“This was an uncommonly rich year for British fiction with the publication of at least three standout novels: On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s stunning story of two families and their intertwined lives; Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro’s gothic tour de force about a group of students trying to come to terms with their unusual destiny; and Saturday, Ian McEwan’s harrowing, post-9/11 novel about the sudden intrusion of violence and unreason on a London family’s cosseted, upper-middle-class life.
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Any one of these novels would have been a worthy recipient of Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction. Instead, the judges last month awarded the prize to John Banville’s (right) novel The Sea—a stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious tale about an aging widower revisiting his past.”
So Michiko Kakutani begins John Banville’s first major American review since winning the Man Booker prize three weeks ago. At least Kakutani didn’t try to recreate he voice of Krapp’s Last Tape in one of her increasingly bizarre parody pieces. Two questions remain: How much of the book-review-osphere will share her take on The Sea, and how will this affect American sales? (Keep in mind that Amazon.co.uk saw a 300 percent spike when the prize was announced, and the book’s still among the top 100 sellers there.)