Dr. Banville and Mr. Black

摘要

John banvijlle is an irish writer of austere, erudite, literary novels. A Booker winner, he's famous for being relentlessly highbrow. Benjamin Black writes mystery novels; his slender, nasty The Lemur(Picador; 132 pages) appears this month. The funny thing about Black is that he and Banville are the same person. It's currently chic for fancy novelists to slum it in the lower genres, the way Marie Antoinette used to dress up as a peasant and milk cows. Sebastian Faulks just wrote a James Bond novel; Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union was a noir mystery set in an alternate universe. Some writers find the discipline invigorating: look at The Road, Cormac McCarthy's fling with apocalyptic science fiction. Some don't: Martin Amis' Night Train was an under-cooked attempt at hard-boiled detective fiction. It turns out that trashy books are as hard to write as good ones.