Harry Rent, the hero of Mark Sarvas’s first novel, is a Prufrock in his mid-40s. His arms and legs are thin, as is his courage, and the author writes most persuasively in a handful of early passages dramatizing Harry’s zoned-out self-consciousness, his crippling awkwardness and his anxiety about what to do with his hands while standing by his wife’s casket.
That you are reading a review of this novel in these pages is a testament to the author’s success as a blogger. Sarvas’s site, titled The Elegant Variation, has been remarking on the literary world for nearly five years, and though it lacks the righteous bile of Edward Champion’s Filthy Habits or the nourishing meatiness of Jessa Crispin’s Bookslut, it has made many worthy contributions to bookchat in that time — heralding the genius of the Irish novelist John Banville, for instance, and giving influential book-review editors the hard time they deserve. Nabokovians everywhere from Appalachia to the Alps owe him one for recently publicizing a pair of marvelous YouTube clips that show Nabokov, voice dripping deliciously, index cards at the ready, talking with Lionel Trilling about “Lolita” shortly after its publication. The first video begins with Nabokov already in progress, delivering a suave rant that he fleshes out in a Paris Review interview: “Corny trash, vulgar clichés, philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudoliterature.” Those are illustrations of what the Russians call poshlost, a kind of coarse banality that may have found a new exemplar.
Troy Patterson is the television critic at Slate and the film critic at Spin.
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