coming along, but I wrote two short chapters in a panic and sent them in as evidence that his money hadn’t gone completely to waste. His response was to invite me to his office for lunch. It was there that I met a brisk woman in glasses, who told me that what I had written was very good and then read a page or two of it aloud to us: to Deutsch, because he had perhaps never bothered to read it himself (the thought occurred to me only later), and perhaps to persuade me that what I’d written was as good as she said, and the book worth persevering with.

She had a fine voice, precise and low, of the kind many more people had then than now, though even in 1984 her kind of accent had lost its claim to be the English that the nicest and best people spoke. “Patrician”, “RP” and “Oxbridge” would be the easy adjectives, though what it reminded me of was listening to the BBC’s Home Service as a boy and watching British films of the same period, where pretty well everyone spoke like this other than junior policemen and Cockney chars in pinafores. No matter. She read aloud – a few hundred words about an old-fashioned grocer’s shop in an Indian railway town – and the fact was that her voice’s elegance and intelligence seemed to elevate what I’d written, just as words scribbled in ballpoint seem profoundly transformed when set in 12-point Baskerville. There may have been an almost maternal element to her encouragement. She certainly had something of the kindly schoolmistress or university tutor about her: her thick-framed glasses, her enthusiasm, her opinion that I simply had to go on with it otherwise I’d be letting myself down. As life turned out, I didn’t go on with it; I went back to newspapers and returned Deutsch’s advance, and therefore as an illustration of Diana Athill’s persuasive editorial technique my story is unsatisfactory, showing nothing more than how my torpor, fear and the need to make money could defeat one of the finest minds in British publishing. All I know is that if anyone could have drawn that book out of me it would have been her.

Athill would have been 66 then. She had been Deutsch’s right-hand woman for nearly 40 years and went on serving the company that bore his name, even after he had left it, for another eight. Deutsch was the entrepreneurial spirit behind the enterprise, but it was mainly Athill who developed its reputation for good books by finding and fostering writers such as Jean Rhys and VS Naipaul. The story of her long professional life as an editor is brilliantly told in Stet, and there’s no need to add to it here. What I didn’t know when I met her was that she was also a writer; or rather had been a writer, because her most recent book had been published nearly 20 years before. Few people remembered her novel (Don’t Look at Me Like That, 1967) or her story collection (An Unavoidable Delay, 1962), which found a publisher in the United States but none in Britain. It was the middle book of her small 1960s oeuvre that knowledgeable readers, particularly women, mentioned when I said that I’d met her. “Oh, but you must read Instead of a Letter,” they said. The book wasn’t easy to find. It had been republished a few times since it first appeared in 1962 and was probably more often in print than out of it, but by the early 80s Instead of a Letter was more of a cult than the popular classic it deserved to be. The times weren’t right. Literary taste was still largely dictated by male sensibilities and, while feminist publishing in Britain had begun to thrive, Athill didn’t quite fit its political agenda. As to the book’s form, “memoir” had yet to be established as a successful category in bookshops. Writers wrote them, of course, but rarely did they become known for the memoir alone (JR Ackerley and Laurie Lee may be two exceptions). Publishers and readers thought instead of “autobiographies”, in which intimate personal disclosure took a back seat to records of achievement. The boundary between the two forms is blurred and bridgeable: VS Pritchett’s wonderful account of his early life, A Cab at the Door, was described as “autobiography” when it first appeared in 1968, whereas now it would have “memoir” written all over it. Gore Vidal explained the difference in this way: “A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked.” His statement is arguable, but it has the virtue of simplicity. More important, by stressing subjective, unverified memory it permits the memoirist to misremember and, unconsciously or otherwise, to embroider and invent – an indulgence, it has to be said, that Athill has never been interested to take.

At any rate, I got Instead of a Letter from the library. It told Athill’s story from birth to the age of 42, a life begun idyllically in the English countryside, a life rich with privilege and promise – horses, sailing, books, an Oxford education – until aged 22 she’s jilted by her fiancé and her dreams of a future as an RAF pilot’s wife turn to dust. Happiness vanishes for the next 20 years. Rejection destroys her confidence, especially in her relationships with men, and she regains it fully only in early middle age, not through the once hoped-for avenues of marriage and children but when she begins to write and has a story published in a newspaper. Put like that it seems an ordinary enough progression – happy, then unhappy, then happy enough – and perhaps an advertisement for a creative-writing school (”Miserable? Jilted? Then learn to write the Miss Lonelyhearts way!”). But at that time I had never read a book like it, and to my mind only a few memoirs have equalled it since.

The most memorable and pleasing aspect of memoirs often comes from the picture they offer of a character or a period. We remember Pritchett’s rackety father besotted by Christian Science and mistresses, or John McGahern’s loving mother walking her son through the lanes of County Leitrim, or Blake Morrison’s father bluffing his Yorkshire way out of and into trouble. The writer attends as a witness, but his own selfhood – what he was like – is present at most as an interlocutor of the character of others. Direct self-description is one of the hardest tasks a writer can undertake, because self-knowledge is so difficult and because the risks of self-indulgence, self-dramatisation and falsity of all kinds are so great (and easily spotted and mocked). Athill’s book was certainly about herself, and the core of it about the severe disappointment that altered, and for a long time deadened, the course of her life. In other hands, it could have been a long wallow with an unconvincingly bright little salvation at the end. Many books are now constructed on this principle: look, I was an addict; behold, my suffering when I was abused. Often the authors say their motive is to give consolation and hope to others in the same position. Instead of a Letter certainly had this effect. About a hundred readers (99 of them women) wrote to her after the book was first published to share their experience and say how much comfort the book had provided – a large response to an unknown writer when authorship was much less publicised than it is now, and when communication involved the trouble of taking out pen and paper and buying a stamp. To be jilted, to have one’s engagement broken off, left a public as well as a private scar (I remember the hush around the subject when in the 50s it happened to an older cousin of mine). The distress caused by rejection may well be a historical constant in human beings, but at least since 1962 our more open and casual attitudes towards sex and marriage mean that the humiliation is no longer so deep. “Guilt never caused me any serious distress, but humiliation did,” Athill writes in Yesterday Morning. “Humiliation . . . was the sharpest misery I knew.”

An instructive story of self-help wasn’t, however, what she intended by Instead of a Letter, nor is it by any means the book’s most important attraction. Like thousands of other readers before and since, what held me about the writing was its candour. The quality has since become an Athill trademark, though in itself candour is no guarantee of literary pleasure or interest: frank books aren’t always good books and can often be tedious by boasting of their frankness. Athill’s way of being candid is more subtle and its effect more persuasive. The reader feels that what he is reading is as true a portrait of the writer and her experience as any words on paper can achieve. Part of this comes from her considerable gift as a maker of sentences, which are so lucid and direct; some of it is owed to the breaking of taboos that then surrounded female sexual behaviour; most of it, though, stems from her triumphant struggle to “get it right”, a lesson she learned from two of the writers she edited. Rhys told her that the trick of good writing was “to get it as it was, as it really was”. Naipaul said that “provided you really get it right, the reader will understand”.

All feeling and experience occur inside specific contexts – a room, a field, a conversation, a country house, a crowded pub – and by getting these things “right”, as a good novelist might, Athill opened up what could have been a narrow story of injury and self-absorption into a book that takes pleasure in the world. Also, the harder thing, she got herself right by letting us see how she appeared to others. A chilling moment comes in Instead of a Letter when, soon after her engagement has been broken off, she reads a passage in her younger sister’s diary. Her sister had a boyfriend who would hold her hand but refused to kiss her, though she was “dizzy with expectation” that he might. This, remember, was early 1940. Athill read the diary entry: “He told me that he was not going to kiss me though he wanted to. He said that I was going to be a fascinating woman but that I mustn’t begin that sort of thing too soon or it would spoil me. Look at Di, he said, you don’t want to be like her. And of course I don’t.” More than 20 years later, Athill wrote that “the shrivelling sensation of reading those words is something I still flinch from recalling”. She saw with a “shameful, accepting humility . . . that I was diseased in other people’s eyes: that unhappiness was not a misfortune but a taint. In the depths of my being I must have wanted to kill my sister for it, but all I recognised was a shuddering acknowledgment that out of the mouths of babes . . .” She then decided that she would be a model sister to her sibling, rejoicing at her triumphs and fretting over her sorrows. “But there was a streak of falsity in it: I was over-compensating for my resentment at the scar she had left with her innocent, idle thrust.”

In a first-person narrative, someone else’s diary can offer a useful change in the point of view. Another diary crops up in Athill’s second memoir, After a Funeral, which was published in 1986. The book – Athill preferred to call it a “documentary” – recounts the tragic story of “Didi”, a promising writer from Egypt who went to stay with Athill as her lodger after she befriended him as his publisher (”Didi” was in fact Waguih Ghali, whose novel Beer in the Snooker Club was published by Deutsch in 1964.) Their relationship becomes difficult and, on his part, bitter. Sex isn’t the issue. Diana has a partner, called Luke in the book, and though she begins by wanting Didi she has sex with him only once, when both of them are drunk. One evening she goes into Didi’s room and finds that he’s left his diary open on his desk. She reads:

“I have started to detest her. I find her unbearable . . . my reactions to Diana are sparked by my physical antipathy to Diana. I find it impossible to live in the same flat as someone whose physical body seems to provoke mine to cringe. This has led me to detest everything she does, says or writes . . . I’d be sitting in my room watching a stupid thing on telly and annoyed with myself for not switching it off and working . . . In her sitting-room her typewriter would go tick tick tick tick tick. ‘Christ,’ I’d tell myself, ‘there she is, hammering away at that bloody mediocre muck – dishing out one tedious stupid sentence after another, and thinking – no, pretending it is writing.”

To quote such a passage about oneself in a book by oneself takes . . . what? Courage certainly, but also an unusually strong sense of duty towards the truth and the usefulness of truth to literature. In Yesterday Morning she writes that the damage lies do – the context is the anti-Catholic prejudices of her grandfather – may be “the central reason for trying to write the truth, even if indecent, about oneself”. That may be the moral reason, but there is also a literary one: Rhys’s “to get it as it was, as it really was”. She exposes for all to see her pragmatic code of personal behaviour. Private diaries left lying around invite themselves to be read; married men can be fucked so long as nobody finds out (or worse, confesses) and the harmony of the marital home is kept intact. This is the way she was – as probably many of us are and will go on being. The consequence is that Athill in her books doesn’t always come across as the most likeable of women. When Didi in his diary notes that she pronounces “spritzer” as “SpritzA!” – Colonel Blimp speaking – the reader may feel a certain sympathy with his antagonism, even though accents are harmless accidents of birth. But if she were more likeable, would she be more sympathetic – or as believable?

The qualities that come with being a writer of Athill’s sort aren’t always attractive. After she and Didi have their drunken sex, Didi comes into the kitchen the next day and pleads with her not to tell her lover.

“‘Promise me one thing. Promise that this is one thing you’ll never tell Luke about.’

‘Of course I won’t, I promise.’ (I was already mulling in my head the written account, as exact as possible, which I was going to show Luke one day.)”

Graham Greene’s famous dictum about the “chip of ice” that lurks in every writer’s heart has never had a better illustration. It would be hopelessly wrong, however, to think of Athill as all ice: a cold-eyed writing machine. The reason that we can read Didi’s diaries and letters is that he left them to her in a letter in which he described her as the person he loved most. Then he killed himself, despite her enormous kindness to him, in his rent-free room in the flat where more than 40 years later, as I write this, she still lives.

Recently I went to see her there. The flat has the top floor of the last house in a Victorian cul-de-sac that ends in the green open spaces of Primrose Hill and a fine view south across central London. Her cousin, the journalist Barbara Smith, owns the house and keeps an apartment on the ground floor; they have had this arrangement for half Athill’s life, but when I visited her, in March 2009, Athill was making plans to move into a residential home for old people while she still had all her wits about her and could save friends and relations the trouble of making decisions on her behalf. Three months before, she had turned 91. When a person is that age the present tense is safest deployed with fingers crossed, though there are very few signs of serious failing. She has a hearing aid and walks with the aid of a handsome silver-topped stick and uses a stair-lift to take her up (but not down) the four flights to her flat, but she still drives her little car and her conversation is as witty and direct as ever. She looks majestic.

Nearly 20 years after I failed to become a writer for Athill there came an odd but pleasing reversal in our roles. As the editor of Granta I also became the editor of her three last books. Very little needs to be said about that. The typescript arrived, a few suggestions for changes were made, she absorbed them with her quick editorial brain, and a slightly amended typescript was soon in the post. Editing her was pure pleasure because I loved reading her; it was like having someone speak into your ear, someone humane and self-amused and wise that you wanted to hear. “Good writing” is difficult to define, and definitions differ according to taste, but you know it when you see it, which is rarer than publishing companies would have you suppose. I remember my excitement when I read the first few pages of the typescript that became Somewhere Towards the End (Athill’s choice of title and a good one, as her titles always are). The book arose out of a brief conversation and the exchange of a postcard or two: it seemed to me that while the memoir genre abounded in accounts of youth – the “coming-of-age narrative” is a literary cliché of our times – very few books have let us know about life at the other end of the road. In fact, other than self-help guides (take a cod-liver oil capsule every day) and apart from the late novels of Kingsley Amis and Philip Roth, I could think of none. There are, of course, books about the process of dying by victims of cruel and slow terminal disease, but writers have been shy of the subject of just being old, as if shame and indignity had replaced wisdom and experience as the best-known qualities of great age. Our conversation hardly amounted to an editorial briefing and I had no word of progress for a couple of years. Then a few early pages arrived and with them the first vivid sense of what it is like to become old, like reports from another country that we shall all, if spared earlier elimination, shortly be moving to.

In different hands, the book could have been filled with a sentimental longing for the past, brittle cheer towards the present, or the religious consolation of the future. None of those things could ever have appealed to Athill. Instead, Somewhere Towards the End is a beautifully turned series of episodes, none of them sermonic, in which the author reveals how she has come to terms (or not) with what she calls “falling away” and the unavoidable fact of death. It was, wrote the late Simon Gray – no stranger himself to intimations of mortality – both “exhilarating and comforting” in its good sense, candour and lively spirit. Every passage is rooted in specifics. On the second page, she describes her new tree fern (£18 from the Thompson & Morgan plant catalogue) and her doubts that she will live long enough to see it reach mature height: a small thought, but it immediately takes us inside the mind of someone going on for 90. She has “got it right”, and continues to get it right throughout the book, in the sense that we utterly believe that this is how life is and was for her. She describes her final lover, Sam:

“We rarely did anything together except make ourselves a pleasant little supper and go to bed, because we had very little in common apart from liking sex . . . We also shared painful feet, which was almost as important as liking sex, because when you start feeling your age it is comforting to be with someone in the same condition. You recognise it in each other, but there is no need to go on about it. We never mentioned our feet, just kicked our shoes off as soon as we could.”

Stet, Yesterday Morning, Somewhere Towards the End: they may not be her last books – fingers crossed again – but they represent the late flowering of a writing career previously conducted in sporadic bursts. All were written when she was in her 80s and all are memoirs. Sometimes they overlap; they weren’t planned as a sequence. A few places and people in them wear a light disguise; when Athill began to write, it wasn’t done to name names in intimate personal histories. Now it seems reasonable to name two of them, because of the important part they played in shaping her life.

The first is a place. “Beckton”, the country house and estate where Athill spent so much of her childhood, is in fact Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, just across the river Waveney from Suffolk. Her mother’s grandfather, a Yorkshire doctor enriched by railway shares and a good marriage, bought it in the 1890s. A cousin of hers still lives there. (Athill herself is far from well off. Publishing never paid her much, partly owing to her indifference about asking for more, which she came to see “as foolish, if not reprehensible”, and she had no inheritance. Having no money, she finds it easy to talk about. The royalties from her greatest success, Somewhere Towards the End will pay for her stay in the old people’s home, somewhere closer towards the end.)

The second is a person. “Paul”, the young pilot who broke her heart, was Tony Irvine. As squadron leader AT Irvine he died in the late afternoon of April 13, Easter Sunday, 1941, when his Blenheim bomber crashed into a mountain near the village of Vigla in northern Greece. Germany had just begun its invasion of Greece and a squadron of seven Blenheims set out to bomb troop formations before they poured south through the Monastir Gap. German fighters attacked the Blenheims (”dreadful, clumsy planes” in Athill’s recollection) and six were shot down in the space of four minutes. Irvine’s plane was last seen climbing into the mist that surrounded the mountainside, possibly trying to escape. The following day its wreckage was found 84 feet below the peak. Irvine had married by that time and his wife was pregnant with a son. When Irvine’s father died, long after, this son found a letter from Athill among his possessions and got in touch with her. They met one or twice. He must now be a man in his late 60s.

“Just say,” I said to Athill, “that Paul hadn’t jilted you, that you’d married him. Would you have written a book?”

Her reply was quick but thoughtful. “If I’d been an air-force wife, I probably wouldn’t have written a book. If I’d been an air force widow, I might have done.”

In any event, a long time passed before she started out on the book that became Instead of a Letter. She said she had no intention of writing it, no premeditation, no structure, no model presented by the books of other writers. “That book happened to me,” she said, meaning that it had somehow taken charge of her and couldn’t be stopped. She had written nine stories for her collection and begun a 10th. “It was going to be about my grandmother but it fizzled out and I put it away. Then I took it out again and it simply went on. I couldn’t stop. I wrote it even in the office in any spare moment. There was no plan and it’s remained for me a very baffling book, but it worked as a piece of therapy to a quite extraordinary extent.”

She realised she could write, and that she was best at it when not covering reality with the polite wallpaper of fiction but by recounting experience as it really had been, as honestly as she could evoke it to her own satisfaction: “I’ve never actually planned a book,” she said. “I’ve never thought of readers.” In the 47 years since, only six books have followed, which brings her total to eight. She said: “I’ve never written anything unless I’ve wanted to. I really am an amateur.”

I thought of her self-description “amateur” as I went down the stairs and began to walk across Primrose Hill. Really, we should have more of them. More people who write only when they feel they have something to tell us; more writers driven by the scrupulous need to make us see clearly and exactly what they have witnessed and felt.

I walked on over the rise. London was now spread all across the horizon in its familiar jumble of offices and monuments. I thought of how Athill was born somewhere off to the right in Kensington during a Zeppelin raid (21 December 1917) and of how she had seen this city in so many different ages and moods. In Instead of a Letter, she and Paul take a ride in London’s last hansom cab – before the war and before her humiliating rejection. Before the Fall, you might say sadly, until you remember how Athill rose from it to find her singular voice. If anyone in future wants to know how an intelligent Englishwoman led her life in the 20th century, her inner and outer life, from birth to a very old age, hers are books that will need to be read. As for now, they can simply be enjoyed.

Christopher Tayler admires a bleakly funny account of a father-son relationship

Legend of a Suicide, David Vann’s first book of fiction, won a short-story prize in the US, but isn’t exactly a story collection – or, for that matter, a novel or a memoir. It might best be described, borrowing from VS Naipaul’s rather grand-sounding subtitle for one of his similarly mixed works, as a novella with five “supporting narratives”. The first-person stories that begin and end the book provide context and framing for the third-person novella, which turns out to be a fiction within the fiction. To complicate matters further, Vann operates in ambiguous territory with regard to real life. The stories are “fictional”, he says in the acknowledgments, “but based on a lot that’s true” – principally the suicide in 1980 of his father, James, to whom the book is dedicated. Readers are left to judge for themselves how firm a line to draw between the historical James Edwin Vann and the book’s James Edwin Fenn, and between David Vann and Roy Fenn, the narrator-protagonist.

The first story, “Ichthyology”, lays out the basic contours. Roy remembers his early childhood in Ketchikan, Alaska, where his father practised dentistry and nursed an idea of himself as a self-reliant outdoorsman. When Roy was almost five, his father came to feel that he had been cheated of experience in the area of women. “My mother was only the second woman he had ever dated,” we’re told, “but to this list he now added the dental hygienist who worked for him.” Roy’s mother left with Roy and his sister for California; James had a short-lived second marriage, then sold his dental practice and bought a fishing boat, not learning the ropes first or hiring a captain, which would have undercut his lone-explorer self-image. Two disastrous seasons later, with the taxman closing in and the boat’s sale imminent, he walked to the stern and shot himself with a Magnum handgun.

“Ichthyology” registers Roy’s distress indirectly through close attention to the fish he keeps in a tank, one of which ends the story by catching a fly, setting off a “million tiny ripples of panic”. It’s also filled with the kind of frozen detail that tends to stick in the mind after such events (after getting the news, the family drink “clear bouillon soup with a few peas in it”). Most importantly, though, it establishes a tone and a measure of ironic distance from both the speaker’s younger self and his father’s multiple failings. As in the memoirs of Tobias Wolff, who’s also mentioned in Vann’s acknowledgments, it’s a tone that allows for nostalgic warmth, quietly unsparing judgments and sardonic humour. Vann’s skills as a deadpan comic are apparent by page two, which describes childhood fishing trips: “The halibut themselves lay flat, like grey-green dogs on the white deck of the boat, their large brown eyes looking up at me hopefully until I whacked them with a hammer.”

Further stories circle cautiously around the hurt caused by the failed father-son relationship. The fullest portrait of James, however, comes in “Sukkwan Island”, the novella at the heart of the book, in which Roy, aged 13, agrees to spend a year with his father in a remote cabin in southern Alaska. As Roy half-expects, his father turns out not to have planned ahead very well: their supplies are inadequate, and James’s confident talk doesn’t hide his lack of know-how. James also has unrealistic expectations of being cured of his unhappiness over the failure of his second marriage by spending time in the wilderness, and becomes morose and self-absorbed. Women never give you a break, he explains; when I caught crabs off a prostitute and passed them on to your stepmother, she wouldn’t even give me a chance to explain myself. At night, when he thinks that Roy is asleep, he sobs in his sleeping bag. Roy wants to go home but fears that something terrible will happen if he does.

With its strong focus on fishing, hunting and other manly activities, its deliberately flattened tone and “and”-heavy sentence constructions, “Sukkwan Island” initially comes across as an exercise in neo-Hemingwayesque, enlivened mostly by the father’s frequent ups and downs. Soon, though, the reader comes to share Roy’s growing sense of dread. Then something happens that I can’t describe without spoiling the book, but which makes it clear that Vann isn’t merely writing a fictionalised memoir. Without changing the tone or drawing attention to what it’s doing, the novella reveals itself as a type of fantasy – vengeful yet sorrowing and empathetic, plausible yet dreamlike, and completely absorbing. Operating at a high level of emotional intensity, Vann triumphantly reels the reader through to the closing stories, in which an older Roy returns to Ketchikan, bringing the book full circle.

Legend of a Suicide benefits greatly from its Alaskan settings: the striking backdrops, the isolation, the emotion-bearing marine imagery. (Roy grows up to be a fan of Elizabeth Bishop’s animal poems.) It’s also very cleverly constructed, but isn’t in love with its cleverness; raw yet controlled feeling is what’s aimed for and achieved. Moving, readable and often bleakly funny, it deserves to find a wide and enthusiastic readership. Its UK publisher’s comparisons with the likes of Wolff and Richard Ford aren’t, for once, misplaced.

As the perennially plucky Gaul turns 50, Michelle Pauli travels to France to meet his co-creator and the translator who helped him conquer an English readership

Asterix fever is hitting the French capital this week. As the doughty little Gaul and his man-mountain of a friend Obelix mark their 50th birthday, the whole of Paris seems to be celebrating with them. There are official dinners with members of the political elite, street parties, a flypast courtesy of the French air force’s aerobatics team, a special exhibition and a commemorative book.

It’s a glimpse into just how far France has taken these comic book creations to its heart since 1959 when writer René Goscinny and artist Albert Uderzo first sketched out their idea for a story set in a remote village on the Brittany coast, the last outpost of ancient Gaul holding out against the Roman invasion, where the villagers have become brave warriors through the help of a magic potion.

Those original sketches and typescripts, on worn pieces of exercise book paper, can now be seen, along with other pieces of early work, and Goscinny’s Keystone Royal typewriter, at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. In the atmospheric setting of the third-century Gallo-Roman baths of the museum of the middle ages, the exhibition brings together the plates and manuscripts the pair created for the first edition of Pilote magazine, where the comic strip was unleashed on a France that had just seen Charles de Gaulle become president, and traces the evolution of the cartoon through the 33 albums of work since. The 34th, Asterix and Obelix’s Birthday: The Golden Book, has been released this week, a collection of comic vignettes that revisit some of the 400 characters that have appeared over the 50 years.

Of course, the comic strip’s success in France tells only part of the story. Asterix is now a global phenomenon, with the Gaul’s adventures selling 325m copies in 107 countries and the franchise reaching an even wider audience through three “live” films, a theme park and the inevitable merchandising, from soft toys to Happy Meals.

For Uderzo, who is still sprightly at 82 and has continued to create new Asterix adventures after the death of his friend Goscinny in 1977, taking on the scripting as well as drawing, the international appeal of the characters was unexpected but reassuring.

“This success was not expected at all. Even in France the success was not expected. We were pleased to discover the international appeal, firstly in Germany, which compared with that in France,” says Uderzo. “We were reassured because we had been told that Asterix in a way excused General de Gaulle and moreover that it only tickled the French, which was not what we wished. We were somewhat reassured when it became a success in other countries.”

What makes Asterix’s popularity outside France even more surprising is not so much that the comic strip is firmly rooted in the French national character – “It is clear that Asterix was made with the image of the French,” says Uderzo. “We took the tics and the manners of the French” – but that it relies so heavily on ingenious wordplay and puns for its humour. How does that work in translation?

For Anthea Bell, who has translated Asterix into English since the first album crossed the channel in 1969, it is the type of humour embodied in Asterix, rather than the specifics, that crosses national boundaries.

“If you are faithful to the spirit in translation then you have to be free with the letter – fidelity to the spirit is what matters,” she explains. “It is European humour rather than French. It doesn’t cross the Atlantic so well, the American sense of humour is different. We and the French like the humour of historical anachronism. We have a lot of history behind us and we like to laugh at it in both nations.” And for all its use of national stereotypes – the proud Spaniards, the phlegmatic Brits, the cowardly Romans – the humour is, says Bell, essentially “kindly at heart”.

Nonetheless, finding English equivalents of the French made-up names – all ending in -ix for the Gauls and -us for the Romans – requires the kind of lateral thinking beloved of crossword compilers, says Bell, whose father was the first compiler of the Times cryptic crossword.

Her ingenuity in finding these new names for the French characters, some of which arguably work even more effectively than the originals, has been credited with opening up Asterix to an English-speaking audience. Asterix’s faithful canine companion, Idéfix, has become Dogmatix; the tone-deaf village bard, Assurancetourix, is Cacofonix; a couple of Roman legionaries become Sendervictorius and Appianglorius; and the chief druid Panoramix, who mixed the potion into which Obelix fell into as a child, resulting in his enormous strength, is Getafix. Bell is amused that the latter has provoked accusations of corrupting youth. “It doesn’t have to be about drugs!” she asserts, laughing. “The druids used Stonehenge to ‘get a fix’ on the stars …”

Ironically perhaps, Asterix in Britain was a particular challenge to translate because one of the joys of the original was the way in which Goscinny captured the British characters speaking French with a dreadful English accent. It is also a favourite of Uderzo.

“While I like all that we have made, I have a little preference for Asterix et Les Bretons, for the way that René made the British speak with the structure of the English language transformed into French. I found it an extraordinary idea,” he says. “For René, who knew English perfectly, it was like a child’s game”.

Bell, who always ran her scripts past Goscinny when he was alive, was relieved to find that her translation solution – to use very dated, stilted, ‘upper class twit’ language in the style of PG Wodehouse – met with the French writer’s approval. “I told him that we were intending to use phrases like ‘what ho, old bean!’ and ‘hullo, old fruit’ and his eyes lit up,” she said. “‘Vieux fruit! I wish I’d thought of that…’ he murmured.”

While other nations have generally taken their lampooning by the comic book heroes in the spirit in which it is intended, life in the Asterix camp itself has not been entirely good-humoured in recent years. Uderzo’s choice to continue Asterix alone after his great friend Goscinny’s death, and his more recent decision to sell the rights to Hachette and allow new albums to be created after his own death, has attracted criticism and led to a rift with his daughter, Sylvie, who accused him of betraying the spirit of Asterix by selling to a large commercial business rather than sticking with the family business they had created together.

Asked what he hopes the future holds for his creation, Uderzo gives the verbal equivalent of a splendid Gallic shrug. “I hope for it, I hope that it will survive us, that it will be able to still live. You know, the life of a hero is held only by the goodwill of the readers, that does not depend so much on the author. If it must continue, it will continue; if things turn out differently, one is not master of that.” For Bell, whose life has also been entwined with the little Gaul’s for the past 40 years, so that she describes him as “an old friend”, the way forward is clear. “For me, there should be no more Asterix after Uderzo’s death. It will be, as they always say at the end of their books, ‘LA FIN’”.

But for now, Uderzo and France are looking back, not forward. For 50 years a French comic book hero has conquered the world and as Uderzo says, with another of those magnificent shrugs, “Extraordinary success must be lived well, because if you don’t live well that much of a success, what would make you live happily?”

The relationship between writers and their paymasters has always been uneasy, as the veteran author’s move demonstrates

Divorces everywhere. First Peter and Jordan, now John Le Carré and Hodder.

Why should the fact that a novelist changes the merchandiser of his books be of more headline interest than, say, Martin Amis changing his dentist? Who cares? When the book trade was a cottage industry we did; it’s questionable if we do any more. You can remember the title but can you recall, from the top of your head, who published Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall? (Answer below.)

Why do authors stay loyal to publishers? Gratitude is one reason. After 20-odd rejections it was Faber that finally plucked William Golding’s grubby Lord of the Flies from the slush pile. Grateful comradeship with his editor, Charles Monteith, kept Golding at Faber for the whole of his long career.

Editors often mean more to an author than publishers. David Lodge seems to have remained attached to Secker because he got on so well with John Blackwell (a brilliant worker on manuscripts, and one of the heroic drinkers of his day). Look at the dedication to AS Byatt’s latest novel – it is to her editor, Jenny Uglow. A dedication to “Chatto and Windus”? Absurd.

Nonetheless, for some authors, loyalty brings with it the nagging sense of being “owned”. It breeds resentment. Thackeray suggested publishers’ carpets should always be red, because – like the butchers in Smithfield market – they traded in authors’ blood and brains.

Most authors, at the start of their careers, get snubbed or – in a few cases, robbed – by publishers. They can develop a deep-seated hatred of the publishing breed – “brigands” all of them, as Dickens (the least publisher-loyal of writers) called them.

Resentment is the most radioactive of emotions. Gratitude, like Golding’s, usually has a much shorter half life. And then, of course, there are agents, those serpents in the literary garden (Le Carré has dumped that partner as well). It was the so-called “jackal”, Andrew Wylie, who enticed Amis away from his long-standing literary agent, Pat Kavanagh. It resulted in a broken friendship with Kavanagh’s husband, Julian Barnes, and a letter which, as Amis recalls, had a lot of fs in it. As in f-words.

So why has Le Carré divorced Hodder? More money? Prettier dustjackets? Artistic restlessness? Most likely, it’s something else. Who, to answer the question above, is Mantel’s publisher? Fourth Estate. Well, no, it isn’t. Fourth Estate is these days part of the HarperCollins Anglo- American megacombine. Hodder? A division of the Anglo-French giant Hachette. Where publishers are concerned, there’s no identifiable editorial friend to be loyal to any more. So why be loyal?

Madeleine Bunting takes her seven-year old son, Matt, on a journey to find out more about the grandfather he never met, and to explore the small piece of Yorkshire hillside on which he built a chapel, and which provided the inspiration for her new book, The Plot

The author of The Tipping Point and Blink on why it’s the middle-of-the-road that fascinates him

Malcolm Gladwell is one of the few journalists who can claim to have had a phrase coined in his honour. He has spawned a new way of looking at the world – or at least at book publishing. I ask him what he thinks of the term “Gladwellian” when we meet in lower Manhattan. Is he proud of the flattery, or embarrassed by it? “I don’t think it’s true,” he replies firmly. “I don’t think there’s such a thing. I don’t think what I do is worthy of its own name.”

He might say that, but in the boardrooms of publishing houses in New York and London, editors regularly deploy the phrase. As in (spoken with faint hysteria in voice): “Will someone please tell me where our next Gladwellian book is coming from?”

He continues to protest: “I’ve never thought I was doing anything unusual; it’s just intellectual non-fiction, and that’s been around as long as non-fiction.”

We are drinking coffee at Morandi, a homely trattoria in Waverly Place. When we were exchanging emails about our rendezvous, Gladwell told me that he does much of his writing in this restaurant, adding in explanation: “I am a public writer.” That seems a peculiar phrase, but when I quiz him about it, he says he only meant that he writes in public places. He rides around on a bicycle with his laptop, setting up office in cafes and restaurants around lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. That too puzzles me, because his friends say he is a deeply private person, verging on the introverted. So why hang out in public like that?

“It’s not because I’m engaged in conversation with people,” he explains. “It’s because I spent 10 years in a newsroom and I can no longer write when it’s quiet. I like people around me; but I don’t want to talk to them.”

Germaine Greer recently derided the current vogue for Big Ideas titles that Gladwell, above all, has inspired, as the bookish version of male display. But that gives the wrong impression of him. In the flesh he cuts a very different figure: more metrosexual than macho.

His most famous physical characteristic is his hair – a result of his mixed-race background, as his mother is Jamaican-born. Before we meet I had imagined encountering the spitting image of Art Garfunkel, whose likeness Gladwell has himself recognised – at a speaking engagement with the shorter, stockier New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, Gladwell introduced them both to the audience as Simon and Garfunkel. In fact, the comparison that hits you when you come face-to-face with Gladwell is with a young Bob Dylan. He tells me he has just had his annual haircut and so has lost that Garfunkelesque blooming afro. He also dresses in the Dylan style – blue jeans, black trainers, several layers of vests and T-shirts.

As if he hasn’t made fellow writers jealous enough already with three bestselling books that have turned him into a brand, Gladwell is now bringing out a fourth, though this one is more modest than the preceding trilogy: it is a collection of his New Yorker essays, selected by himself from his 13 years on the magazine.

Tina Brown, who now edits the current affairs website The Daily Beast, brought him on board at the start of 1996 as one of her happening young things. She recalls that, “We were on a talent-spotting spree and it was clear that Malcolm Gladwell was very bright.” What she didn’t know then was that he would turn out to be, as she puts it, “a natural editor of the culture, a force of nature in the way he propels his work into the conversation”.

Gladwell’s breakthrough idea came almost immediately. He wanted to find out why crime in New York City, his adoptive home, had plummeted since 1990. He began digging, and was surprised by what he found. There was no dramatic cause for the steep decline, no draconian police roundup or seismic demographic shift. Rather, a sequence of seemingly trivial acts – removing grafitti from subway cars, apprehending fare dodgers, mending broken windows on housing estates – had combined to contain and then eradicate the city’s crime wave.

Brown, who had plucked Gladwell from relative obscurity on the Washington Post, was pleased with the piece and displayed it prominently on her magazine’s cover. She took the expression he used in the article for the headline: it was The Tipping Point.

But Gladwell felt there was more juice to be squeezed from the theory that human behaviour is often like an epidemic, starting small then growing until it reaches a critical mass and tips into a phenomenon. It could be applied as equally to the spread of products, messages and fads as to murder rates; to the selling of Hush Puppies as much as to fare-dodging on the Manhattan subway. Put like that, this was a Big Idea that could unlock the secrets of how modern change happens the way it does.

The publisher Little, Brown was impressed, and reputedly backed him with an advance of $1.5m. Its faith was richly rewarded. The book version of The Tipping Point came out in 2000 and has sold more than 2m copies. Blink, a romp through the power of instinctual thinking, followed in 2005 with equally astonishing results. Then Outliers, last year’s exploration of the social factors behind individual success, earned him another seven-figure advance.

The essays in his new book, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures, bear many of the classic Gladwellian hallmarks. They are simply and directly told, with the aid of a dizzying array of illustrations to support his argument. He moves effortlessly from individual stories to learned academic treatises to sociological observation and back to the individual. The writing is vibrant, colourful and packed with surprises.

Writing about the plane crash that killed John Kennedy Jr, Gladwell commissions a pilot to take him on a simulated nosedive of the sort Kennedy must have fallen into, known as a graveyard spiral. He profiles a so-called dog whisperer who tames violent dogs – hence the book’s title. In another piece – Gladwell’s favourite, he says – he spends time with Ron Popeil, a manufacturer of kitchen appliances, giving the reader a wonderful insight into the mindset of a minor genius from New Jersey.

The small-scale nature of Popeil’s genius is an important clue as to why Gladwell has gone on to such gargantuan success. He scrupulously sets his sights not on the rare or unfamiliar, but on the ordinary and mainstream. As such, his writing talks to all of us, by dint of the common questions he seeks to ask, such as how can you tell if someone is going to be good at their job, or why is there no alternative to Heinz Tomato Ketchup?

“I’m interested in slightly dumb, obvious questions, right,” he says. “I’m not interested in really deeply weird, obscure things. My tastes are not idiosyncratic. What I’m interested in turns out by happy circumstance to be what lots of people are interested in.”

To make his point, he deploys a very Gladwellian trick: he shoots off on an anecdote. “I’m a car lover, but a paradoxical one because I don’t love expensive cars. I drive a Golf. And the reason I love the Golf is that it is the most interesting solution to a problem – how to make a great car to sell for $23,000. Now that’s hard; that’s really interesting. The Ferrari is beautiful but so what, you charge $250,000 for it, what’s hard about that? The Golf GTi is a really amazing car for $23,000. That notion of battling constraints, of the degree of difficulty, is what impresses me.”

This fixation on the middling has earned Gladwell brickbats that he specialises in the art of the obvious. They don’t bother him at all. “I don’t mind the criticism that I explore the obvious, because that says I’m still trafficking in those familiar common questions, which is where I want to be.”

Where did that interest in middle-of-the-road values, assumptions and products come from? He launches into a discussion of his half-English roots. “We’re not exotic, the Gladwells. We don’t have exotic tastes. My father is from Kent. He’s from a middle-class family from Kent – this is who we are.”

He giggles, in a way that is part pride, part mischievous self-deprecation. So is there a part of him that is forever Kent?

“I suppose there is. My father grew up in Sevenoaks. I once told that to a Londoner, who burst into gales of laughter. I didn’t realise Sevenoaks was symbolic of a certain solid middle class.”

Yes, accountants, I say.

“My grandfather was in insurance, so there you are. And the town I grew up in in Canada was a little farming town, so I’m not constitutionally focused on the exotic.”

Indeed, Gladwell is an English Canadian New Yorker with Caribbean roots who rarely writes about race – although he did bring his great-great-great-grandmother, who had a child by her white slave master, into Outliers. That book also points out that former US secretary of state, Colin Powell, is a distant relative. Otherwise, though, he has never made much of his blackness, having never felt it to be a description of himself to which he can relate.

“I don’t know what I am. I’m part West Indian: what does that mean? I had my DNA tested and I am 23% black, or whatever the term is – that’s a meaningless thing. I guess I’m a quadroon, or whatever it is.”

There is, though, one label he attaches to himself with certainty: outsider. Gladwell feels himself to be mainly Canadian, which in America is to be an outsider – as he has frequently been reminded in recent weeks by the US healthcare debate. “You feel so non-American when you see these crazy people who have no clue about what it means to have universal healthcare. Never before have I been so reminded of my outsiderness than during this debate.”

His father is a mathematician, and from him, he says, he acquired a tremendous respect for academics. “I realised when I was older that there’s a persistent attitude in people that academia is farcical. I’ve never had that. I’ve had exactly the opposite. My assumption has been that there’s value in almost all of it, if you take the time to read it properly. And that comes from being in a family in which you were taught to revere expertise.”

Such reverence is another Gladwellian hallmark. He is constantly turning to experts of various shades to elucidate a problem. He likes to think of himself as a “translator” of learned thinking for the mass reader.

At best, that enriches his writing with intriguing detail drawn from sociology, psychology, anthropology and a host of other ologies, which he uses to challenge received wisdom and open up new debates. In particular, he turns to science to support the argument that underpins so much of his writing – the idea that no man is an island. We are all subject to social forces that impact on our behaviour (as in The Tipping Point), governed by our subconscious thoughts (Blink) and blown around like leaves by the vicissitudes of timing and social privilege (Outliers).

This may be an unrevolutionary thought in the UK, where Margaret Thatcher long ago failed to convince us there was no such thing as society. But in the US, where the American dream and individualism still reign supreme, it remains a central intellectual battleground.

At worst, though, Gladwell is at times guilty of taking deep intellectual work and making it shallow, like spreading Marmite so thinly it loses its bite. One reviewer of Outliers slated it as an intellectual striptease.

Again, Gladwell professes to be unfazed by the criticism. “There’s a constant issue of tone: who do you want to read these pieces, and how do you want them to be read? I can write them in a way that is deeply satisfying to a professor of philosophy at Princeton, but we all know if I do that I’ll lose everybody else, and I can do it at the other end of the spectrum for a 10-year-old. You have to pick where you want to be, which for me is somewhere around the middle. Maybe a little to one side of the middle.”

Which side? He looks slightly taken aback by the question. “I like to think I’m on the high side of the middle. Upper-middlebrow. That’s what I am. Upper-middlebrow.”

• What The Dog Saw And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell is published by Allen Lane, priced £20

Gladwell’s day

8.30am I lead an astonishingly boring life. I always wake up at 8.30, unless I’ve set the alarm for 8.30, in which case I wake up at 6.30. Why is that? I’m not one for breakfast; just a cup of tea maybe at one of the cafes down the street from my apartment, where I sit and try to figure out what’s wrong with whatever it is I’m writing. I always have one thing I’m writing that’s working, and two that aren’t. 10am-1pm Brood for a while. Write a little. Then ride my bicycle to New York University Library and nose around the stacks. 1.30pm Have a panini at an Italian place near the library, and read the New York Times. Then I answer emails, maybe read something that just came in from Amazon. 5pm Go for a run along the river. Then if there’s football on, I’ll watch that. 11pm-midnight If Lee Child has a new book out, I read – but really slowly, so I can make it last. Sleep. Repeat.

The original was Maurice Sendak’s vision and the forthcoming film version is largely Spike Jonze’s. Now, Dave Eggers has written a novel inspired by the classic children’s picture book Where The Wild Things Are. He introduces an extract from it

A long time ago, before I knew either one of them, Spike Jonze and Maurice Sendak began talking about a film adaptation of his classic picture book Where The Wild Things Are. When Spike got started on it, he called me up and asked me to co-write the screenplay. I had never written a screenplay; hell, I’d never read a screenplay. But I said yes, because these two people were among my favourite artists on earth.

So we got started, with the consent and under the watchful eye of Maurice, trying to make 10 lines of text into a feature-length movie. A couple of years into the process, Maurice called me, saying that there had been talk of someone doing a novelisation of the book-cum-screenplay. He didn’t want some new guy doing it, so he asked me if I’d want the job. I readily said yes, partly because he intimidates me and partly because, at that point, Spike and I had discussed so many ideas about childhood generally, and about this mysterious island of giant manic-depressive beasts in particular, and I knew only a few of them would make it in the movie.

So the book, I thought, would be a place where I could explore these and other ideas, and where I could bend the story toward my own interests a bit (the movie is much more Spike’s than mine). Along the way the novel diverged significantly from the movie, and from Maurice’s book, but all three share a basic outline – boy is confused about a home and world out of control, boy acts out, boy leaves home and becomes king of a herd of sentient beasts. And all three benefit from the pure, uncompromised vision of childhood that Maurice Sendak espoused and put on paper, again and again, in a stunning body of work that becomes more impressive and singular with every passing decade. He is the greatest living writer and illustrator of books for or about children, period, bar none, end of discussion. He also has a dog named Herman.

Extract from The Wild Things

Max decided to go for a quick bike ride before dinner. He was going to tell his mom he was leaving, but then didn’t, oh well. She was busy with Gary anyway. Gary, her chinless boyfriend, was lounging on the couch, drinking red wine and watching one of those ludicrous musicals. Every night was some musical. Disgusting, untrue, wrong in every way.

Max burst out into the cold night and sped down the driveway. He had to think and he could only think while biking or building things, and he wanted to be biking, to think with the blood loudly filling his head. He rode one-handed, then no-handed, then with his head slung back, squinting at the emerging stars. He whistled quietly to himself, then louder, then hummed, then sang out loud. It was a quiet night and he wanted to slash it open with his own voice.

“Aw, shut up, you,” a man said. Max recognised the voice. It was Mr Beckmann. Max had just passed him and his dog, Achilles. Max circled his bike around.

“You shut up, old bones,” Max said.

Mr Beckmann laughed out loud. He was an older man, maybe 80 or 100, who lived down the road and was often seen walking, slowly and steadily, for hours at a time, through the nearby streets and paths and forests, always with Achilles, a dog easily as big as Max and with an aristocratic bearing. The animal was so perfectly bred and well cared for it looked like a dictionary etching of a German shepherd. Achilles knew Max well and was already laying on his side, urging Max to scratch his stomach. Max dropped his bike and did so.

“So Maximilian,” Mr Beckmann said. “How the hell are you?”

“OK, I guess,” Max answered. “I got in trouble again.”

“Oh yeah? What’d you do this time?” Mr Beckmann’s eyes were dangerously alive, punctuated by brows so thick and mischievously arched that he seemed at all times to be plotting a great and dastardly plan.

“I soaked my sister’s room,” Max said, and went on to tell Mr Beckmann about how Claire’s teenage friends had chased him into his snow fort, and at the moment when Max thought he was safe inside, they had jumped on the roof, collapsing Max inside. He’d escaped, barely he thought, with his life, and when he emerged, screaming, his sister had done nothing. Nothing to protect him, nothing to show she cared if he did or did not disappear for ever under the snow. So he no longer had a sister.

“What’d you use?” Mr Beckmann asked. “A bucket?” Max nodded. “Yeah, I would have used a bucket, too.” This is why Max loved Mr Beckmann: he was an equal. He seemed to have navigated his way through seven or so decades of adulthood without forgetting one moment of his childhood – what he loved and hated, feared and coveted. Max and Mr Beckmann stood for a long moment, breathing their loud grey breaths into the still night. Far off, a dog or wolf howled. Mr Beckmann looked up at the broad silver stripe across the dome of the sky, and then sighed. “Well, I’ll be seeing you, Maximilian.”

“See you, Mr Beckmann,” Max said.

Mr Beckmann stopped, remembering something. “If you need a bigger bucket next time, I have a nice one in the garage.”

Max laughed and rode home to eat dinner.

Max knew that a bunk bed was the perfect structure to use when building an indoor fort. First of all, bunk beds have a roof. And a roof was essential if you were going to have an observation tower. And you need an observation tower if you’re going to spot invading armies before they breach your walls and overtake your kingdom. Anyone without bunks would have a much harder time maintaining a security perimeter, and if you can’t do that, you don’t stand a chance against anyone.

Max had just done a quick survey of the area surrounding his bunk-kingdom and now was down below on the lower bunk, where he could be unseen and unknown. Deep within the fort, a small lantern buttered his lair with warm light as Max thought about the sun and whether it would die. His science teacher had made clear, that very afternoon, that the sun was an ageing star, that it would soon enough be gone – but not, the teacher laughed, until well after the human race had devoured itself. So Max thought about the end of the universe, and he thought about the end of himself. It was a very strange time in Max’s life.

He wanted to make something. Needed to. But he didn’t want to set up some whole thing with glue and wood. He didn’t want to have to use tools at all. What did he want to do? This was the central question of this day and most days. Max wondered how he might actually build a ship. He had designed many dozens of ships on paper over the past year, and now he wondered if it was time for him to build a real one and sail away. His father had taken him sailing five times the previous summer, and had taught him the basics of piloting a small boat. “You’re a natural!” his father had said, even though Max was afraid of the open water, of rogue waves and orcas.

Then Max caught sight of his wolf suit, hanging on the back of the closet door. He hadn’t worn it in weeks. He’d gotten it for Christmas three years before, the last one with both his parents, and he’d immediately put it on, and kept it on for the rest of school break. It had been too big then, but his mom had pinned it and taped it to make it work until he grew into it.

Now he and it were the perfect size and he wore it when he knew he would be alone in the house, and when he could wrestle the dog or jump and growl without anyone watching. And though the house was full, as Max stared at the wolf suit it seemed to be calling to him. It’s time, it was saying to Max. He wasn’t sure this was actually the right time to put it on, but then again he’d never disobeyed the suit before. Should he really wear it tonight? He usually felt better when he put on the wolf suit. He felt faster, sleeker, more powerful.

He had a choice. Would he stay behind the curtain and think about things, marinate in his own confusion, or would he put on his white fur suit and howl and scratch and make it known who was boss of this house and all of the world known and unknown?

“Arooooooo!”

The howling was a good start. Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence. Max, standing in his white wolf suit, stood at the top of the stairs and, using a rolled-up piece of construction paper as a megaphone, howled again, as loud as he could.

“ARRROOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

When he was done, there was a long silence. “Uh oh,” Gary finally said.

Ha! Max thought. Let Gary worry. Let everyone worry. Max pounded down the stairs, triumphant.

“Who wants to get eaten?” he asked the house and the world. “Not me,” Claire said. Aha! Max decided. That only puts her higher on the menu! He strode into the TV room, where Claire was pretending to do her homework. He lifted his claws up, growled and sniffed at the air. He wanted to make sure that Claire and everyone knew this terrible fact: there was a bloodthirsty, brilliant, borderline-insane wolf in their midst. Claire didn’t look up.

Max walked around the corner and found Gary lying on the couch in his work clothes, his frog-eyes closed, his chin entirely receded into his neck. Max gritted his teeth and let out a low, simmering growl. Gary opened his eyes and rubbed them. “Uhh, hey Max. I’m baggin’ a few after-work Zs. How goes it?” Max looked at the floor. This was one of Gary’s typical questions: Another day, huh? How goes it? No play for the playa, right? None of his questions had answers. Gary never seemed to say anything that meant anything at all. “Cool suit,” Gary said. “Maybe I’ll get me one of those. What are you, like a rabbit or something?”

Max entered the kitchen with his arms crossed, marching purposefully, a general inspecting his troops. He sniffed loudly, assessing the kitchen’s smells and waiting to be noticed. His mother said nothing, so he brought a chair near the stove and stood on it. Now they were eye to eye. “What is that? Is that food?” he asked, pointing down to something beige bubbling in a pan. He got no answer.

Max squatted down to inspect a package of frozen corn. “Frozen corn? What’s wrong with real corn?” he demanded. He dropped the package loudly on the counter, where it made a wonderful clatter. “Frozen corn is real,” Max’s mom said, barely taking notice. “Now get off the counter. And go tell your sister to get her stuff off the dining room table.” Max didn’t move. “Claire, get your stuff off the dining room table!” he yelled, more or less into his mom’s face.

“Don’t yell in my face!” she hissed. “And get off the counter.”

Instead of getting off the counter, Max howled. The acoustics where he was, so close to the ceiling, were not great. His mom stared at him like he was crazy. Which he was, because wolves are part crazy.

“You know what,” she said, “you’re too old to be on the counter, and you’re too old to be wearing that costume.”

Max crossed his arms and stared down at her. “You’re too old to be so short! And your make-up’s smeared!”

“Get down from there!” she demanded.

The sting of what she had said about him being too old to wear his wolf suit was just hitting him. He felt his anger focusing. There was a weakness in her voice and he decided to seize on it.

“Woman, feed me!” he yelled. He didn’t know where he’d come up with that phrase, but he liked it immediately.

“Get off the counter, Max!”

Max just stared at her. She was so small!

“I’ll eat you up!” he growled, raising his arms.

“Max! Get down!” she yelled. She could be very loud when she wanted to be. For a second he thought he should get off the counter, take off his suit, and eat his dinner quietly, because the truth was he was very hungry. But then he thought better of it, and howled again.

“Arooooooooo!” At that, Max’s mom lunged for him, but Max, side-stepping, was able to elude her grasp. He leaped over the sink and then back down on to the chair. She lunged again and missed. Max cackled. He really was fast! She grabbed at him again, but he was already gone. He jumped down, landed on the floor, and executed a perfect shoulder-roll. Then he got up and fled from the kitchen altogether, laughing hysterically. When he turned around, though, he found that his mom was still chasing him. That was new. She rarely chased him this far.

When they raced through the living room, Gary took notice of the escalating volume and urgency. He put down his glass of wine and got ready to intervene. Then, in the front hall, a surprising and awful thing happened: Max’s mom caught him.

“Max!” she gasped. She had his arm firmly in her hand. She had long fingers, deceptively strong, and they dug into Max’s bicep. In her hand all his muscle and sinew turned to soup and he didn’t like it. “What’s wrong with you?” she screamed. “You see what you’re doing to me?” Her voice was shrill, corkscrewed.

“No, you’re doing things!” he countered, sounding meeker than he’d intended. To offset this sign of weakness he thrashed around in her grip. He kicked and squirmed, and in the process he knocked everything off the bench – the change, the mail, and his delicate blue bird, the one he’d made in art class. It broke and like quail the pieces darted to every corner of the foyer. This gave them both pause. They stared at the broken bird.

“See that? You’re out of control!” she said. “There’s no way you’re eating dinner with us. Animal.”

Now, because he was angry at breaking his bird, and angry at having Gary in the house, and angry at having to eat frozen corn and angry about having a witch for a sister, he growled and squirmed and – the idea flooded him so quickly he couldn’t resist – leaned down and bit his mom’s arm as hard as he could.

She screamed and dropped him to the floor. She stepped back, still holding her arm. She wailed like a beast, her eyes alive with fear and fury. Max had never bitten her before. He was scared. His mom was scared. They saw each other anew. Max turned to see Gary entering the foyer. He was clearly unsure what he was supposed to do.

Claire stormed into the hall at that second, and seeing Claire and Gary and his mom, everyone looking at him like he was the problem – it sent Max tumbling over the edge. He screamed as loud as he could – a sound between a howl and a battle cry.

“Why are you doing this to me?” his mom wailed. “This house is chaos with you in it!” That was it. Max did not have to stand for this, any of this, all of this. He threw open the door and leapt down the porch and into the night. The moon and wind and steam-train clouds greeted him like long-lost kin. He ran faster than ever before, knowing he would soon be home.

• Extracted from The Wild Things by Dave Eggers, published by Hamish Hamilton at £14.99. To order a copy for £13.99, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846. The film Where The Wild Things Are is out in December.

Vladimir Nabokov was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Now, 30 years after his death, his last novel is finally to be published. But should it be? On the eve of his death, fearing it was imperfect, he instructed his wife to destroy the manuscript, sparking a fierce controversy that embroiled family, friends and the literary establishment, writes Robert McCrum

Vladimir Nabokov, the acclaimed author of Ada, Pnin, Pale Fire and that transgressive bestseller Lolita, is a writer whose imaginative mastery continues to torment successive generations. Behind the imminent publication of his posthumous 18th novel is an extraordinary story, a literary magician’s spell.

On 5 December 1976, the New York Times Book Review published a pre-Christmas round-up in which a number of famous writers selected the “three books they most enjoyed this year”. Vladimir Nabokov’s response to this routine inquiry was at once moving and mysterious. Having revealed that he was seriously ill, he listed “the books I read during the summer months of 1976 while hospitalised in Lausanne”: Dante’s Inferno in the Charles Singleton translation, The Butterflies of North America by William H Howe (Nabokov was a world-famous lepidopterist) and, finally, The Original Of Laura. This, he wrote, was “the not-quite-finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing and reworking before my illness and which was completed in my mind”.

With artful cunning, Nabokov proceeded to reveal a mystery that is only now, 33 years later, on the brink of being solved. “I must have gone through it [The Original of Laura] some 50 times,” he confided, “and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden.”

Who could resist such entrancing fabrications ? “My audience,” Nabokov went on, “consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible. Perhaps because of my stumblings and fits of coughing, the story of my poor Laura had less success with my listeners than it will have, I hope, with intelligent reviewers when properly published.”

With that fleeting reference to “my poor Laura”, the spell was almost wound up. There was just one more twist. Shortly after Christmas, provoked by that tantalising fragment in his newspaper, Herbert Mitgang, a New York Times reporter specialising in books and writers, began to make inquiries of Nabokov’s publisher and confirmed, as he reported on 5 January, that the celebrated author of Lolita had indeed “completed his next novel in his head”. This news he corroborated with Nabokov’s New York editor, who told him: “It’s all there: the characters, the scenes, the details. He [Nabokov] is about to do the actual writing on three-by-five-inch cards.”

Writing on index cards, in pencil, had become Nabokov’s preferred method of composition. He would fill each card with narrative and dialogue, shuffle the completed pack and then, in the words of his editor, “deal himself a novel”. What literary news could be more thrilling? In summary, we now know that the novel concerns beautiful and promiscuous Flora Lanskaya, “the original of Laura”, and her unhappy marriage to the grossly fat Philip Wild. The theme of the book, central to Nabokov, is Death and what lies beyond it. Wild is engaged on a process of self-dissolution, thinking away his corporeal self in a bizarre act of cerebral suicide. Next month we shall at last discover what this fabled manuscript actually amounts to; at the time there was only gossip.

Mitgang reported that the working title of this new novel by a contemporary European master was “Tool”. This was, he speculated, “presumably an anagram, somehow based on a character named Laura”. Fired by the mystery of “Tool”, and the excitement of the quest, Mitgang flew to Switzerland. The 77-year-old Nabokov and his devoted wife, Vera, had lived there, amid the marble and chandeliers of the Montreux Palace Hotel, for more than 15 years.

Mitgang was to be slightly frustrated. The celebrated author refused to grant the New York Times an interview, but he was, apparently, happy to entertain a purely social visit from Mitgang, who told the Observer last week that he’d had “about half an hour in the hotel lobby with Nabokov”. Mitgang says he found Nabokov to be “very cordial”, but that he got little else from the meeting. He later wrote that it would be “idle to speculate about the title or the meaning [of 'Tool'] because Mr Nabokov likes to play games with words, ideas, and publishers”. The true nature of the new book would not be vouchsafed “until those shuffled cards are typed into a manuscript”.

None the less, having made the pilgrimage to Montreux, Mitgang was not going to go away empty handed. “And what,” he asked, breathlessly breaking the rules of the encounter, “is the new novel about?”

“If I told you,” Nabokov demurred, with teasing courtesy, “that would be an interview.” Never had the magician cast a better spell. He had done it often enough before, in print. As he said in his memoir, Speak, Memory: “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.” This time illusion and reality would become tragically fused.

For Nabokov, art and life were always “a game of intricate enchantment and deception”. Lolita, his most famous creation, is an enchantress. His greatest novels display extraordinary narrative legerdemain and fiendish invention, partly inspired by the ludic interaction of English and Russian. Of himself, he wrote that, in his imagination: “I appear as an idol, a wizard, bird-headed, emerald-gloved, dressed in tights made of bright-blue scales.”

Perhaps you have to be an aristocrat born on Shakespeare’s birthday to play Prospero. Nabokov came from a family of almost impossible grandeur, Russian liberals who fled the Crimea in 1919. As a young man, after a Cambridge education, he stumbled into a career as a drifter, a collector of butterflies and author of strange books. A brilliant outsider, he established a modest literary reputation across the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, supporting himself through lessons in English and tennis and crossword puzzles composed for a Russian emigre newspaper.

In 1940, fleeing the Nazis, Nabokov embarked on a second exile to America, landing in New York with just $100. Here, in his early 40s, he started to write in English for the first time. His young cousin, the renowned French publisher Ivan Nabokov, says: “Vladimir had an English nanny. English was his first language and he always had a terrific ear.”

Nabokov eventually found his niche, teaching at Wellesley College and Cornell and finally publishing Lolita, after many rejections, in 1955. After years of living in a kind of literary twilight, the sensational success of that great literary narcissist, Humbert Humbert, and his scandalous predilection for “light of my life” Dolores Haze, thrust Nabokov under the hot lights of American celebrity. It was not a congenial experience and in 1961 he retired to Switzerland with his wife to devote himself to his books.

Now the plot thickens again. The first major novel to spring from his pencil after Lolita spookily rehearses the strange afterlife of “Tool”. Pale Fire (1962) has been described, by Mary McCarthy, as “a jack in the box, a Fabergé gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine”.

John Shade, a famous American poet, murdered in 1959, has left a final poem. Nabokov gives the reader four cantos of Pale Fire, 999 lines of rhyming couplets, plus an editor’s foreword and scholarly annotations. When the disparate parts of the manuscript are fitted together, a novel of many planes and levels is revealed, a novel inspired by games of chess, the heroic couplets of Alexander Pope and the lambent mysteries of nature (Pale Fire is full of lakes, trees and butterflies).

And the poem? This, we are informed by Charles Kinbote, the editor of Shade’s posthumous masterpiece, “consists of 80 medium-sized index cards” on which the poet, Shade, has written out “in a minute, tidy, remarkably clear hand, the text of his poem…” Already, The Original Of Laura has its antecedents.

But not yet a title. When “Tool” first surfaced in Nabokov’s notebooks, in 1974, it was Dying Is Fun and then The Opposite of Laura. If Nabokov hoped he could tease his worldwide readership, some of whom loved him close to idolatry, with The Original of Laura as work in progress, he was to be cruelly denied. Mitgang says that when he met the novelist in the new year of 1977, “he seemed to be old, but in good health”. In fact, Nabokov was dying. When the BBC filmed him in the spring of 1977, he was low in the water and visibly sinking. He moved slowly, his skin was “grey and flabby” and he was breathing hard.

As his condition deteriorated, he worked obsessively to finish the new novel that was so synaesthetically vivid in his imagination. In the end, he had to acknowledge his fate. If the manuscript could never be finished to its perfectionist author’s satisfaction, it must never see the light of day. Now the spell he had nurtured would become an old man’s malediction. He instructed Vera that, after his death, it should be destroyed forthwith.

Nabokov died from bronchitis on 2 July 1977, in the presence of his family and, according to his son, Dmitri, “with a triple moan of descending pitch”. The writer’s departure seems like just another piece of wizardry. “The echo is so strong,” his son writes, “that I imagine that it is indeed all staged, that he will soon speak again.”

It could not be and the spell became a curse. The 138 index cards of “Tool“ were placed in a safe deposit box in the vault of a Swiss bank while Vera wrestled with her late husband’s injunction. From time to time, she enlisted sympathetic outsiders for advice. Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s distinguished biographer, was given a taste of the manuscript amid conditions of great secrecy during the mid-80s and advised against publication, an opinion he later rescinded. “People shouldn’t expect to be swept away,” he has said, tactfully. “It’s the kind of writing that induces admiration and awe but not engagement.”

Those for whom Nabokov is, in the words of Martin Amis, “the laureate of cruelty”, see his deathbed decree as peculiarly vexing. But it was not unique. Virgil instructed his heirs to destroy The Aeneid, and was defied by the emperor Augustus. Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his papers, which included the novels we know as The Trial and The Castle. “Fortunately,” said Nabokov in his own lecture on Kafka, “Brod did not comply with his friend’s wishes.” This remark has been used by the Nabokov estate as a prescient approval of its failure to destroy The Original of Laura.

The burden of administering the Nabokov estate had fallen to the writer’s beloved son, “my dearest Dmitri”, who was also known to his father as Mitya, Mityusha, Mityenka, Mityushenka and Dmitrichko. An only child, Dmitri has always expressed a quasi-tribal loyalty to the Nabokov name, but that is not the whole story. Vladimir loathed music and never learned to drive; Dmitri is a one-time opera singer with a love of fast cars. In the narrative of what happened next, the complexity of the father-son relationship has played a vital part. Last week, his cousin Ivan Nabokov described to the Observer the executor’s anguish. He remembers Dmitri telephoning for support. “If you’re asking me, I replied, you’ve already made up your mind: your instruction was to destroy it. .”

Now 75, Dmitri, known to the Italian press as “Lolito”, is as tough, vivid and entertaining, fast-talking and Americanised as his father was elusive, sweet-natured and immemorially Russian. For years, he lived in the Nabokov apartment in Montreux, or in Palm Beach, enjoying a playboy lifestyle with Ferraris and a string of girlfriends. In his time, he has been a passionate mountaineer and a racing driver until a near-fatal crash in 1980 curtailed all climbing, singing and driving.

When Vera Nabokov died in 1991, there was no escaping the family curse. Dmitri, who had already made an admired translation of Nabokov’s ur-Lolita, The Enchanter, welcomed an immersion in his father’s work as a way of remaining close to him. “When the task passed to me,” he writes in his introduction to The Original of Laura, it was as though he “had never died, but lived on, looking over my shoulder in a kind of virtual limbo, available to offer a thought or counsel to assist me with a vital decision”.

It is not known when Dmitri first began to study the 138 index cards, but when he did he seemed to make up his mind. The Original of Laura, he wrote, was “the most controlled distillation of my father’s creativity, his most brilliant novel”. Nevertheless, he continued to vacillate, like Hamlet, in the execution of his filial obligation to his late father’s request. Once again, he turned to his publisher-cousin.

About 10 years ago, the index cards of “Tool” were converted into a 76-page typescript and shown to Ivan Nabokov and some others in the estate’s inner circle. Nabokov says, pointedly, that, “We were all of the same opinion. It was just a torso, and not a glorious torso.” But now, once again, life was intruding on art. Entering his 70s, Dmitri Nabokov was progressively unwell with a grim tally of geriatric afflictions involving expensive Swiss doctors. To put it bluntly, he needed the money. Then, in 2005, there was a new twist.

Ron Rosenbaum is a New York journalist who happens to believe, as he told the Observer, that Vladimir Nabokov is “the greatest writer of the 20th century, the only one close to William Shakespeare’s level”. In November 2005, Rosenbaum, who enjoys a reputation as a literary gadfly, wrote a column, “Dear Dmitri, Don’t burn Laura!” in the New York Observer.

Having rehearsed the history of “Tool”, Rosenbaum reported an email exchange with Dmitri Nabokov about the manuscript (”He will probably destroy it before he dies!”) and closed with a passionate plea: “Won’t some university library step forward with a detailed plan for funding the preservation of The Original of Laura, this irreplaceable literary treasure ?”

The result: uproar. The eccentric, worldwide fraternity of Nabokov scholars had a field day. Dmitri, apparently maddened by the controversy, now adopted his father’s teasing stance. He declared himself to be “torn” between his obligations to posterity and to his father’s shade. Asked if he would burn or shred the manuscript, he replied, mischievously: “Perhaps I already have and prefer not to reveal the method.”

The teasing went both ways. In 1991, an American librarian published a literary critical essay, apparently by a Swiss professor, entitled “A first look at Nabokov’s last novel”, which was quickly exposed as a brilliant spoof. Others became entangled in the debate. “It’s perfectly straightforward,” said Tom Stoppard. “Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it.” Novelist Edmund White, whose early work had been championed by Nabokov, was equally blunt. “If a writer really wants something destroyed,” he told the Times, “he burns it.” John Banville said that this situation was “a difficult and painful one”. Conceding that The Original of Laura may turn out to be inferior, Banville decided that it should be saved from the flames. “A great writer is always worth reading,” he said, “even at his worst.”

So how good was The Original of Laura, and what was its place in the Nabokov canon? Ron Rosenbaum, who had begun to exhibit some of the symptoms that afflict everyone who approaches this manuscript, was now on a mission to find out and it left him wanting, he said, “to spend the rest of my life trying to evaluate its relationship to the rest of VN’s work”. But when he spoke to the Observer recently, Rosenbaum admitted that he was “deeply conflicted” about what he had seen.

Ivan Nabokov, who has watched this saga from the privileged position of one who actually knew the author, can’t quite see what the fuss is about. “To me, it’s an inconsequential matter,” he told the Observer, but as a distinguished former editor he fully understands the publishers’ dilemma. Never mind the “burn or not to burn” question; here is a highly publicised, highly prized volume that’s barely 76 pages long, by an author who wanted it destroyed, for which several imprints worldwide have paid a lot of money.

“Sonny Mehta at Knopf has come up with a brilliant solution,” he says. Designed by Chip Kidd, The Original of Laura will appear in a highly collectible edition: Nabokov’s handwritten index cards are reproduced in facsimile to display his neat handwriting, his furious crossings-out and his fascinating inserts. There’s one valedictory wink from the great magician, a final card containing a list of synonyms for “efface” – expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out and… obliterate.

Better late… Other posthumous novels

CG Jung (d.1961) The Red Book Begun after falling out with Sigmund Freud in 1913, this 205-page book with 212 illustrations detail what appears to have been a psychotic episode in Jung’s life. A Jungian scholar finally persuaded the family to publish the book this month, nearly half a century after it was written.

Kurt Vonnegut (d.2007) Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction This collection of 14 short stories includes one about insect-sized people and one about an evil machine that tells listeners what they want to hear. A second collection is scheduled for autumn 2010.

William Styron (d.2006) The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps To be published next year is a book of five tales loosely based on Stryon’s experience in the US Marine Corps. They include the first chapter of an unfinished novel and a previously unpublished short story.

David Foster Wallace (d.2008) The Pale King Also published next year, but already extracted in Harpers and the New Yorker, this is Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel about the “intense tediousness” of working for the Internal Revenue Service.

In trying to match the success of their first book, Freakonomics’ two authors have come a cropper, laments David Runciman

If ever two writers were likely to suffer from “difficult second book” syndrome, it’s Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of the smash-hit Freakonomics, which made them the rock stars of the economics world. The reason rock stars find the second album so difficult is that the first one is usually the product of years of hard graft, in bedrooms or garages, and then in dingy clubs in front of a handful of people, trying to discover which songs really work. When the record comes out and it’s a hit, the record company immediately starts wanting a follow-up, so the band has to dust off a few numbers that weren’t quite good enough for the original, plus a few more that they have managed to squeeze out in whatever time is left to them between gigs and groupies. Then the record company has to hype this new collection to death, in the hope that the fans won’t notice.

For Steven Levitt, the professional economist of the Freakonomics duo (Stephen Dubner is a magazine writer), the equivalent of the dingy clubs were the academic economic journals in which he tried out his theories in the decade or more before the first book came out. That book was already a selection of his greatest hits and the quality control was assured. Aware that people might wonder if they have been pressured into a follow-up before they were ready, Levitt and Dubner reassure readers in the preface to Superfreakonomics that they deliberately waited four years until they were sure they had enough high-quality material.

Unfortunately, though, those four years have not only seen various imitators start to crowd the field with X-ray economics books of their own, but it also seems to have given Levitt and Dubner time to forget what made their original book so fresh and exciting. The great appeal of Freakonomics lay in Levitt’s ability to mine the data for totally unexpected insights into otherwise baffling problems and Dubner’s skill in turning these discoveries into stories as exciting as detective fiction.

Their ultimate tale of the unexpected was Levitt’s find that crime fell in America in the early 1990s because abortion had been legalised around 20 years earlier, cutting off a significant supply of potential criminals at source. He only reaches this conclusion after dismantling all the other, potentially more plausible theories (including the “broken windows” theory made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point). Superfreakonomics contains nothing as painstaking or as revelatory as this. Instead, it too often tells us things we might have been expected to work out for ourselves.

For example, one of its five chapters is devoted to the economics of prostitution. Here, the discovery is that prostitutes and their clients are rational beings and the whole business operates according to the laws of supply and demand. But why should anyone be surprised by this? We are told that the price prostitutes in Chicago can charge for oral sex has plummeted over the past 100 years. The explanation is that as oral sex has become more available and acceptable in the wider culture, so prostitutes have been unable to charge a premium for performing a service people can get elsewhere (Levitt and Dubner call this the demise of the “taboo tax”). The trouble is that this is exactly what you would expect if you thought about it for more than a few seconds – more oral sex equals cheaper oral sex. Levitt and Dubner don’t bother to dismantle the competing theories, because there aren’t any.

They also seem to have fallen into the trap of spending too much time with their fans. A significant chunk of this chapter is spent telling us about “Allie”, a nice, intelligent, well-paid prostitute who also happens to be a fan of the original book (which is how Levitt and Dubner got to know her). It turns out that Allie is quite a shrewd businesswoman, who does quite well out of her business. This is only surprising if you think that prostitutes are incapable of behaving intelligently. It’s also just one person’s story. The genius of the original book lay in its ability to turn hard data into stories as interesting as the best anecdotes. This book treats mildly interesting anecdotes as though they were substitutes for hard data.

The real problem is that there is too much of people like Allie and too little of Levitt. We hear something of his latest research – about how drink-walking is more dangerous than drink-driving, or why children’s car seats may be no safer than seatbelts. But we don’t hear nearly enough and too many questions are left unanswered; for instance, whether more people die walking home drunk because they are simply so much drunker than people who still think they can drive.

When the car-seat evidence proves inconclusive, Levitt and Dubner take a seat to a safety lab to see what happens under crash conditions. But why should economists be any better at understanding what actually happens in a simulated car crash than scientists or engineers? They aren’t and Levitt and Dubner more or less admit as much before moving on.

So, instead, most of the book is taken up with stories about what other economists have been up to. This means it’s essentially Dubner’s book and it reads like a series of magazine articles. The last chapter is not even about an economist – it’s devoted to the story of Nathan Myhrvold, who thinks that global warming can be solved by pumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to replicate the cooling effects of volcano eruptions. The interesting economic questions here, and the ones you’d expect to engage Levitt, are to do with the unintended side-effects of such a proposal and how it may skew incentives. But, instead, we just get a breathless account of what a ballsy, quirky, out-of-the-box sort of guy Myhrvold is.

If the Freakonomics brand has been reduced to telling stories about people like this, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Malcolm Gladwell does it better (for one thing, he might have been a bit more sceptical). Earlier on, Levitt and Dubner are reduced to telling a story that Gladwell already has told far better in his recent book, Outliers, about why people born early in the year are more likely to succeed at sports. In a footnote, they admit they had planned a whole chapter on this, until Gladwell and others got there first. But the fact they still include a few pages rather than cutting it altogether suggests they didn’t really have enough fresh material for a second book after all.

Superfreakonomics is not a bad book, but it’s not a patch on the first – it has very little of the charm or the originality. Yet in their rather smug preface, the authors say that they believe the second book “is easily better than the first”. Can they really think this? Maybe not; after all, as economists they tell us they are fully attuned to the difference between declared preferences (what people say they think) and revealed preferences (what it turns out they really think).

But it’s possible that the success of the first book has gone to their heads. That book was the product of creative tension; they admit they first encountered each other in a mood of mutual suspicion, each wondering what the other had to offer. This one seems to have been more of a love-in (in the acknowledgments, Levitt calls Dubner “a brilliant writer and creative genius” and Dubner calls Levitt “a great collaborator and wonderful economics teacher”). A bit more suspicion would not have gone amiss.

It says something that the real puzzle this book leaves you with is wondering about the skewed incentives that led two such talented people to write a book that does so little justice to those talents. Maybe that should be a subject for a third book, if there is one.

David Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, From Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond is published by Princeton, £20.95

Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway are both celebrated for their brutal minimalism – but how much do they owe their renown to the interventions of their editors? As two new ‘original’ versions of their work are published, the question of posthumous restoration has never been more vexed

It’s been a good year for dead writers: they have been an uncommonly busy bunch. This year sees the publication of “new” works by Raymond Carver, who died 20 years ago, Vladimir Nabokov, who died 30 years ago, and Ernest Hemingway, who died almost 50 years ago – as well as Roland Barthes, Jack Kerouac, William Styron, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut and even Mark Twain, while Ralph Ellison and David Foster Wallace have posthumous novels coming out next year.

But are these posthumous editions doing writers any favours? Foster Wallace’s editor admits she has no idea which version he preferred of the multiple drafts he left when he died. But that hasn’t stopped her from assembling a novel from them. Carver’s renowned short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love has, in a sense, undergone the reverse process: Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, has reissued it as Beginners, in what she calls the book’s “original” form, before the tales were notoriously slashed, rewritten, and retitled by Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish. Nabokov’s last unfinished book, which he asked his wife Véra and son Dmitri to burn if he died before completing, will shortly be published as a “Novel in Fragments” by Penguin with the title The Original of Laura; Hemingway’s 1964 posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast, which has become a classic in its own right, has been “restored” by his grandson to include previously excised chapters.

One could argue – and many have – that the greatest benefit is neither to writers nor readers, but to publishers and literary estates. However, some of these publications are offered in propitiation of writers’ ghosts, promising to reveal their final words, do justice to their true feelings. Gallagher has battled hard to publish Beginners, to demonstrate that the stories the world knows as What We Talk About When Talk About Love, Carver’s breakout 1980 story collection, is not the book he wrote. Hemingway’s grandson Seán has similarly argued that the first edition of A Moveable Feast, the posthumously redacted version of a manuscript Hemingway left unfinished, accurately reflected neither the writer’s drafts nor his feelings.

Far from being aberrations, these controversial editions are the latest in a long tradition of revising “masterpieces” posthumously. More classic novels have been revised after their author’s death than many readers realise. Posthumously published books obviously must be edited – unless we take the idea of “ghost writing” literally – but the degree to which they are edited is often disguised, even misrepresented, by people with a vested interest in the final product. The question is: who gets the last word?

Many readers don’t realise, for example, that Herman Melville’s Billy Budd was left unfinished when he died, with additions and erasures in the manuscript that turned out to have been made by his wife, but were mistaken by the first editors for Melville’s own changes. These editors rewrote and rearranged the text to “clarify” it; not until the 1960s, 80 years after Melville’s death, was an “authoritative” version published. But the older editions are still readily available, with the result that a casual reader who picks up the novel without carefully identifying which edition she chooses may well read a book co-authored by Melville, his wife, and three or four editors he never met who couldn’t tell the difference between his handwriting and hers.

Spouses and other relatives have often taken a hand: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita was completed by his wife before it was published; Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems were rearranged and reselected by her estranged husband, Ted Hughes – who figured in some of the poems he cut. Emily Dickinson’s brother’s mistress was her first editor, her niece was her second: both women standardised not just Dickinson’s spelling, but her diction and scansion, smoothing out her rough edges, assigning saccharine titles to untitled poems – and these versions still circulate. Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, first published three years after he died, is an even more complicated story. Posthumously edited by his fourth wife, Mary, the memoir tells the nostalgic story of his first marriage to Hadley Richardson in Paris. The 1964 memoir closes with his bitterness in hindsight at the end of the marriage, as he left Hadley for his second wife, Pauline, whom this edition blames for luring him away. Some readers might not consider Mary an entirely dispassionate judge of Hemingway’s feelings about his first two marriages. Now Hemingway’s grandson Seán has “restored” the text, with the express intention of correcting its impression of Pauline – Seán’s grandmother. It seems there are always axes grinding: literary executors tend to be relatives, and thus have an emotional investment, as well as a financial one, in the public image of the artist.

Posthumous revisions are problematic enough. But the case of Carver has become so controversial partly because he had submitted unwillingly (at least at first) to a ruthlessly assertive editor, and now after his death those revisions are being undone. The vexed history of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love has become a cautionary tale about the role of editors in the production of classic books. In 1980 Carver, a short-story writer who had published one well-received collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (it was shortlisted for the National Book Award), submitted a collection he called Beginners to Lish. At this time Carver was respected, but far from famous; Lish had long championed his career, giving Carver his earliest breaks and supporting him through the dark days of serious alcoholism, when he seemed intent on drinking himself to death. Lish proceeded to cut the manuscript of Beginners by more than a half. Some of the stories – “Where Is Everyone?”, “So Much Water So Close to Home” and “A Small Good Thing” among them – were cut by between 70% and 80%. Titles were changed: “Where Is Everyone?” became “Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit,” a title Carver said he hated. The ending of “A Small Good Thing” – a story in which a child is killed on his birthday, and the grieving parents are harassed by a baker who doesn’t understand why the birthday cake they had ordered was never collected – was changed so that the fate of the child was unclear, there was no final confrontation with the baker, and no subsequent redemption. Characters’ names were changed throughout, often in ways that seem arbitrary: in the title story Herb became Mel, Carl is renamed Ed, and so on. Overall Lish not only made the stories much shorter: he also made them more elliptical, more open-ended, darker, more violent and callous, more working-class and less overtly intellectual (excising intertextual references to writers such as Italo Svevo), changing their tone and overall attitude to women.

Take the changes Lish made to “So Much Water So Close to Home,” in which Stuart goes on a fishing trip with friends; while camping, the men discover a dead young woman, naked and floating in a river. Reasoning that she’s already dead, the men decide to finish their trip rather than cutting it short to report the body. Lish transformed the ending, entirely altering the story’s meanings and implications. In Lish’s version, Stuart returns home to a fight with his wife Claire over his negligence, but then the fight leads to a troublesome sexual reconciliation. Stuart says to Claire: “I think I know what you need,” and proceeds to undress his wife. She not only accepts his overtures – for the first time in a while, as the story makes clear – she finishes unbuttoning her blouse, and urges him to “Hurry”, the story ending on that word.

Carver’s version is very different: in it, Claire is far more traumatised by the men’s indifference to the girl, the story implying that she once had an emotional breakdown. Her fight with Stuart leads not to sexual reunion, but to sexual violence, a violence linked to the dead girl, whom the police suspect was raped. Claire is less certain, and spends much of the story imagining the men viewing the dead girl’s body and the water running over it. When Stuart tries to have sex with her, Claire shouts “Stop, stop, stop” and stamps on his toes. Stuart responds by slamming her to the floor, and saying to his wife: “‘You go to hell, then, do you hear, bitch? I hope your cunt drops off before I touch it again.’ He sobs once.” Claire remarks “. . . and I realise he can’t help it, he can’t help himself either”, and feels “a rush of pity” for him. That night Stuart breaks the lock on her door – “just to show me that he can, I suppose”, Claire observes – and then stands there “looking surprised and foolish” before retreating to the kitchen, where Claire joins him and says, “For God’s sake, Stuart, she was only a child.” Carver’s story ends there.

As this example shows, Lish’s cuts were sweeping, wholesale, and so violent that Carver described them as “surgical amputation and transplant”. He responded with a now-famous cri de coeur, writing a letter to Lish explaining his horror: “I don’t want to sound melodramatic,” he wrote, “but I’ve come back from the grave here to start writing stories once more . . . I’ll tell you the truth, my very sanity is on the line.”

Lish called Carver and somehow talked him into accepting the edits, and the published collection made Carver famous. The book became influential enough to generate the adjective “Carveresque,” and to attach the tag “minimalist” to Carver’s writing, a label he detested for reasons obvious in retrospect: it turns out that the minimalist in the machine was not Carver, but Lish. Lish may have been tactless, ruthless, even unscrupulous – but then again his decisions made Carver’s reputation. However, the collection’s success also trapped him in a style he felt wasn’t his own.

Eventually Carver left Lish and published his third story collection, Cathedral, in 1984, which he believed was a watershed and many readers consider his masterpiece. The stories in Cathedral are fuller, richer, more generous and expansive, and prompted many readers to conclude that Carver’s genius was flowering under his newfound sobriety and stability with Gallagher, with whom he’d been living since 1979. But in fact the earlier stories were bleak less because Carver had an alcohol problem than because he had an editor problem. Gallagher insists that Carver was always a more expansive and expressive writer than his reputation suggests. But is this reissue what he would have wanted?

A little-discussed coda to the controversy is that when he knew he had terminal lung cancer, Carver himself published a final edition of collected stories, Where I’m Calling From (1988), which included older stories as well as seven new ones, and some of those older stories he restored to the pre-Lish versions. Far from being “new,” we have actually had access to the original “So Much Water So Close to Home” for 20 years. Carver also restored his original versions of “A Small Good Thing” (reprinted in the same form in Beginners), but left Lish’s rewrite of stories including the much-anthologised “Gazebo,” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” – presumably because he felt, in the end, that they were superior. Carver’s final editor, who worked with him on Where I’m Calling From, said that Carver compiled that collection with “the stated objective” of putting together “his choices for posterity”.

Moreover, Lish was hardly the first editor to take an interventionist approach with his writers. He was working in the venerable tradition of editors such as the legendary Maxwell Perkins, the editor at Charles Scribner who discovered F Scott Fitzgerald, ushered in Hemingway’s greatest novels, and turned Thomas Wolfe’s thousands of pages of chaotic prose into two now-classic books. Perkins was instrumental in determining the final version of The Great Gatsby – so much so that a scholarly edition of Fitzgerald’s final draft before he incorporated Perkins’s suggestions was published a few years ago as Trimalchio, a kind of beginner’s version of Gatsby.

Unlike Lish, Perkins is usually lauded as a consummate editor, the exemplary talent scout, salesman, reader and cheerleader. At various times he acted as agent and banker for Fitzgerald, drinking and fishing buddy for Hemingway, legal, financial, even psychological adviser for all his writers. He offered titles, ideas, themes, plots, characters, and dialogue. He helped Fitzgerald portray Gatsby more effectively – and tried, unsuccessfully, to get Hemingway to tone down his language. Although Perkins was far more tactful than Lish, and virtually never rewrote his authors’ prose, he did not always employ a light touch. He imposed severe cuts on Wolfe’s manuscripts, for example, which Wolfe reportedly later resented, although he was also notoriously unable to edit himself, and at other times referred to his partnership with Perkins as “a collaboration”.

Great art is often a question of judicious cutting. Consider The Waste Land, which Ezra Pound convinced TS Eliot to cut by more than half. Far from resenting the edits, or saying that they endangered his sanity, Eliot dedicated the poem to Pound as “il miglior fabbro” – the better craftsman. Pound worked as a kind of conductor for Eliot, orchestrating and isolating the music he had composed. Are readers cheated if we don’t read Eliot’s full 1,000 lines, instead of the 434 of the final version? If Eliot was grateful for Pound’s assistance, presumably the published version reflects his final wishes.

But what of Richard Wright’s 1940 Native Son, from which he excised a controversial scene in which his protagonist Bigger Thomas masturbates with his friends in the cinema? The Book of the Month Club demanded the cut, which amounted to censorship; Wright acceded for commercial reasons. The scene was eventually restored – but only in the “unabridged” scholarly edition. There continue to be simultaneously circulating editions that reprint the abridged 1940 version, without explanation.

One of the most extreme instances of classic books with competing editions is Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, of which there are two radically different versions in print. Fitzgerald’s fourth and last completed novel, Tender is the Night was the long-delayed follow-up to The Great Gatsby; the combined problems of his own alcoholism and his wife Zelda’s psychiatric breakdown meant that it took Fitzgerald nine years to complete. His first two novels (This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned) had been bestsellers, making him popular and rich, but The Great Gatsby had been a commercial disappointment, selling only modestly. Fitzgerald pinned his emotional and financial hopes on the success of Tender is the Night: in 1933, he showed a visitor a manuscript nearly a foot high, and said: “There’s my new novel. I’ve written 400,000 words and thrown away three-fourths of it. Now I only have 15,000 words to write.” Then he exclaimed: “It’s good, good, good.” But to his bewilderment and despair, when the novel came out in 1934 it sold poorly. Fitzgerald would live only six more years, during which time he struggled to make sense of the comparative failure of his two masterpieces. One straw he ended up clutching was the idea that Tender is the Night’s experimental structure had been its commercial downfall; he had written it in three sections, with a long flashback in the middle. Always seeking opportunities to reissue his books and make some much-needed money, in 1938 Fitzgerald approached Perkins with the suggestion that they reissue the novel in chronological order. Perkins demurred, and the idea came to nothing while they lived. But when Fitzgerald died, among his papers was found his personal copy with the pages cut loose from the binding and reordered chronologically, and an underlined note: “This is the final version of the book as I would like it.”

Ten years later, in 1951, Malcolm Cowley was helping to initiate a Fitzgerald renaissance, and decided to reissue the novel “With the Author’s Final Revisions,” in chronological order. A fine critic, Cowley included a preface, scrupulously explaining his reasons. The Cowley edition didn’t impress other critics, who preferred the original version. Hemingway told Cowley that the chronological version took all the “magic” out of the book. The Cowley edition, first published by Scribner (four years after Perkins’s death), was in print for years, initially with Cowley’s explanatory preface. But eventually the preface dropped out of reprints, so that thousands of copies of Cowley’s redesigned novel still circulate – without any indication to the reader that it is not the original book. Surely this was Fitzgerald’s “final” revision only because he didn’t live long enough to change his mind again; if he had survived to see the success of his initial Tender is the Night, presumably he would have stopped tampering with it. As Cowley’s preface acknowledged, Fitzgerald continued to have “afterthoughts” while working over this supposed “final version”: the problem of posthumous editing is always the problem of afterthoughts, and second guessing.

Fitzgerald has been the recipient of a great deal of second guessing. His friend Edmund Wilson, who published both the unfinished The Last Tycoon (now usually corrected to The Love of the Last Tycoon) and The Crack-Up essays after Fitzgerald’s death, also took it on himself to correct Fitzgerald’s diction in the famous ending of The Great Gatsby, changing the phrase “orgastic future” (which Fitzgerald was quite specific about: Perkins queried the word, and Fitzgerald responded that it “expresses exactly the intended ecstasy”) to “orgiastic future,” on the condescending basis that it was “Scott’s mistake . . . he was very unreliable about words.” But as Hemingway remarked when asked about Cowley’s reordering of Tender is the Night: none of this is important, he said, “unless everything is important in writing.”

Editorial decisions were so important to both Fitzgerald and Hemingway that in the early years of their friendship they read each other’s drafts and made suggestions. Fitzgerald was particularly influential on the final version of The Sun Also Rises (entitled Fiesta in the UK), which came out in 1926, most significantly suggesting that Hemingway cut the first two chapters – a suggestion Hemingway followed, and later denied that Fitzgerald made. Always competitive, Hemingway came to resent Fitzgerald’s comments, annotating a letter Fitzgerald sent with suggestions about A Farewell to Arms with the marginal comment “Kiss my ass – EH”, but continued to follow some of Fitzgerald’s advice, without ever crediting him. As Fitzgerald’s posthumous star rose, Hemingway increasingly disparaged him, culminating in three notorious chapters of A Moveable Feast, in which Hemingway ridiculed Fitzgerald’s art, his taste, his intelligence, his ability to hold his drink, his wife and even his masculinity. But once again the problem of posthumous editing indicates that this is not the full story.

The restored version includes sentences that the first A Moveable Feast cut, suggesting a more fair-minded assessment of Fitzgerald. (It also includes, however, a less-than-generous new episode in which Hemingway’s son Bumby – who would have been three at the time – instructs Fitzgerald on how to drink like a man.) But more important to its new editors is the restored edition’s view of Hemingway’s first two marriages. A Moveable Feast is widely regarded as a classic – a nostalgic, acerbic, self-justifying, moving account of life in Paris in the 1920s, with memorably spiteful accounts of the writers whose helping hands Hemingway proceeded to bite, including not just Fitzgerald but Ford Madox Ford (Hemingway accused him of bad hygiene) and Gertrude Stein.

Those poison pen portraits have entered literary history – but they were assembled from a series of sketches and unfinished drafts in a loose manuscript of a “memoir” on which Hemingway had been working sporadically since at least the late 1950s. Seán Hemingway has said explicitly that his intention is to cast his grandmother Pauline more sympathetically, with the justification that this is how Hemingway “actually” felt and that the restored edition would “set the record straight” by revealing Hemingway’s ambivalent mix of happiness in his first two marriages and remorse at their endings.  

The restored version, based on a “typed manuscript with original notations in Hemingway’s hand – the last draft of the book that he ever worked on” is closer to what scholars, familiar with the manuscripts, have long argued were Hemingway’s intentions. The restored book includes a revised version of the memoir’s final chapter, “The Pilot Fish and the Rich”, in which Hemingway takes more responsibility for the end of his marriage to Hadley, ceasing to represent himself as merely the hapless victim of the combined perfidy of John Dos Passos (the “pilot fish”), Gerald and Sara Meyer (”the rich” couple, to whom Fitzgerald dedicated Tender is the Night), and Hadley’s friend Pauline (also rich, by no coincidence). “For the girl to deceive her friend was a terrible thing, but it was my fault and blindness that this did not repel me,” says Hemingway in the new version. “Having become involved in it and being in love I accepted all the blame for it myself and lived with the remorse.” The new A Moveable Feast is considerably more prolix, which may disappoint readers accustomed to Hemingway’s famous terseness; and it’s considerably more sentimental, which may disappoint readers who enjoy the original’s virtuosic spite. The “restored” book is self-pitying where the first was self-justifying, pious as well as petty.

So is it a better record of Hemingway’s “true” feelings and memories? One of his associates, the writer AE Hotchner, thinks not. He wrote angrily to the New York Times earlier this year deploring the publication, arguing that it travesties both Hemingway’s intentions and the art of the 1964 book. Hotchner read Hemingway’s final manuscript, personally delivering it to Scribner in 1960; he says the published version is faithful to the transcript he saw, and denies that Hemingway’s widow Mary edited the final chapter. He sees this book as an unwarranted correction by interested parties, asking what happens “if a descendant of F Scott Fitzgerald demands the removal of the chapter in A Moveable Feast about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis, or if Ford Madox Ford’s grandson wants to delete references to his ancestor’s body odour?” Insisting that publishers “are guardians of the books that authors entrust to them”, Hotchner maintains that “someone who inherits an author’s copyright is not entitled to amend his work.”

But there’s a problem with Hotchner’s story, too: in April 1961, three months before he died, Hemingway wrote to Scribner saying that the manuscript Hotchner had delivered for him was unfair to both of his first two wives, and to Fitzgerald. The letter declares that the manuscript “is not to be published the way it is and it has no end”.

But Hemingway also added in this letter that he felt unable to fix it, as everything he had done since, he contended, made the book even worse. And it is those “worse” drafts that Seán has included and published as the “restored” A Moveable Feast. Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway’s posthumous reputation is increasingly determined by afterthoughts: his heirs have also published Islands in the Stream (1970), The Dangerous Summer (1985), True at First Light (1999), a “fictional memoir” edited by his son Patrick Hemingway (Seán’s father, who has also endorsed the new Feast), only to be republished six years later more extensively as Under Kilimanjaro. The Garden of Eden, which became a bestseller in 1986, was assembled out of three manuscripts, cutting approximately 200,000 words to 65,000.

Writers such as Carver, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald were famous when they died, they all had sincere artistic ambitions and took their craft seriously. As a result, they all had an investment in their literary reputations, writing – and publishing – with an eye on posterity. But posterity is looking back, and it doesn’t follow that the authors themselves are the best or only judges of their art, and that they will be given the last word even after death. Only posterity can grant a book continued meaning, an afterlife.

It’s easy to sentimentalise – even misrepresent – this point: professional writers sell their art in a marketplace that necessarily admits editors and readers into the story. There is nothing pure about it: the rubicon between “original” art and edited collaboration has already been crossed. Beginners is unlikely to replace What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Instead, it will be in dialogue with it, because the story has no end: there will always be afterthoughts.