Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings Book

John Fowles calls his essays "little bits of what I am" and declares--rather than fears--himself "only too well aware that there are many they will not please. "The 30 pieces collected in Wormholes display this enigmatic author's concerns (above all with the natural world), disdain (for passing artistic and critical fashions and various other 20th- century "manias") and crankiness. Pity the tidy suburban gardener who comes upon the following generalization: "In America, freedom from crabgrass becomes a test of social acceptability; the man with the best roses walks six inches taller." Fowles knows he's going to push people's buttons, and clearly enjoys doing so. Yet he's serious when it comes to personal and public responsibility. He's also dead right in thinking that natural life needs privacy, untidiness, and its fair share of insects. From the first entry, "I Write Therefore I Am"--as much a tirade against the so-called literary world as it is a love letter to literature--Fowles is confrontational, casual and astoundingly learned. He's also highly amusing. Witness the opening squib of "Gather Ye Starlets" (1965): "I had better confess at once that I am writing about a subject with which I have never slept; and nothing, as Genet has five or six hundred times reminded us, is quite so immoral as total innocence." Readers have long delighted in Fowles's philosophical fiction because he makes thinking a great game, and his essays openly engage--and outrage--in similar fashion. Wormholes may well be the best intellectual and emotional biography we will ever have of the man who created such modern classics as The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman.Read More