Motherload

Thank goodness for Andrea Levy! I knew when I read The Help that there was something subtly wrong with it. Essentially its politics were good, its characters were interesting and readable, and the ending a happy one for most concerned. Big ticks all round. So what was wrong with it? Nothing so simple as the fact that it was written by a white woman — after all, no one can help the colour of their skin, right? No, it was that The Help is enslaved to the narrative of slavery, while The Long Song is emancipated from it. This seems to me the task of fiction — to free itself from the facts, in order to imagine the lives that might have fleshed out those facts. Not properly, but improperly. It will be argued that The Help does this fleshing out in spades, and so it does. And it's not about your actual slavery on Jamaica, but about racial integration in the deep South of the United States. Yet it misses out one key ingredient. Uneasiness. The Help makes us feel safe and cosy. It is i...

I'm in a terrible hurry, so only have a few minutes to digest a couple of things with you. This puts me squarely in the category "overfed information junkie" for a thinker like Alain de Botton, who's been delivering Point of View on Radio 4. I've heard a couple of these so far. In the first, he argued that humanities teaching in British universities is culturally bankrupt; in the second that everyone else is. I was kind of cross about the first perspective, given how much of my life I gave to trying to help students think clearly, simply and forcefully about works of difficult literature. But I agree with the second perspective, because I find myself swimming about in it these days, running between pointless meetings, unable to research ideas in any depth, and overwhelmed by the number of books I 'ought' to have read, or be reading (quite apart from the cultural events that I never now see). I agree with him on the notion that we are bulimics of culture: u...