A Vicious Circle. Amanda Craig

by Amanda Craig

Book Overview

A brilliantly witty satire of modern manners, dissecting and connecting modern London, from its literary circuit to its hospitals and slums, as well as giving a funny and poignant portrait of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0349139326
• ISBN13: 9780349139326
• Release Date: September 2012
• Publisher: Abacus Software
• Length: 383 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Superb Satire

A modern-day reworking of George Gissing's New Grub Street, Amanda Craig's A Vicious Circle suffers the same fate as its inspiration: Both novels are far more famous in Britain than in the United States. Since A Vicious Circle is fairly recent (1996) and satirizes a milieu unique to London, one could argue that its place is in the British canon alone. American publishers seem to have drawn this conclusion, as only Craig's more recent work has found an American publisher. This is a shame, because American readers are in a position to derive far deeper pleasure from Craig's novel than her readers in Britain. When this deft satire of the London literary world was first published, it was promoted and devoured as a roman-a-clef that pointed fingers at some extremely well-known figures. However, the British readers who snickered knowingly in the 1990s are unlikely to return to the novel (who reads The Bonfire of the Vanities today?). Americans, on the other hand, who can understand what Craig is up to but are not necessarily able to pick Robert Maxwell out of a lineup, are far more likely to enjoy the novel's less obviously timely aspects: the quiet humor; the Dickensian interconnections between social classes; the recognizable anguish of the sick and sick-at-heart.