Drinker, Writer, Lover, Spy

By Lev Grossman

There is a secret, shameful part of every American that longs to attend a small, quaint, exclusive boarding school in the English countryside. The crack of the cricket bat, the furtive cigarettes, the obligatory corporal punishment--like buried memories from our Colonial past, they arouse atavistic, Anglophilic urges. Some people get their Brit fix from Harry Potter. They will get that, and much more, from William Boyd's brilliant, beautiful and exceptionally British Any Human Heart (Knopf; 498 pages).

Boyd was born in Ghana and lives in France, but he is a comic novelist in the best English tradition of Waugh and Amis (Kingsley, that is). Any Human Heart is the diary of Logan Mountstuart, an English writer whose long, languid life begins in 1906 and embraces most of the 20th century. Mountstuart starts his diary as a senior in high school--a sixth former, as they say--and goes on to chronicle his years at Oxford, his early literary efforts and his assorted marriages and affairs. Sophisticated and self-deprecating, flip-flopping between passionate love and fashionable ennui, Mountstuart makes for good company. A pleasure-seeker, he travels ceaselessly, eats and drinks abundantly and lies fluently. Boyd insinuates his hero as an extra into several historical panoramas--the General Strike of 1926, the Spanish Civil War--and has some cheeky fun with celebrity cameos: Picasso appears as a manic Left Bank chatterbox, Virginia Woolf as a venomous cocktail-party boor, and in what amounts to literary incest, Mountstuart indulges in a brief snog with Waugh himself.

The book's narrative pulse quickens with the onset of World War II, when Mountstuart is assigned intelligence work and becomes embroiled in the affairs of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the former looking "like a miniature American film star, slim and dapper." Up to this point, Mountstuart has managed to skim lightly over the surface of the century, only rarely involving himself deeply with anyone or anything. But the war leaves him a sunken wreck--physically intact, spiritually destroyed.

Mountstuart is too much of a hedonist to grieve for long, however. Soon his high spirits buoy him back to the surface, and he's off again: to New York City as an art dealer, to Africa as a professor of English, and beyond. Throughout, Boyd expertly keeps up the irregular tap-tap rhythms of diary writing--often the gaps in Mountstuart's chronicle, when he is too depressed or having too much fun to write, are as eloquent as the words themselves--and Boyd has a biographer's eye for arranging the multitudinous ironies and serendipitous connections that are fate's signature on a long, interesting life.

Is that all? As a matter of fact, it is. With its upper-crust settings and century-spanning scope, Any Human Heart invites comparison to Ian McKewan's Atonement. But while McKewan's novel is a work of elaborate, formal artifice, Any Human Heart is determinedly, even defiantly, formless. There is no overarching story here, not even a last-minute revelation or the standard old man's epiphany to tie it all together. Like any really honest diary, Any Human Heart is just a random, jumbled heap of days, most immensely amusing, some unbearably sad, but together they carry the full, devastating force of a lifetime of intermingled joy and pain. "Isn't this how life turns out, more often than not?" Mountstuart writes. "It refuses to conform to your needs--the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth." Mountstuart struggles heroically to give his life this rough shape. He never quite does so. That's his failure as a person--but Boyd's triumph as an artist. --By Lev Grossman