Trivial Matters

In the following passage, a well known critic describes the strategies of an even better known novelist. Without peeking, try to deduce the identities of both writers, and try to gauge the critic's assessment of the novelist:

"The policy of the book appears to be this, that the more trivial the matter the more space is devoted to its analysis. Nor is this sheer perversity; for the more trivial the matter the more completely do all its particular data lie within the writer's control, to be arranged, enumerated, commented on, exhausted, whereas a matter of some moment -- like the death of Aristotle's thirsty man -- entails so many factors, so many intersecting chains of causality, so many possibilities realized, not realized, or not even recognized, that art quails before it and is content with a perfunctory sentence."

That is the late Hugh Kenner writing about Samuel Beckett in Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians. The same passage, especially the first sentence, might have been written about any god-awful novelist, from Mikhail Sholokov to Joyce Carol Oates. Instead, Kenner is writing about a novelist who, as he says two pages later, "succeeds in not at all wasting our time."

Dalkey Archive Press has reissued Kenner's book, originally published in 1962, complete with 10 drawings by the late Guy Davenport. I'm especially fond of Davenport's rendering, on page 61, of "[Leopold] Bloom reflected in John Ireland's window, O'Connell Street."