A teenager, strangers and a pair of apes

John Self

PERHAPS AS A FUNCTION OF MY OWN journey through middle age, I have become increasingly interested recently in late work. This is the writing that comes when a writer has passed what blurb-composers call “the peak of their powers”, but at the same time diligently distils the curiosities of a long life into fiction. Often the late work is compressed and succinct — no time to waste! We saw this in the final novels from those once-garrulous American masters Saul Bellow and Philip Roth: the reader, used to being beaten into submission by their storm of words, found a clarity and control in The Actual (1997) or Nemesis (2010) that had once been well hidden. Ian McEwan said recently that he and Julian Barnes had “agreed that the novella is the…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2023

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