How do you assess an author’s lasting impact?



Forget the blurbs, they are less than worthless. Even the glowing reviews

will soon be forgotten. Awards are no better indicator—half of the writers

honored with the Nobel Prize in literature are forgotten and out-of-print

nowadays.



Here’s the truest test. Wait until ten years after their death, and see if

anyone still talks about their books.



You need a decade for the hype to dissipate, for the eulogies to fade from

readers’ memories. Class reading lists have now been updated. The old

book reviewers have been replaced. No publicist or agent is working the

room. The chatter at fashionable cocktail parties has moved on to other

books. Only a great author can still hold readers after a decade’s absence.



And what does this measure tell us? Well, Saul Bellow (died in 2005) has

clearly fallen from grace. Even a centenary celebration and publication of

the first volume of a major biography couldn’t hide the defensive tone of

Bellow’s advocates. When Bellow’s name is mentioned nowadays, it is as

often to dismiss or criticize as to praise. I question the fairness of this turn-

of-events—I rank Bellow as one of finest authors of his generation—but

can't deny that his reputation has taken a huge hit.



On the other hand, Kurt Vonnegut (died 2007) will certainly survive the ten-

year-test. He is not only read and quoted, but is still treated as an iconic

figure of the counterculture. The same can certainly be said of David Foster

Wallace (died 2008), whose reputation and admirers seem to grow with

each passing year. I suspect that the tenth anniversary of his death will

serve more as a kind of canonization of a saint than a reevaluation of a writer.

In sharp contrast, Norman Mailer (died 2007) already seems like an old-

fashioned figure from the distant past, an author who may still garner some

recognition among the general public, but won’t find many readers under

the age of forty.



Which brings us to the sad case of John Fowles. We have now arrived at

the tenth anniversary of his death (on November 5, 2005). My local

bookstore has none of his novels in stock, and some of his classic works

are now out-of-print. He is, by my reckoning, one of the greatest writers of

the 20th century, but I fear that he is badly failing the ten-year test.



What a change from 1969, when John Fowles was at the top of the literary

world. His novel

The French Lieutenant's Woman

was already in its third

printing even before Fowles finished his publicity tour of the US. It would

stay on top of the bestseller list for more than a year. Fowles found himself

booked on back-to-back TV shows, basking in a degree of pop culture

fame that one could hardly imagine any novelist receiving nowadays, let

alone a middle-aged white British male educated at Oxford and fond of

postmodern narrative techniques.



Fowles

's

best works still dazzle. And they seem just as strange and

wondrous now as when they were published. When Fowles’s

The Magus



arrived in bookstores almost exactly a half-century ago, its first readers

must have shaken their heads in amazement. How could you describe a

novel that was so different from every other book on the shelves? These

kinds of characters, situations and plot complication simply didn’t exist in

other tales—it was almost as if Fowles had mapped a hidden world that no

one had previously visited. But that’s still true today, and perhaps the most

impressive testimony to his achievement is that this author’s finest works

still defy categorization.



Take a look at his final novel,

A Maggot

—if you can find a copy, that is.

(This book is out-of-print except in digital form.) Try to determine what kind

of novel it is. After fifty pages, you will be convinced that it is a historical

novel about early 18th century Britain class relationships and moral

attitudes. But one hundred pages later, you will have changed your mind,

and believe you are reading a murder mystery. But soon after you will

suspect that

A Maggot

is actually a work of magical realism. But in another

hundred pages, you will start wondering whether John Fowles has really

written a science fiction novel set in 1736. But a short while later, you will

find that you are reading a work of religious fiction—or are you? Why would

John Fowles, atheist and free thinker, be taking you on just this particular

path?



The whole book hold together marvelously, and you will be caught up both

by the postmodern techniques and the sheer bravado of the storytelling. But

you won’t be able to classify it, let alone provide a brief summary of its

contents. It is too rich and varied for synopsis. You must experience it

whole, or not at all.



The same kind of category-breaking vision informs

The French Lieutenant’s

Woman

. At first glance, this book seems to emulate the long, rambling

Victorian novels of Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. But Fowles takes

the basic formulas of the nineteenth century and reinvents them with the full

arsenal of twentieth century literary techniques. Here the reader encounters

meta-narrative, gender politics, post-Freudian psychoanalysis, existential

questionings, sociological analysis, and various postmodern structural

shifts (including two conflicting endings to the story). Yet Fowles embeds all

of this into a sexually-charged love story that probably would have sold

loads of copies merely on the merits of its appeal to fans of romance tales.

By any measure, the novel is tour de force. And though it has inspired later

works (see, for example, A.S. Byatt’s

Possession

), there is still no other

novel that quite captures the peculiar flavor of

The French Lieutenant’s

Woman

.



I am hardly surprised that Fowles doubted that the book could be made into

a movie. He was wrong on that count. Not only did

The French Lieutenant's

Woman

serve as the basis for 1981 film, but garnered five Oscar

nominations (including the first of fifteen Best Actress nominations for Meryl

Streep). But to pull off this shift to the silver screen, scriptwriter Harold

Pinter had to make significant changes to the meta-narrative.



In truth, Fowles has been poorly served by Hollywood. (But he got his

revenge with his 1977 novel

Daniel Martin

, which offers up many caustic

observations on the cultural impact of movie moguls and their minions.)



The Magus

ranks among the most brilliant novels of the 1960s, but the film

version was a disaster. Woody Allen famously quipped that, if he got to live

his life over again, he would do "everything exactly the same, with the

exception of watching

The Magus

." According to actor Michael Caine, even

the cast failed to understand the story. Yet the fault here does not reside in

the book, but in the disastrous decision to turn it into a movie of less than

two hours.

The Magus

has more surprising plot twists than almost any book

I’ve ever read. Every thirty pages, more or less, something transpires that

forces the reader to reassess everything they have learned in previous

chapters. I suspect that it could be turned into an absolutely compelling mini-

series if told over the course of 10 or 20 hours. Imagine

Lost

on steroids.

But the story cannot survive compression into the standard length for a

feature film. Director Guy Green shouldn’t even have made the attempt.



Fowles, like so many of the sensations of the 1960s and 1970s, never quite

achieved the same level of fame in the final decades of his life. But he

deserves almost all of the blame for his subsequent disappearance from

the limelight. Instead of seizing the opportunities presented by

The French

Lieutenant’s Woman

, he seemed almost determined to retreat from his

new-found celebrity. He hid from high society, and rarely met with other

writers. He turned down numerous offers, almost as a matter of course. He

even followed up the extraordinary success of his US book tour by writing a

long essay, “America I Weep for Thee,” that was almost custom-made to

alienate many of his new-found fans. Other projects—assorted poems, an

article on cricket for

Sports Illustrated

, reviews of nature books—were

equally unlikely to generate much interest. Five years would elapse before

he would publish a significant work of fiction, and even this was merely

collection of short stories.



Fowles wouldn’t release another novel until

Daniel Martin

in 1977. This is a

smart, substantial book, and critics (at least those in the United States)

received it as a major book by an important writer. John Gardner, writing in



Saturday Review

, claimed that Fowles deserved comparison with Leo

Tolstoy and Henry James. William Pritchard, review

Daniel Martin

for

The

New York Times

called it Fowles’s "best piece of work to date."



Sales didn’t approach the levels achieved by

The French Lieutenant’s

Woman

. But Fowles hardly had to worry about money at this stage. During

one amazing week in February 1977, he received almost a half million

dollars in film rights and a book advance. Given this state of affairs, some

readers might find the scorn for Hollywood in

Daniel Martin

as a bit of

hypocrisy. But, to Fowles’s credit, he would have little to do with the

entertainment industry in subsequent years. He lived a quiet life in Lyme

Regis in West Dorset, where he served as curator for a local museum. He

wrote letters to the editor of the town’s newspaper, and embraced causes

that had little to do with literature or culture—complaining about a local

sewage treatment plant or giving a talk extolling the virtues amateur

geology.



Although he talked about retiring from fiction, Fowles still had more novels

in him. But the negative reception to

Mantissa

(1982)—which one critic

even ridiculed as an “idiotic story”—made clear that he could no longer

count on an enthusiastic audience to support his literary efforts. The shift in

the public’s attitude was so marked that Fowles was surprised by the

positive response to his last published novel,

A Maggot

from 1985. But

Fowles, now a committed recluse, could hardly enjoy the success. He

described the publicity tour of the US as “a bad dream…the people unreal

and myself most unreal by now.”



Fowles would live another twenty years, but many readers may well have

assumed that he was already dead. At an age when most authors are still

productive and engaged by creative pursuits. Fowles stayed mostly silent.

When he died, in 2005, he was 79-years-old, but hadn’t published a major

work since his late 50s. And even after his death, when heirs often release

a treasure trove of previously unpublished works, Fowles had little of note to

share posthumously. Who can be surprised, then, that he slipped from view,

even among those who care deeply about literary matters.



Here’s a measure of Fowles’s marginalization. A few weeks ago, a blogger

took the books on Time magazine’s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th

century, and ranked them by their Amazon sales. Fowles’s The French

Lieutenant’s Woman placed number 97 on that tabulation—behind even

such dauntingly reader-unfriendly authors as

William Gaddis

,

John Barth

,

Theodore Dreiser, Malcolm Lowry and

Flann O’Brien

. If you can’t outsell



The Sot-Weed Factor

you are in deep trouble. But that’s where John

Fowles’s bestselling novel finds itself in the current day.



Mr. Fowles deserves better. He anticipated so much in contemporary

fiction. He embraced feminist themes in his books to an extent that few

male writers of his generation can match. He was deeply sensitive to the

ecological issues long before they had much impact on highbrow fiction.

His critique of the compromises made by authors who are beguiled by the

crossover potential offered by the entertainment industry is more relevant

now than when Fowles first delivered his harsh judgments. His ability to

draw on postmodern techniques without losing the gusto of his storytelling

reminds me of many of the best authors of the current day.



In short, we may have forgotten John Fowles, but he still has much to tell us.

I don’t blame readers. Fowles himself decided to absent himself from the

literary scene long before he died. And he often had savage criticisms to

make on even his best books. I suspect that he was ambivalent about his

fame, and perhaps felt more than a little guilty at the money he made from it.

In so many ways, he laid the groundwork for his eventual fall into obscurity.



But we shouldn’t let that happen. Now that a decade has elapsed since

Fowles died, let’s take the opportunity to re-experience and re-evaluate his

body of work. My verdict is that Fowles left behind two genuine

masterpieces—

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

and

The Magus

—and

several other works of lasting merit. I fear they will eventually find

themselves relegated to lists of neglected classics. Fowles himself might

have been content to see his name on such a list. But these books deserve

even more to enjoy the status of classics without the neglect.







Ted Gioia writes on literature, music and popular culture. His most recent

book is

L

ove Songs: The Hidden History

, published by Oxford University Press.





