Chums of War

After more than a dozen years and three other novels, Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy––Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995)—remains a notable example of scrupulous historical realism quite happily unencumbered by postmodernist prejudices. In a 2003 interview in Bookforum, she was blunt: “What fiction has to offer is, above all, characterization. If this makes me a tremendously old-fashioned novelist, I don’t care.” How she has practiced her “tremendously old-fashioned” art deserves attention now that she is publishing her eleventh book, which returns to

print Apr/May 2007

James's Gang

Clive James contains multitudes, and his new book of 876 pages on 107 figures in history and the arts—his thirty-first in thirty-three years—is here to prove it. Born in Sydney in 1939 and now living "in London, Cambridge, and various airports," he tells us in an author's note and on his website ("the first personal multimedia extravaganza of its type anywhere in the world") that he is "one of the most influential metropolitan critics of his generation" and "a prominent television performer" in Britain. "But despite the temptations and distractions of media celebrity," we read, "he always