Old Souls and the Game of Fiction

John Wilson on A.G. Mojtabai and Michael Gilbert

If you follow this column, you may recall that last spring, writing about the books in the bedroom Wendy and I share (books on shelves, books in stacks on the floor, even a few books atop the dresser), I mentioned that one stack on my side of the bed includes all the books by A.G. Mojtabai, mostly but not exclusively novels. She’s one of my favorite writers; I’ve followed her since her first novel, Mundome, appeared in 1974.

When her novel Parts of a World (one of her best, I think) was published, I wrote about it (and about her work more generally) in the July/August 2011 issue of Books & Culture; my column was subtitled “The anti-career of A.G. Mojtabai.” (“Her books,” I said, “are not like anyone else's. She hasn't been taken up by critics as an example of this or that tendency or school.”) More recently—in February 2021, for First Things—I wrote about her novella Thirst, centering on a dying priest.

Greg Wolfe’s indispensable Slant Books, publisher of Thirst, will soon be bringing out another novella by Mojtabai, Featherless, likely to be her last book. I asked Greg to send me a description (I’ll certainly write about the book when it appears). Here’s a bit to whet your appetite:

Plato famously defined a human being as a “featherless biped.” It’s hard not to sense the ironic humor in this definition, a reminder that for all our talk about human dignity our condition is contingent, vulnerable, and at some level even comic. Perhaps that’s why the writer A.G. Mojtabai—known for her dry, understated, subtly humorous but ultimately honest and courageous depictions of the human condition—chose the name for her latest novel, set in the confines of Shady Rest Home for the Aged.

Oof. This hits close to home. And I can’t wait to read it. If you’ve never read Mojtabai yourself, now might be a good time to give her a try.

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My brother, Rick, and I (he’s two and a half years younger) have always been close. We are very different from each other in some ways. He is among many other things a mechanical genius and a lifelong car-buff; I am at the very lowest level of mechanical aptitude (I’m not exaggerating), and I never even learned to drive. But we also have much in common in addition to our love for each other. We are both (for instance) heavy readers of crime fiction, detective stories, and so on. Several years ago, knowing that I relish the novels of Michael Gilbert (1912-2006), as he does, he sent me a collection of linked stories by Gilbert, Game Without Rules, featuring “Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens,” undercover agents for the British Joint Services Standing Committee. First published in 1967, the book was reissued in 2011 by the blessed House of Stratus (who reissued all of Gilbert’s many books).

The Calder & Behrens stories are supremely witty exercises in the humor of incongruity. In their everyday lives as genteel retirees “settled in a tiny village in Kent,” the protagonists seem to inhabit a world far removed from the machinations of espionage and the regrettable necessity of violence. There is an element of fantasy to the set-up: the villagers are well aware that these neighbors are not quite what they appear to be, but, “being countrymen, talked very little about it, except occasionally among themselves toward closing time. To strangers, of course, they said nothing.”

And yet in some respects, the stories are more down-to-earth than many fashionable works in the genre; Calder and Behrens do not torment themselves with doubts about the rightness of what they are called to do. In his introduction to the Union Square edition, Alex Segura rather ungenerously suggests that the reader “may be left wondering why it took so long for this book to return to print.” No acknowledgment here of the House of Stratus edition. In any case, whatever edition you acquire, Game Without Rules will more than repay your attention.

Somewhat irrelevantly, it may seem to you, the title of Michael Gilbert’s delightful collection of stories made me yearn for a symposium on the art of fiction and “rules,” a gathering of essays by various hands, written by invitation for this project, which would then become a book. It should be titled The Rules of the Game. The essays would explore, from many different angles, how fiction resembles (and differs from) games; various attempts to lay down “rules” for fiction, and how those have played out; particular writers who have approached their work as a kind of game; and so on. It might be interesting to include, along with the essays, interviews with a couple of writers the spirit of whose work suits the enterprise. I fervently hope someone with commissioning power will be inspired to take this on and make it happen while I still have my “faculties”!