APS TOGETHER
Day 1
New Grub Street by George GissingChapter 1
November 6, 2023 by Yiyun Li
Opening paragraph:
“Jasper, listening before he cracked an egg, remarked with cheerfulness.”
George Gissing is not a particularly poetic writer, but I love the detail that Milvain waits for the church bell to finish ringing before cracking an egg. It takes a character with a certain degree of aesthetic sense to do that; or else, a certain degree of greediness.
One hundred pounds in 1882 would be 15,000 pounds in 2023. One absorbs the details of every character’s financial situation with eagerness. These characters share a similar fate with many of Jane Austen’s characters, though here fate is much more menacing: life is never a garden walk or a tea party for Gissing’s characters. Breakfast is cold with the news of a hanged man.
“I tell you, writing is a business… We talk of literature as a trade, not of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare… I speak only of good, coarse, marketable stuff for the world’s vulgar.”
Rather refreshing to open a novel with such an unpalatable character, and unapologetically so.
