We could, as a homage to Derrida, go deep with this story of an immigrant, a wealthy man, a publisher and 'cultural tycoon' (Quartet Books, Women's Press, the Literary Review, the Wire, the Oldie, chief executive of Asprey's and, in 1993, voted Retail Personality of the Year), who employed an educated but intellectually insecure Scots woman, a translator with an academic husband and three children, to ghost novels, interviews, newspaper and magazine columns, love letters and 'the occasional poem' which he passed off as his own - but we won't. Shallow, I think, is the proper level. Not that this text isn't interesting, or even important. On the contrary, it's interestingly shallow, even importantly shallow. It tells us of shallow things, and we need to pay attention to the entirely superficial, for how else are we going to understand the ways of the contemporary world?

LRB 4 November 2004 | PDF Download