APS TOGETHER
Day 25
New Grub Street by George GissingChapter 25
November 30, 2023 by Yiyun Li
That Reardon would wish his wife in pain, ill, penniless—I don’t know what to say, but that one hopes such a meager soul should not take on a writer’s profession (or a wife?).
“Sometimes he opened his Shakespeare, for instance, and dreamed over a page or two.”
Despite my complaint about Reardon, I find this sentence touching, with a real sadness and beauty.
“Do you think I am able to occupy myself with the affairs of imaginary people?”
I may be in an odd and ungenerous mood today, but even when Reardon was working on his fiction, he never really understood the affairs of imaginary people. Perhaps his tragedy is that he has little understanding of much of anything, despite being a man of letters.
