By REX MURPHY
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Rex is an artist. Whether it's his CBC editorials, his Cross Country Check Up hosting or his delightful Globe and Mail columns his use of the English language is always a joy.
SNIP FOLLOWS:
Pamela Anderson has published her first novel. All the news stories pointedly reference that it's her first, which means I suppose that she's not just visiting the form, that like the great practitioners of the past, Dickens, Balzac and Jacqueline Susanne, Ms. Anderson and the muse are setting up house for the long haul.
I haven't read her novel yet — it's so fresh off the presses, it's still dripping mascara. But I know that this will be a heartbreaking work of staggering exposition, as transparent as wind, as still of mind as a tranquillized sheep.
SNIP FOLLOWS:
Pamela has always favoured the direct style, and being in the same room as a word processor is unlikely to have changed her. What you get is what you see. This has been the hallmark of her tradecraft from the beginning. From the Tool Time Girl on Home Improvement, to Baywatch, to VIP, to her studiously unartful home productions, the Anderson oeuvre has the clarity of Evian and the simplicity of lettuce.
Besides, Pamela Anderson is a celebrity — and, as Homer (Simpson) once said of rock stars, is there nothing that celebrities can't do? It's her book because her name is on the cover, and even if its story bears an uncanny, almost Siamese, semblance to her own real life, was it not Oscar Wilde, another literary poseur, who first made the claim that all real art imitates life?
SNIP FOLLOWS:
Nor should it be left unnoticed that what Ms. Anderson has done here is actually to have brought the novel, the form, home. The more austere guides to English fiction usually credit Samuel Richardson as being the father of the novel. You were nobody in the 18th century if you weren't a Richardson fan. If Oprah had been around in the 1740s — and we can only fervently wish that she had been — Richardson would have been her literary Dr. Phil.
Star tells of the heroine's unsettling reaction to the changes of puberty. Her mother reassures her: "You're not dying, you're just growing up. Looks like you're finally going to get some boobs. You're becoming a woman, honey. You're blooming!" And bloom she does. Then comes a sentence that would make Flaubert weep: "Her breasts came on suddenly and tenaciously, as if trying to make up for lost time."
And weep again, perhaps, if possible, even more copiously: "The hard bump turned out to be one of a pair of unruly and self-willed nipples." It's the "self-willed" that's genius.!
Read the full article here:
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040806.wrexm7/BNStory/National/?query=rex+murphy>
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