Fiction

The Architect by John Scott

Item: The Architect
Author: Don Anderson

by Don Anderson •

May 2001, no. 230

Viking, $27.00 hb, 174 pp

Fiction

The Architect by John Scott

by Don Anderson •

May 2001, no. 230

Is it possible to admire a novel, to have enjoyed it on both first and second readings, yet to remain unconvinced that one can with confidence say what it is about? Isn’t that rather the complex response that poetry excites? Here it might be noted that John Scott, who subtitles The Architect not ‘a novel’ but ‘a tale’, is a poet turned novelist, as is his friend David Brooks, of whose House of Balthus something similar might be said. ‘Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully,’ as Wallace Stevens opined.

Don Anderson

Don Anderson is the author/editor of eight books, collections of essays and reviews, and anthologies of prose, largely of texts from the Americas, Australia, and Europe. For fourteen years in the 1980s and 1990s he was a regular literary columnist in the National Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was for thirty years a member of the English department at the University of Sydney, where he taught American, Irish, and Australian literature, and literary theory. He was for some years a member of the Advisory Panel of ABR.