A Critic to the Core

...Dunnett is also worried for his own reasons...

...I read e very word she writes, even though not a single one of them is about me,' he complains...

...Frayn acknowledges the authorial debt by naming one of Dunnett's rival critics Vlad the Impaler, a man who is "always masterfully sweeping his specimens off on joint family holidays in Tuscany before he puts them into the killing-bottle and pins them into his collection...

...Frayn the playwright (his Noises Off was a Broadway hit several years ago) often surfaces in the novel, as elements of farce (Dunnett wearing a pink dressing gown in JL's London kitchen when her two sons and an old lover stop by) and quasi-stage directions ("A sudden shift of authorial tone here towards the reverential...

...He'll marry her...

...You hedge me about, you cage me and patrol me, and take all the ground and air from around me...

...After spending the night with JL, he admits that "one's desire contains an element of frankly professional interest...

...His letters are gleefully self-incriminating...

...He lies, admits the lie, and replaces it with a new one...

...But he worries that she will find her visit trying ("a grim little gathering in my rooms") and dull ("dinner with a handful of academics in unsympathetic disciplines"), and that when the festivities end she will be lonely ("a night in some bleak guest room in a windswept corner of the campus...

...There is a type of magic trick that has the magician seeming to reveal how it's done, only to come up with an added twist that preserves the mystery...

...Dunnett does more than misquote...

...Near the end of the novel the couple move to Abu Dhabi, where he keeps her more or less locked away in an "air-conditioned, viewless, well-sound-proofed" room...

...But it is nonetheless entertaining, thanks to the pleasures of Frayn's dexterous prose—chatty, full of quirky affectations (as letters from a man like Dunnett would be), often witty, and always rhythmically pleasing and on key...

...He says, for example, as he looks at his beloved major writer sleeping beside him: "It seemed to me that there was a mocking parallel between our positions on the bed and our positions in life...

...Becausehere she was gazing no less intently up at me...

...She's coming," the first letter begins...

...I shake her hand, and feel not the virtue in her flowing into me, but the virtue in me leaking away into her...

...His novel is composed of a series of letters that Richard Dunnett, a critic and professor at a provincial English college, writes to a friend living in Melbourne...

...Frayn appears to be attempting a similar feat in this book...

...Dunnett wants what JL has, the trick of her talent, and he stalks her, marries her, takes her away from friends, family and country in his attempt to get it...

...Flesh...

...He is determined to figure things out for himself, scorning to ask JL questions (" I long to know...

...What is she trying to tell the world about it...

...We're not into flesh in our trade...

...Although Dunnett seems to side with the traditionalists, his discontent is everywhere apparent...

...Dunnett has no more luck reaching through to his wife than he does uncovering the trick of writing...

...I just don't want to be told, somehow...

...Dunnett's specialty is a contemporary English author—a major author, in Dunnett's opinion—and it is one of Frayn's small tricks to have Dunnett use only the initials JL to refer to her, making the "secrets" revealed in the letters all the more enticing...

...As it turns out, Dunnett will do more than shake his heroine's hand...

...It's not a matter of getting more attention from JL...

...You have led me into a desolate and stony place," JL tells him, "and things are very bad between us...

...I'm not absolutely certain she said 'hedge me about'," he appends to the speech quoted above...

...He never does, of course—the trick is not something to be acquired, Frayn seems to be saying—but it's great fun watching him try...

...sneak in...

...and for that short time she knew me...

...That he has pulled it off without our being able to say how is exactly the point...

...He tries to imagine the effect that walking into the college's breakfast room with JL the next morning might have on his colleagues: "What would I think if Hooked up from my eggs one morning and saw—I don't know, I can't think of any parallels— Gavin Lecky in Animal Husbandry walking in with one of his pigs...

...He leaves out crucial details, too...

...Following their union, Dunnett and JL move to the English countryside where she can have peace and he can ensure it, cooking and cleaning and keeping away distraction...

...After repeating a long conversation he supposedly had with JL about her current work, he assures his Melbourne correspondent that in reality the exchange never took place: "The entire dialogue is a kind of metaphor for the rather complex events that actually occurred—the process of guess and counterguess, of glimpses over her shoulder when I took her cups of coffee she hadn't asked for, of silences and frowns, of looks and glances, of an accusatory tilt of the jaw here, adefensive set of the mouth there...

...So then how do I teach on, magic-less, to the end of the term—the end of the year—the end of my career...

...She knew me as I knew her, and we were equal...

...This and other qualifications have the effect of throwing the whole report into doubt...

...It soon becomes clear that the cranky academic is obsessed with equality...

...JL is his life's work, after all, and he is afraid that seeing her "in all her circumstantiality—I mean in an x-colored coat and y-colored shoes, ? inches shorter than me—will destroy the magic...

...The most pointed fun, however, is had at the expense of Dunnett himself...

...For all of his ambitiousness (he has always imagined he would end up married not to a major writer, but to "the wife of one of the major writers of our time"), he is a critic to the core: He can't stop looking for significance...

...Thankfully, Michael Frayn is wise enough not to try to tell us, and clever enough to hold our interest anyway...

...That is as direct and substantial a statement as JL makes in the book, though everything Dunnett relates must be taken with agrain of salt...

...This doesn't help Dunnett either...

...Dunnett is happy, of course—it is a feather in his cap to get the famous JL down from London...

...Yet when JL produces a novel full of characteristically violent images and episodes, Dunnett sees it as an attack on him: "What is she trying to tell me about our life behind rhododendrons...

...How life, in other words, becomes art...

...Yet Dunnett feels some ambivalence about what he has done: "It seemed to me, even as I broke it, that I had discovered a new taboo governing mankind, one which must have existed unknown since the dawn of time until I stumbled upon it yesterday evening—a taboo against intercourse with an author on your own reading list...

...There are also enough lineaments of self-reflexiveness —crossed-out words, footnotes, "interviews" with JL—to give pause to deconstructionists, who might otherwise brush aside a text that asserts in a delightfully backhanded way the primacy of "the noble tradition to which we all once paid homage" and the subservience of criticism...

...He is as frustrated—and in many ways as insane—as the monomaniacal critic of Nabokov's Pale Fire...

...But you don't own the words I say or the thoughts I think, and you never will, and you never can...

...She reads not a single word I write, even though most of them are about her...

...This is a plot twist that Frayn deploys with consummate comic skill, and one that allows him pokes along the way at overscrupulous biographers, poststructuralists, and others who attach themselves to those who really do know the trick of it...

...In the same letter Dunnett recalls thinking, while lying on top of JL, that "this was a revenge for all these long years when she had been up there, obliviousof me, and I had been down here gazing so intently up ather...

...Indeed, Frayn's story seems to take as many steps back as it does forward...

...There she was, comfortably ensconced in the soft center of Englishletters, not even aware that there were others clinging painfully to their outer edges...

...contributor, "Massachusetts Review, " "Newsday" The "trick" here is how: how a writer writes, and writes well...