The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Pandora's Handbag: Adventures in the Book World by Elizabeth YoungStephen Bernstein
Elizabeth Young. Pandora’s Handbag: Adventures in the Book World. Intro. Will Self. Serpent’s Tail, 2001. 366 pp. Paper: $18.00.
Until her untimely death from hepatitis C in early 2001, Elizabeth Young was a prominent British arts-writer, impressively well read and articulate. Pandora’s Handbag reprints over sixty of Young’s writings from the 1990s: book reviews, author interviews, culture columns, drug policy polemics, and personal essays. What these pieces have in common is Young’s unusually astute intelligence. Never self-important, she managed to imbue her work with her own profound love of reading. To read these essays is to be in the presence of a genuinely objective temperament and, as with the best critics, it is easy to become as interested in Young’s habits of thought as in her immediate subject. Spanning the nineties, Pandora’s Handbag offers a panoramic view of the decade’s highs and lows, with essays covering writers from Alice Munro to Bret Easton Ellis, T. Coraghessan Boyle to Irvine Welsh. Young’s brief piece on Trainspotting is probably one of the most perceptive things written about that phenomenon, while her thoughtful account of Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar shows how “mere reviewing” can sometimes succeed precisely where academic literary criticism too often fails—it deepens our understanding of the novel. Her introductory piece on becoming an arts journalist should be required reading for anyone yearning to be part of that world. Young spent the end of her life getting this book ready for the press, lending a predictable poignance to the intensely lived engagement its contents display. That is no reason to read the volume, but others abound. Anyone who took an interest in British or American writing and art during the last decade will find much to enjoy in the pieces collected here. It is a wonderful book to dip into, a fine reminder of why the most mundane and unpretentious forms of criticism matter so much. [Stephen Bernstein]