Portrait of a Bilious Tory

...If y ou are enchanted by the conversation of bright college sophomores, particularly the kind who believe the purpose of privilege is to provide a vantage point from which to put down the unfortunate, you may get a kick out of Fortnight's Anger...

...like a windless Hag...

...like a gigged frog...

...Moreover, the stylistic felicities and infelicities are credited directly to him...

...In any case, we all arrange ourselves, with varying degrees of success, to meet the world...

...We can't all write novels nor, if we managed to, would they be likely to achieve the harmonic beauty of Joyce...

...His preposterous position was that sexual desire is inherently nuptial, that it is fulfilled solely in long-term monogamous relations...

...curled like a worm...

...One finds oneself thinking instead of Professor Scruton...

...I hope he will return without further distraction to his political and philosophical enterprises...

...I can't otherwise explain the survival—to cite a relative handful—of: "like a badly made automaton...

...like an image of perfect peace...

...The problem is that we do not see, are not helped to see, a strikingly new or ridiculous feature of the sort of woman who would write a thesis entitled "The Social Significance of Fine Art in Late Capitalist Society...

...It is sometimes said that the very rich receive bad medical service because their money makes servants of doctors...

...like props from a theater left out in the rain, all their uses gone...

...Although best known in Britain as a political pundit and Thatcherite bulldog, he is by profession a philosopher, and his most recent work in that line, Sexual Desire, showed a great capacity to fantasize evidence and say many things not true...

...Conservative theses (perhaps they should be more accurately labeled conservative peeves and tics) can also be detected in the background of Fortnight's Anger, which concerns the wanderings of a bilious young writer in London and the breakup of his family following his mother's death...

...One of the most peculiar features of Fortnight's Anger is the quantity and quality of its similes...

...Yet one cannot help noticing how many objects pass from the real world into the novel unabsorbed by any imaginative context...

...Probably about as real as the Celtic revival...

...Jarva Knees...

...Scruton doesn't seem to realize that what might be amusing viva voce will not necessarily survive translation into print...

...Roger Scruton's attempt, however, is a complete flop, strangely unredeemed by his considerable intelligence...

...and I doubt that even Scruton has managed to achieve degree zero of sartorial self-presentation...

...Inevitable in actual pornography, this effect makes us hold the actors filmed or photographed responsible for the actions depicted: We know the—at most lightly fictionalized—performers are really doing the things we see...

...But imaginative prose aims to sel up—in ways easier to feel than to describe abstractly—complex reverberations of sound and sense, creating a peculiar species of sensible, almost edible, beauty...

...Here is a typical sentence from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "In the distance along the course of the slowflowing Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim fabric of the city lay prone in haze...

...Doesn't the realism heighten the effectiveness of the satire in Fortnight's Anger...

...Some samples: "Javanese...

...What is preposterous is to pretend that the view derives from a dispassionate analysis of human sexual phenomena—that it issues from the very nature of things...

...It made her look as though she belonged to an underground militia...

...Every sentence says its piece primly, plainly and properly, and then shuts up...

...Javanese...

...Flatness, indeed, characterizes the whole novel...

...like a wounded creature...

...Writing simply can't have the on-the-wing quality of realworld cleverness...

...Nonfiction does not ordinarily raise assignment problems: The sentences are designed to reveal the writer's thoughts straightaway...

...You've not been upbraided or downbraided for weeks...

...Apool of living tears...

...Awell of loneliness...

...His latest idyll...

...She's for real...

...The finenessof Joyce'sobservation is in part due to the perfect ordering of the visualized elements accomplished on the level of sound...

...Regrettably, none of these characters emerges as an autonomous individual, none has the opacity—or, if you prefer, mystery—of a genuine person...

...We are given no more than a conventional—and probably dated—association that is too general, too banal, to peg the character Barbara Langley...

...Scruton's principals are Kenneth Fortnight, his younger brother, their parents, several women who are erotically linked to Kenneth, and a fraudulent medical practitioner —more or less an analyst—who messes around in everyone's life and puts the make on the apparently irresistible Kenneth...

...like a dance of paper in a street...

...Thus, "Barbara had taken to wearing rough denim clothes, dirndl skirts and dun-colored headscarves...

...If novelistic imagination were simply a knack for writing false sentences, Scruton would be in very good shape...

...A description of some guests at a fashionable London party fares no better...

...The clothes read within the novel exactly as someone like Scruton would read (or misread) them in ordinary life: asbadgesof Left-wing militancy...

...Fiction, properly, contains characters separate from their creator, who is presenting them tous...

...like the legs of a restive insect...

...We hear, behind its brittle, flashy surface, a monotonous grumble and discontent as Professor Scruton tries to think the 20th century out of existence by sheer force of ill-will...

...like the moaning of a cat, low, menacing, and then gradually rising to a shriek...

...To recommend such relations is, of course, merely standard conservative rhetoric...

...This is not ordinary observation, it is subordinary: Though denims (or "jeans" as we call them) are highly cathected and endure endless alchemical modification, I have never heard of dirt being applied— bleach and paint, yes...

...hovered like a ghost...

...In a sense...

...dirt, no...

...The Kid is about 15 during most of the novel, and equally likely, on a given page, to break out in song or Latin...

...In contrast, we do not (unless we are préadolescents or moralizing critics of movie violence) assign Rambo's actions to Sylvester Stallone, because we know that whatever his faults Stallone is not killing anybody...

...like a stricken animal...

...Hence the pornography effect...

...We're doing L'Enfance du Christ by Hectoring Berlioz, did you know...

...There commitments to clarity and truth almost suffice...

...No...

...But why should we blame The Kid's glibness on Scruton...

...I leave the reader to decide whether anything in the above resonates, sparkles or surprises...

...Yes, and the collapse is invited by Scruton himself, for his thin construction of Fortnight's Anger leaves him open to the "pornography effect...

...Jar Van Ease...

...he is not depicting verbal performance...

...The only thing I got was a new word, "gigged" —apparently that simile means "like a frog with a demerit...

...Are we not collapsing character into author...

...The faint aroma of Calandre arose from arty men on whose denims every speck of dirt had been the subject of meticulous arrangement...

...An absence of musicality is not a defeet—it may even be an advantage—in expository prose, in science, in philosophy, where phrasemaking should be guided exclusively by t he ends of clarity and trulli...

...editor, "Philosophical Forum " This book is a tour deforce of intellectual rubbish, the product of a mind well-furnished in the old-fashioned or "classical" English way but devoid of novelistic imagination, the literary equivalent of trying to claw your way into heaven with good works and no grace...

...There is, to be sure, no knock-down proof of this kind of creative failure...

...Isn't that the funniest word...

...Each of the preceding is uttered by a character called The Kid, the younger brother of Kenneth Fortnight, the eponymous antihero...

...perhaps Scruton's standing as a fairly famous philosopher had a similar effect on his editors...

...Isn't that OK...

...Trying to wangle himself into my unconscious as though the place wasn't bloody crowded out already with ids, yids, kids, whatever, all divided so as the better to be ruled...

...The only thing that is truly impressive on the page is what is impressive no matter how long it took to concoct...