The Novel: a survival skill offers a completely new account of the relationship between writer, text, and reader. Drawing on ideas from systemic psychology and positioning theory, Parks suggests that both the content and style of a novelist’s work, the kind of stories told and the way in which they are told, form part of a more general strategy of survival that the novelist has developed in response to tensions within his or her family of origin. The reader reacts to these in very much the way he or she would react to the same communicative strategy in a real life encounter, different readers responding differently depending on their own backgrounds and habits of communication. Powerful chapters on Joyce, Hardy, Lawrence and Dickens considering the different value structures that can dominate in any close human grouping—good/evil, independence/dependence, success/failure, belonging/exclusion—, and carefully demonstrate how these authors place themselves in relation to these values and how this positioning is manifest in their writing. Radically undermining traditional lit-crit criteria and deconstructing the pieties with which the novel is usually defended, Parks gives a novelist’s insider account of what may best understood as the biography of the act of writing itself and its relation to the lives with which it is entwined.
Author
Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since, raising a family of three children. He has written fourteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, and most recently In Extremis. During the nineties he wrote two, personal and highly popular accounts of his life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the passion of football. Other non-fiction works include a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money and a memoir on health, illness and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still. In 2013 Tim published his most recent non-fiction work on Italy, Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo. Aside from his own writing, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his critical book, Translating Style is considered a classic in its field. He is presently working on a translation of Cesare Pavese's masterpiece, The Moon and the Bonfires. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, his many essays are collected in Hell and Back, The Fighter, A Literary Tour of Italy, and Life and Work. Over the last five years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online. These have recently been collected in Where I am Reading From and Pen in Hand.
