Estou quase a acabar de o ler. Talvez devido ao prémio que acaba de ganhar, reproduzo aqui a critica literária que Hollinghurst fez deste livro para o Guardian:

David Lodge's new novel is about the perils and compulsions of authorship, and the ironies of popular and critical success. One peril it doesn't address until its endnote is the one that has befallen it: that someone else should have written a novel at the same time on exactly the same very specialised subject, in this case the middle years of Henry James. Lodge's Author, Author shares a number of scenes with Colm Tóibín's The Master, published six months ago; in fact one particular scene is shared with a third novel, Emma Tennant's wider-ranging Felony (2002), which investigated James's Aspern Papers and its sources. It is the scene in which James is rowed out to a remote place in the Venetian lagoon to dispose of the clothes of his friend, the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, the dresses rising again to the surface like black balloons. As a symbol of bad conscience, the undead dresses are something any novelist might be pleased to have invented; but in fact all three took the episode from Lyndall Gordon's A Private Life of Henry James (1998) - one of a number of books in the past decade which have sought to probe the complex relations, in James's life, between friendship, sexuality and the demands of his art. Gordon's own source for this otherwise unattested event is not above suspicion; but the image is understandably irresistible to writers who want to catch James at an awkward moment.

The idea of "the middle years" was a resonant one for James. It was the title of a story he wrote when he was 50, about an author who dies in middle age without ever attaining to the splendid "last manner" he believes himself capable of. That James himself did achieve and sustain such a manner through the first decade of the 20th century is one of the great facts of modern literature. But in the early 1890s his career as a writer was in crisis. His sales and advances, never high, had dwindled alarmingly - in 1889 he was offered £70 for his novel The Tragic Muse, which as his friend George Du Maurier points out in Author, Author, was what Punch paid him for a single draw ing. (The novel would sell only 3,500 copies in James's lifetime.) James's optimistic solution to this crisis was to start writing plays, a medium for which he had no real aptitude. A dramatisation of his early novel The American had only a modest success in 1891, and Guy Domville, on which he'd pinned his highest hopes, had a disastrous first night on January 5 1895, when James took a curtain call to a barrage of boos and whistles. It was a decisive humiliation, and the turning-point of his career. Tóibín opens his novel with it, but Lodge makes it the climax of his, leading up to it with much informative narrative.

James himself disparaged the historical novel, which he felt was bound to be either implausible or inartistic, but Lodge and Tóibín feel sensibly uninhibited by such strictures, or by the later James's demanding precepts of the novel as a unified dramatic "action". Of the two books, Tóibín's has the more Jamesian purity of point of view: he stays strictly in James's consciousness - in fact in an inner chamber of it, home to those primitive doubts, fears and yearnings which gave his work much of its underlying power. Covering the years 1895-99, he travels much further through narrative flashbacks, but his is a purposely muted and unsocialised James, often paralysed in conversation, unable to fulfil his own desires or to respond to those of others. Tóibín's interest is in James's failed or merely latent relations, and their bearing on his art. The book succeeds in the way that it should, by being so thoroughly Tóibínian - dark, oblique, and tense with repressed sexuality; but it is not in the least "dramatic".

Lodge sustains the Jamesian point of view for most of Author, Author, framing it with two deathbed chapters in which consciousness is dispersed between different attendant figures. His preoccupations are not so inward as Tóibín's, and the James he presents is at times barely recognisable as the same "character". Lodge's James is naturally loquacious and social, and his book, reaching from the early 1880s up to 1899, has at its heart the long and happy friendship with Du Maurier. He gets very touchingly James's simplicity of affection combined with subtlety of mind; and explores in detail the ironies of the two friends' contrasting careers through the mid-90s, when James's failure in the marketplace as both novelist and dramatist coincided with Du Maurier's global success with Trilby, not only as a novel, but also as a play and as a very modern kind of mania, trilby shoes and hats being as it were the merchandising. It is a further twist that Du Maurier had offered the Trilby idea to James, who made a note of it, but decided that his lack of feeling for music made a novel about a singer impossible for him.

In his portrait of the writer's private life Lodge touches, less interestingly than Tóibín, on James's guarded fascination with the Wilde trials, and his prudish attitudes to nudity and the sexual mores of his more bohemian friends. Both dwell on his instinct for bachelorly self-preservation, his cautious relations with Woolson, and his guilt after her suicide in Venice. Both recount, to rather different purpose, the scene when James first saw a naked man, his cousin Gus Barker, being drawn by William James; though oddly neither of them notes James's admission in his memoirs that he "secured and preserved for long William's finished rendering of the happy figure", who was to be killed in the civil war.

Part of James's richness as a subject is that his life touched on so many others, and Lodge has fun trailing past us in infant form such figures as Compton Mackenzie (son of the actor- manager Edward Compton), Virginia Woolf and Agatha Christie (bumped into on a cycle-ride from Torquay). All this is interesting and enjoyable, but one comes to feel more and more that Author, Author is limited, as a novel, by its artless closeness to biography. In his acknowledgements Lodge owns up eagerly to the few small details he has invented, and longish stretches of the book, with its conventional scene-setting and tidy summaries, might well have come straight from a Life of James. The conversations are of course made up, but are often heavy with back-story and explanations to James of things he would already have known. James himself is made to speak courteously and quick-wittedly, but he is not realised with the vividness of numerous real-life anecdotes, which reveal him as one of the most prodigious and idiosyncratic talkers of the age.

Stylistically, Lodge, the sharp comic novelist, has put on the slippers of a comfortable semi-historical manner, neither James's nor his own: James's avoidance of the commonplace could be comically fastidious, but it is odd that Lodge himself should be happy with so many fine views, elegant façades, and cheerfully glowing fires. There are some jarring notes - Edith Wharton would not have been described by the 1930s term "socialite" in 1915; "master bedroom", on which Lodge makes an awful joke in his first paragraph, is a usage from the later 1920s. But there are good jokes too; James's flattered conversation, on the day of the Domville premiere, with a man in the Reform Club lavatory about what a great day and exciting prospect it is, the stranger in fact referring to an imminent rugby match in Swansea, is part of the deft depiction of the self-delusions of authorship. The recurrent lavatorial note (the Master farting, belching and urinating) is, I suppose, a playful infringement of Jamesian propriety.

That there might be a larger impropriety, or at least rashness, in writing a novel about a great novelist and attempting to describe the inner life of a supreme analyst of consciousness, is something of which Lodge, in his closing salutation to James, seems modestly aware. From time to time he riskily quotes bits of actual James, and in each of them - not only the surreally magniloquent deathbed dictations, in which he thought himself to be Napoleon, but the notebook entries, the letters, even the telegrams - James's brilliance and singularity are humblingly evident.

Por mim gostei particularmente desta passagem do livro:

"Norris turned out these books at the rate of one or sometimes two a year, three deckers with not very many words to the page, perfectly adjusted to the circulating library system which was his principal market. They were things to marvel at, these novels, for totally lacking any distinctive flavour. Henry (James) compared them in his mind to cups of tea brewed in a pot from which the tea leaves had been accidentally omitted in the process of preparation, and served to people who were either too polite to comment or didn't actually like tea. The pot, and the cups, were of unexceptional design, the water was of exactly the right temperature, and flowed freely from the teapot's spout, but the beverage was completely transparent and tasted of nothing. They were novels for people who liked to have a novel at hand, but did not much care for the reading process."

Página 301, 302