Tale of failed writer can't find its focus

Brian Evenson, Special To The News

Friday, February 28, 2003

William Boyd's latest novel is the third of a series of books exploring what it meant to be an individual and an artist living in the 20th century.

In The New Confessions, he portrayed the life of John James Todd as he goes from being a soldier in the trenches of World War I to becoming a filmmaker. In Nat Tate, he explored the life of an imagined American visual artist. Here, he investigates the life of Logan Mountstuart, a writer whose career quickly runs aground.

Mountstuart is an interesting character who lives a somewhat messy life. Recording his life from his early schooldays until just before his death, his journals focus narrowly on the writer's daily experiences: "the only point of keeping a journal," he acknowledges, "was to concentrate on the personal, the diurnal minutiae, and forget the great and significant events of the world at large."

Mountstuart's writings document his early successes, his failed marriages, his affairs, his time spent as a British spy, his life managing an art gallery in Paris, his somewhat unwitting and unlikely involvement with the Baader-Meinhoff gang at age 70, and finally his death.

Writing in the picaresque tradition, Boyd is less interested in giving a logical and coherent forward movement to his plot than in showing Mountstuart in a variety of situations.

Boyd's writing is generally witty and well-crafted, and Mountstuart develops into a fairly likable, albeit incredibly flawed, character: He is unfaithful to his wives, friends and lovers, and not always heroic in regard to his fellow man.

Unfortunately, he seems more willing to flee one difficult situation and start anew than to stick anything out. As a result, his early promise as a writer quickly evaporates.

He justifies his own erratic course through life by blaming luck: "That's all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula. Tote it up - look at the respective piles."

The difficulty in the novel comes less from Mountstuart's portrayal than from Boyd being too willing to stretch the bounds of believability. Boyd at once wants to work in the picaresque tradition and to develop Logan as a full and well-rounded character, and these two concerns ultimately clash: In the picaresque novel, almost anything can happen; in a novel of character, contemporary readers demand believability and logic.

Mountstuart manages, despite his minor status, to meet most of the important writers and artists of the 20th century, from Picasso to Virginia Woolf to Hemingway to James Joyce to the Duke of Windsor. Add to that some unlikely plot twists (including a somewhat gratuitous sojourn in Nigeria, among other things), and Boyd's book begins to feel a tad self-indulgent. Indeed, both Nat Tate and The New Confessions are more interesting.

Despite having many strengths, Any Human Heart doesn't quite know what kind of book it wants to be. At least as far as Boyd is concerned, the third time isn't necessarily the charm.

Brian Evenson is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent being "Dark Property." He directs the creative writing program at the University of Denver.