The problem with book critics — and at a minor-league level I guess I am one — is that they tend to think they know better than authors how they should have written their books. You can imagine the possibilities, both comedic and dramatic, when a literary scholar marries his favorite author. Michael Frayn does exactly this in his 1989 novel “The Trick of It.”
Frayn tells his story in a series of letters from Richard, a professor in England, to his friend in Australia. Richard has made himself an authority, even the authority, on the author he refers to as JL, and sometimes as MajWOOT (major writer of our time). She accepts his invitation to speak at his college, they wind up in bed together and sometime later are married. Then the real problems begin.

Richard has no interest in teaching any other writers, yet lecturing about and writing about his own wife's novels has become awkward, eventually causing him to accept a teaching position in Abu Dhabi, of all places. JL follows him, though unhappily, on the assumption that she can write anywhere.

The bigger problem is that JL, who has never even read anything Richard has written about her, won't take his advice. He is convinced he knows how she can improve her writing, but she refuses to listen. Her popularity increases when one of her books is adapted for a television miniseries, while his own small place in the literary universe evaporates — except perhaps for those letters.

Frayn's novel makes amusing, and sometimes confusing, reading. Many readers will be put off by its showy narrative style, but I am not going to suggest how he might have made it better. I found it a delight. ( )

Michael Frayn has this trick of making me see something about myself I didn't understand. In this case I was quite taken aback to see written in black and white the explanation of why I can't write fiction.

Oh, thanks, Michael Frayn, I say somewhat doubtfully.

Frayn does make a habit of inducing me to break my principles never to read a book twice. Compared with A Landing on the Sun I'm not sure I could explain why it is so with this book. Maybe an example? This book is a monologue by a man obsessed with his wife.

Have I ever told you what she's like? I haven't, have I! What am I thinking of?....

All right - perhaps I should simply give you a complete physical description. I'll begin with her eyes, because that's the first thing you notice about her. Her eyes are like Indian groceries. That's to say, they're open. Very open. Open from early in the morning until late at night. You have to watch them for a very long time to catch them blinking. I sometimes sit on the opposite side of the kitchen table and watch them for thirty or forty minutes without seeing it happen. A blink in her eyes is as rare as a sea-bream in the Sahara. Is it humanly possible to go that long with a blink? Perhaps she does blink - this astonishing thought is coming to me for the first time now as I write - and I don't see it because I'm blinking too. Her blink is unconsciously triggered by mine, or mine by hers, so that we blink in perfect unison.

They're serious eyes, that's the next thing you notice about them, and they shine in the soft light reflected upwards from the tabletop beneath the shaded table-lamp. The pupils stand wide in the half-darkness, and in each of them is a tiny man. This tiny man fits into the pupil most perfectly, like a jewel into a jewel-case. His appearance is striking. He reminds me of a small golden cloud left in a clear evening sky, or a smile left in the bathroom mirror. No description of her would be complete without a complete description of him, so I'll start with his eyes, since they always seem to be looking at me. They never blink, either. They're not so serious as hers, but they also shine in the soft upward light, and the pupils are wide. But what makes them immediately recognisable is that in each pupil is a little woman. Now, no description of the little man could ever by exhaustive unless it included a description of the little woman in his pupils...

I'm sorry about this, It's probably because it's the fourteenth of the month. Which, as psychiatrists now recognise, is three days after the eleventh.

And thus, in the space of two brief sentences Michael Frayn provides a complete judgment on the entire field of psychiatry.

How could you not love him?

( )

Michael Frayn has this trick of making me see something about myself I didn't understand. In this case I was quite taken aback to see written in black and white the explanation of why I can't write fiction.

Oh, thanks, Michael Frayn, I say somewhat doubtfully.

Frayn does make a habit of inducing me to break my principles never to read a book twice. Compared with A Landing on the Sun I'm not sure I could explain why it is so with this book. Maybe an example? This book is a monologue by a man obsessed with his wife.

Have I ever told you what she's like? I haven't, have I! What am I thinking of?....

All right - perhaps I should simply give you a complete physical description. I'll begin with her eyes, because that's the first thing you notice about her. Her eyes are like Indian groceries. That's to say, they're open. Very open. Open from early in the morning until late at night. You have to watch them for a very long time to catch them blinking. I sometimes sit on the opposite side of the kitchen table and watch them for thirty or forty minutes without seeing it happen. A blink in her eyes is as rare as a sea-bream in the Sahara. Is it humanly possible to go that long with a blink? Perhaps she does blink - this astonishing thought is coming to me for the first time now as I write - and I don't see it because I'm blinking too. Her blink is unconsciously triggered by mine, or mine by hers, so that we blink in perfect unison.

They're serious eyes, that's the next thing you notice about them, and they shine in the soft light reflected upwards from the tabletop beneath the shaded table-lamp. The pupils stand wide in the half-darkness, and in each of them is a tiny man. This tiny man fits into the pupil most perfectly, like a jewel into a jewel-case. His appearance is striking. He reminds me of a small golden cloud left in a clear evening sky, or a smile left in the bathroom mirror. No description of her would be complete without a complete description of him, so I'll start with his eyes, since they always seem to be looking at me. They never blink, either. They're not so serious as hers, but they also shine in the soft upward light, and the pupils are wide. But what makes them immediately recognisable is that in each pupil is a little woman. Now, no description of the little man could ever by exhaustive unless it included a description of the little woman in his pupils...

I'm sorry about this, It's probably because it's the fourteenth of the month. Which, as psychiatrists now recognise, is three days after the eleventh.

And thus, in the space of two brief sentences Michael Frayn provides a complete judgment on the entire field of psychiatry.

How could you not love him?

( )

An English Lit professor invites an author - the author who is the subject of his scholarship - to come visit his classes, to talk about her novels and her writing process. The encounter changes his life and his career.
A one-sided epistolary novel about the creative process as viewed from the outside. I wonder if Frayn was settling some scores in this excruciatingly painful read about literary hangers-on.

The narrator writes about his anxieties as he anticipates his first meeting with the author:
"I don't think I want to meet her at all. I expect my rivals in the field all know her personally, but that's no concern of mine. I don't know why I call them rivals. That's not how I think of them. Fellow-specialists. Comrades in arms. I expect my esteemed colleague Vlad the Impaler is always masterfully sweeping his specimens off on joint family holidays in Tuscany before he puts them into the killing-bottle and pins them into his collection. And I'm sure that creepy little woman from somewhere in Pennsylvania who can't spell heuristic, Dr. Stoff, or Swoff, or whatever she's called, is over here every summer with little jars of home-made arse-salve, weasling her way in to dinner. I always thought we in Britain were above such things. Or rather, I never thought anything at all. The idea of trying to scrape an acquaintance with her has never crossed my mind. Could this just be lack of imagination? Or is some unconscious resistance at work here? And doesn't the unconscious have its reasons that reason knows nothing of? All these years of quiet scholarship, and suddenly I'm careering off the rails. (Not just five years of TBAD. Do you know I was teaching TSR and FDDS at that summer school I did in Ontario eleven years ago?) Maybe the sight of her there at the station in all her circumstantiality - I mean, in an x-coloured coat and y-coloured shoes, z inches shorter than me - will destroy the magic. I shake her hand, and feel not the virtue in her flowing into me, but the virtue in me leaking away into her! Flesh! We're not into flesh, in our trade. So then how do I teach on, magic-less, to the end of the term - the end of the year - the end of my career?
"I say z inches shorter than me. z = 5. I've just looked in my notes. Oh God, there's going to be nothing but disappointment in meeting someone you know everything about already. There's something I don't know? Then I know where to look it up. I know her mind and I know her heart, and I know them backwards, forwards and sideways. I know what she looks like. I know what she looked like when she was twelve and when she was seventeen. Seeing her in her x-coloured coat and y-coloured shoes is just going to reduce her to a single set of arbitrary particulars.
"....
"I know everything, you see. Well, 'five foot ten and a half' [which he has just written is the height of her ex-husband] is a slight liberty, a little jeu d'esprit. A plausible invention. What one might call taking a leaf out of the opposition's books. Because that's what these people do. Did you know that? They make things up. Off the top of their heads. Pour un oui ou un non. Piff paff. And then honest working folk like us, in our great concrete knowledge factories, have to REPORT, have to LEARN, have to KNOW, have to EXPOUND these shrugged-off nothingnesses. Ain't it all a blooming shame?
"I realize now, now that I've said it - and I mean now, between the last paragraph and this - that I am serious about my second thoughts. But I mean SERIOUSLY serious. I absolutely do not wish to meet this woman." pp. 6-9

A university lecturer invites his favourite author to give a lecture in his provincial university. She attends and they begin a relationship which will allows him to glimpse into her way of creating a novel. It is written as an epistolary novel, in which we only have access to the letters which the lecturer writes to a colleague who lives in Australia telling him about his relationship with the female author. It is a satire about the work of critics and researchers and their envious attitude towards writers. The main character, the lecturer, is a pathetic individual who wants the writer to write about him and who wants to control her and her literary creations. The female writer is only seen through his eyes and is described as a very determinate woman who has lived a richer life than him,. Although she gives up quite a lot of things to be with him he describes her as quite uncaring and mainly focused on her work. Frayn shows that he knows how to craft well a novel, his technique is excellent. Nevertheless this one is it not as impressive or interesting as Spies. ( )