The glittering prizes

Congratulations are in order to the first Australian to win a Pulitzer prize, Geraldine Brooks. Even those who, like me, have read neither her March nor the classic novel from which it is derived, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), are aware that Brooks' novel belongs to that modern literary genre known as 'sharecropping'. The idea is simple: take a classic novel, and write a spinoff involving one of the characters, preferably one who only plays a minor role, or better still, who never actually appears in the source-novel. In Little Women, the father of the March family is away at the Civil War, and exists mostly as an offscreen character. Brooks has won her Pulitzer by writing a novel in which we follow what Mr. March was doing all that time.

Others with a canny eye to this kind of ploy have included Peter Carey, who wrote Jack Maggs to follow what happened to the convict Magwitch, from Dickens' Great Expectations, after he vanished to Australia. Then there's Sena Nashlund's Ahab's Wife, which tells the story of, you guessed it, Captain Ahab's wife. We can only look forward to a version of Moby Dick, told from the whale's point of view. How could you beat an opening sentence like: "Call me Moby" ? Probably the grandaddy of the sharecropping novel is Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a prequel to Jane Eyre, filling in just what happened to the first Mrs. Rochester.

I have respect for the mercenary motive in literature, and agree with Dr. Johnson that 'nobody but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money'* so I have no qualms about any writer who wants to maximise their chances by pitching directly for the biggest market, and by piggy-backing on an established best-selling classic. However, that liberality should not be mistaken for a willingness to judge the end result by any standards other than the literary.
(* which makes me a blockhead, or should that be 'bloghead'? Perhaps Boswell misheard the Doctor, who really said 'nobody but a blogger...')

Having taste-tested March, I can say that it is not as badly written as one would expect. Not well written, but at least not offensively inept, and it is surprisingly free of the ear-gouging linguistic anachronisms and factual bloopers which normally pepper the modern literary historical novel. Its outstanding fault, on a quick survey, is the 'voice' of the central character - a dreary, lifeless pastiche of an imaginary nineteenth-century novelistic voice. I have always suspected that the men and women of the nineteenth century did not talk like the people in Dickens and George Eliot any more than modern Americans actually talk like the people in Hemingway or Richard Ford.

I am probably hopelessly idealistic about artists and writers, but I found Geraldine Brooks's attitude to her former critics not encouraging. Referring to a 'wrist-slittingly' bad (i.e., mildly critical) review given to March by Thomas Mallon in the New York Times, she has said gleefully "He'll get up tomorrow and read the news and puke." Maybe. But if he's any kind of critic, he'll be puking because a mediocre literary airport novel has - yet again - won a major prize, not because he's been 'proved wrong' by the infallible Pulitzer Committee.

Brooks' Australian publisher, Shona Martyn, offers perceptive, but somewhat backhand praise: "Geraldine … goes to the heart of what I would call the book club market". I've often wondered what happened to that market, once ruled by giants like Morris West, A. J. Cronin, Irving Stone...