Passing Mrs. Dalloway on the street

Anna Quindlen struggles to justify in her book IMAGINED LONDON: A TOUR OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST FICTIONAL CITY why, having loved English literature her whole life, she never visited London till well into adulthood and writerly fame. Perhaps she was worried about living out the oft-quoted Samuel Johnson aphorism about a man being tired of life when he is tired of London as she paced its blocks looking for the characters she studied and loved; judging by the book, she should have stayed longer.

Quindlen clearly did her reading before she left: IMAGINED LONDON is peppered with Brit-lit tidbits from Shakespeare on up and offers a wealth of recommendation for the armchair and otherwise traveler. (I especially appreciated her section of novels about Blitz-era London and her description of VANITY FAIR's Becky Sharp as a latter-day W.A.G.) But for a writer who paints herself in the book as a writer of details, she resorts too often to generalities to tackle the city itself. She quotes her mother saying about Dickens that he "describes every leaf on every tree in every street in every town," then floats statements like "London is a city of bookshops" and "No one in London will stop and give you directions."

At crucial moments, she seems almost reluctant to engage with the books she's read on the page, preferring Gentle Reader to have read them and know instinctively what she's talking about. Unlike Dickens, she probably wasn't paid by the word for this book, but why apologize for quoting MRS. DALLOWAY at length in a passage about the view to Big Ben? That's what we're here for! She begins a chapter on THE FORSYTE SAGA by disparaging it for being middle-class, then goes on to write about it at length anyway. (She also in passing slags off two things I love, the "Muppet Christmas Carol" and the Tate Modern, and if loving them both is a contradiction, very well then I contradict myself.)

The book may have disappointed me but I'm still curious to check out others in the series it belongs to, in which National Geographic paired writers like Ariel Dorfman and Oliver Sacks with places to write about. Most of them don't have an explicitly literary focus, so maybe I would find less to nitpick in them. (My trip to London was not at all literary except for a night out at the New Globe for "Hamlet," which was magical.) I am grateful to Quindlen for giving me the descriptor "autogeographical," to describe a novel that takes place in a real space with correct identifiable landmarks. Fidelity to the real world isn't always desirable or necessary, but still fun to catch.