Volume 43, Number 6 · April 4, 1996
That's Life!
By John Banville
Last Orders
by Graham Swift
Knopf, 295 pp., $23.00
It is a peculiar misfortune for a writer to produce a first-rate novel at a young age. The novelist's is a slow-ripening gift, and most fiction writers when they reach maturity find themselves going hot with shame when they contemplate the fruits of their youth. Some do manage to free themselves of the millstone of an early masterpiece and go on to a triumphantly productive middle age—Flaubert (Madame Bovary in 1857, L'Education sentimentale in 1869), Joyce, Thomas Mann—but writers of lesser genius can find their careers blighted by an early success. Waterland (1983) was not Graham Swift's first novel—he had previously published two novels and a volume of short stories—but it was the one which brought him his greatest popular acclaim: the Guardian Fiction Prize and the lucrative Winifred Holtby Award, Booker Prize short-listing, and the apotheosis of being made into a Major Motion Picture. The two novels he has published since 1983—Out of This World and Ever After—have been more or less warmly received by the critics, but in almost every review, with awful predictability, unfavorable comparison has been drawn with Waterland. Graham Swift may sometimes have wished he had never written the damned thing.
Review, 2841 words
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