Customer Reviews

Ticknor: A Novel

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Don't you hate people who are more successful than you are? Especially the ones who pretend they're your friends. George Ticknor, the narrator of Sheils Heti's super new novel, has a problem with his more successful chum, a boyhood pal called William Prescott who has grown into a one-man writing factory, while he, George, has remained a low level journalist and a fulltime milksop, just seething with secret resentments. The relationship between them is not unlike the one Nabokov sketched out in PALE FIRE between John Shade, the Olympian, above it all poet, and his neighbor Charles Kinbote, who comes to believe that the poem Shade spends his last days writing is "secretly" an allegory for Kinbote's own hidden past in Zembla.

Heti's novel has its Zemblan aspects, a fleecy, neurosis-ridden prose style used to expose Ticknor's pretensions. That's not to say he isn't sometimes genuinely lyrical. Prescott shares his name and profession with the real-life famous US historian of the American Renaissance period, while George Ticknor was the publisher of Hawthorne, Lowell, many in the same era. Sheila Heti has scrambled pieces of their identities to provide us with an increasingly modern story of guilt and forgiveness, for in her version, something happened way back when in the boyhood of the two main characters, something dark and nasty that resulted in Prescott's losing an eye, like the accident Robert Creeley suffered as a youth, but here there's a definite BAD SEED feeling to it.

Sheila Heti's not so good when describing George's lustful feelings for a woman who probably doesn't even know he's alive. Funny lapse in a writer otherwise so gifted. I just didn't buy that he was attracted to her. It seemed like Heti was trying a) either to humanize her boy or b) to make him more sociopathic and creepy or c) a mixture of both but I doubt any man has ever felt that way about any woman outside of a book so it just felt clunky.

The narrator walks along a Boston street thinking about his friend / rival, who he's going to dinner with. I thought the format of the monologue -- essentially the narrator interviewing himself, switching between "I" and "you" and changing his "I" story in the face of unsympathetic and well-informed questions from the "you" questioner -- had potential, but nothing about the actual content grabbed my interest. I gave up after 33 pages. At least it only cost me 1c...