FICTION

The Many Lives of Amory Clay

Purity Jonathan Franzen; Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay William Boyd; Where My Heart Used to Beat Sebastian Faulks

William Boyd (Bloomsbury, 464pp, £18.99, Oldie price £15.99)

‘SWEET CARESS belongs to a genre that William Boyd has made his own: a novel which traces from birth to death the life of an artistic main character who experiences at first-hand several of the 20th century's defining events,' explained James Walton in the Daily Telegraph.

‘The book's narrator, Amory Clay, is a photographer,' Jon Michaud told the Washington Post. ‘Born in 1908, her life is set on its course when her uncle gives Amory her first camera. While she is at boarding school, Amory's father, suffering from “shell shock”, attempts to kill her.'

‘Thereafter her saga encompasses events such as a Blackshirt rally in London in the 1930s, several visits to New York and a love affair with an American publisher and a French writer,' related Charlotte Heathcote in the Daily

Express. ‘There are also visits to Vietnam and Weimar Berlin, and a doomed marriage to a Scottish aristocrat.'

‘Yet her episodic adventures do not amount to a plot,' complained Amanda Craig in the Independent. ‘Her attributes seem less like those of a fully imagined character than those of a shell waiting for a great actress to breathe life into her in the TV serialisation that will no doubt follow.'

Sheena Joughin in the TLS agreed: ‘Amory is not really a

character. She's a plot device, whose ragged adventures leave her as bewildered as we are,' and Peter Kemp, in the Sunday

Times, also lamented ‘the slackness of its characterisation'. Several critics were unconvinced by Boyd's attempt to write as a woman: Sarah Churchwell in the New Statesman was amused by ‘Amory's habit of comparing, decades later, each of her lovers' penises in great anatomical detail which will make most women hoot with laughter'.

By contrast, Elizabeth Day, in the Observer, found that ‘Amory's fictional voice never wavers. She can be tricky, contradictory and impulsive, but this only serves to emphasise her realness.' And Caroline Moore in the Spectator found the book ‘a masterly portrait'.