The Household Tips of the Great Writers by Mark Crick (Granta, $30.00).

Reviewed by Gordon McLauchlan

Most parodists would agree that theeasiest to mimic among modern writers is Ernest Hemingway, with his longuncomplicated sentences mostly stitched together by conjunctions, telling storiesthat evolve simply and directly elaborated by meticulous descriptions of landscapeand action. This is so distinctive many would claim that, with his late-lifenovels, he parodied himself – and that’s not to demean the bulk of his manynovels and short stories.

          Theability to parody the work of top-flight writers takes at least insouciance,perhaps even reckless self-confidence, the sort of attitude that Mark Crickcertainly had writing this good-fun book. But above all it requires an intensely close read of the authors to beparodied, not only of style but of substance.

Crick imaginesseventeen ‘Great Writers  in the Kitchen’:among them Jane Austen preparing tarragon eggs; John Steinbeck cooking mushroom risotto; Vietnamese chickena la Graham Greene; and cheese on toast a la Harold Pinter. Raymond Chandler’slamb with dill sauce drips with a weary, sophisticated nonchalance and coq auvin a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez is superbly, magically real.

Crick’s othertwo imaginative cateogories are ‘Great Writers’ DIY Tips’ and ‘Great Writers inthe Garden’. 

I wentimmediately to ‘Hanging Wallpaper” by Hemingway, in the DIY section, to see howCrick managed the writer I thought would be the easiest to of them all take off.Well, what he does is breathtakingly clever and very funny. He not onlyaccurately parodies the Hemingway style, down to the Biblical intonation, butimagines the hero of The Old Man and the Sea wallpapering. He openswith: ‘The old man had worked for two days and two nights to strip away the oldwallpaper and now on the morning of the third day the time to hang the new  paper had come and he was tired….’ It getsbetter and better.

In fact the DIYpieces are the best to me. ‘Reglazing a Window with Milan Kundera’ mocks thegreat Czech novelist’s introspective, questioning turmoil thus: ‘Allgovernments oppose transparency. They oppose it because they know that withtransparency comes fragility. Such is the nature of glass…’.

Imagine‘Painting a Panel Door with Anais Nin with her toolkit -- screwdriver and brush-- and her materials -- primer, undercoat and gloss paint. She doesn’t paintthe panelled door herself, of course, but watches a man at his work, ‘As shelay back on the couch … her breasts thrust forward, her arms raised over herhead.’ One would not expect the painter to complete the task, and he doesn’t.Not the painting anyway

Crick (right) has donethis sort of writing before. An earlier book, Kafka’s Soup, was an international best seller, and was followed bySartre’s Soup and Machiavelli’s Lawn. His literaryknowledge makes his mimicry something special. Beyond the laughs and theadmiration of the extraordinary guile he demonstrates, a reader who is also awriter will learn a great deal from the way he not only imitates the intrinsicrhythms of prose stylists also but illuminates the way they control theirmaterial. So, as well as amusing, this an instructive book.

ENDS