Guardian.co.uk, 15 August 2009
It takes a peculiar sensibility
to demonstrate a lack of responsiveness to Jamesian prose. John Crace achieves this in a so-called "comic" podcast,
where he tries - and singularly fails - to make fun of The Golden Bowl. The "text" includes deliberately self-conscious
references to the length of the novel, in which "pages and pages" have been taken up with "meaningless introspection," with
the characters not doing much except reflecting on their actions. The podcast summarizes the plot of the novel, but
reveals the podcaster's basic contempt for it in a coda which describes it as "a load of Golden Bowlocks."
I sometimes wonder quite what
the point might be of producing material like this. Those who have engaged with The Golden Bowl would probably
press the 'Stop' button before the seven-minute long podcast finished, while those who believe that the novel is simply "Golden
Bowlocks," as Crace claims, would probably not be interested in the podcast anyway. Maybe we might most charitably describe
it as narcissistic exercise in self-promotion.
