Mel Brooks has just turned 92, and, as far as anyone can tell, he is unaltered. He has blue-gray eyes and a rakish smile; his hair is white and full; the voice remains powerfully hoarse, with traces of Louis Armstrong’s music filtering through the guttural tones. When Brooks gets excited, that voice bursts out of him like a tiger bursting out of the bush. At other times, he murmurs rapidly, teenage-style, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” No one is ever likely to miss a Mel Brooks joke, since he speaks, sometimes roars, with great precision. His normal speaking voice—not the Yiddish-accented voice of the comedy routines—could be called classical Brooklyn, the sound I remember as a New York kid from encounters with taxi drivers, baseball fans, and teachers. Those men had a definite flavor, and they meant to be understood.
The Victorian critic John Ruskin coined the phrase “pathetic fallacy” to describe the morbid attribution of human feelings to animals and inanimate objects. According to Ruskin, an artist’s skillful deployment of such imagery could yield insight into the human condition. What he objected to was sloppy, overwrought language that depicted both nature and emotion untruthfully and unbeautifully. “It is a fallacy caused by an excited state of feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational,” he wrote. “All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things.”
After the separation, I was afraid of appearing irrational, violent, pathetic and fallacious, revealing what Ruskin called “a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or overclouded, or over-dazzled by emotion.” So I couldn’t dwell on the parakeets’ cries over their shattered nest, or the heartbreak and toil of building a new one. To imagine how and why their home had ripped in two might just overcloud me with despair.
This is a story about a book that just kept selling, catching publishers, booksellers and even its author off guard. In seeking to understand the reasons for the book’s unusually protracted shelf life, we uncover important messages about our moment in history, about the still-vital place of reading in our culture, and about the changing face of publishing.
How am I supposed to feel about the fact that for the first time a graphic novel has made it on to the Booker longlist? As someone who loves comics, and who has championed them in this newspaper for more than a decade, it should go without saying that I’m thrilled. Sabrina by Nick Drnaso is a good book by any standards: as deeply rich in mood, voice and plot as any regular novel I’ve read this year.
But in truth, I can’t help but be irritated by all the fuss, too. To me, it’s as if someone had suddenly pointed out that music is great, or trees, or swimming pools. Given the thriving state of the comic, and the relative weediness of certain other literary forms, surely the bigger story here by far is the fact that the poet Robin Robertson’s wondrous verse novel, The Long Take, is also on the list.