Jane Austin Novels

As for the rest of the book…well, what exactly is it up to, really? It is a genre-teaser, equal parts memoir and monograph, literary crash-course and a portrait of the critic as a young man. Even so, it seems undecided about which direction it wants to take. Just as you start to get interested in Jane Austen, here comes William from afar with all his predictable problems: daddy issues, post-grad jitters, romantic disillusionment. And just as you start to wonder what is up with this guy William, back we go to linger among the landed gentry.

And gradually, of course, one begins to discern the familiar sweep of a Jane Austen novel: naïve young person must overcome stubbornness/immaturity/ignorance and take responsibility for him or herself while attempting to grow as an individual. As the book opens, for instance, William Deresiewicz himself recalls struggling to see the value in Austen’s writing. “The one area of English literature that held no interest for me,” he writes of his 26-year old Ph.D-pursuing self, “was nineteenth-century British fiction. What could be duller, I thought, than a bunch of long, heavy novels, by women novelists, in stilted language, on trivial subjects?”

At the time he fancied himself a rebel, and he recalls passing his days “in a cloud of angry sarcasm, making silent speeches” while walking down Broadway “in my John Lennon coat,” railing angrily against everything “conventional, respectable, and pious.” He valued Joyce and Conrad above Jane Austen and George Eliot. He smoked pot and listened to the Clash. He read Kerouac and Heller. He scoffed at sellouts. He was, he writes, “Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, raging against the machine.”

Elif Batuman’s The Possessed come to mind, as well they should. Dyer set the gold standard of the imaginative-critical genre, contrasting the often hilarious postponement and procrastination of his restless writing life with that of D.H. Lawrence. The result was dizzying in its brilliance, not to mention lucid and illuminating in its portrayal of Lawrence and his writing.