Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Cartwright, Justin

Cartwright, Justin

Justin Cartwright grew up in South Africa, where a number of his novels are set. Before devoting himself to writing he made documentaries, as well as wildlife films for the BBC and ITV. Justin wrote many novels, including Lion Heart, The Promise of Happiness, the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet and the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers. He sadly died in December 2018.

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The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [1] 35; [2] 15; [47] 27

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20040601161631

Maxwell’s World

Justin Cartwright on the novels of William Maxwell

A curious thing: the New York literary world is smaller than the London literary world. It also has a strange feeling of being more old-fashioned. I was edited there by the legendary Joe Fox. I don’t think he liked me, but we would have dinner at a hotel restaurant, the last place where he could smoke in New York, and talk about great writers, including William Maxwell. Joe Fox died at his desk in Random House behind a huge pile of copies of the New York Times, cigarette on his lips.
20040301162404

A Writer’s Bestiary

Justin Cartwright on animals in fiction

A few months ago I was giving a talk to a group of students. Afterwards one of them asked if the baboon relationship in my book White Lightning has anything to do with Jody’s fated relationship with a deer in The Yearling, by Majorie Kinnan Rawlings. At the time I denied it, but I now think it a perceptive question. At about the age of 12, I was deeply moved by the book. When the deer has to be killed it is a rite of passage for Jody, tragic but also necessary to growing up and understanding the harshness of life. In my book, the death of the baboon is the end of innocence for the narrator, even though he is middle-aged. When I began to think about the question, I realized that I had read scores of children’s books with animal themes and had been profoundly influenced by them. Graham Greene made the point that we never again read in the same way we read before the age of 14. Later we look for reflections of ourselves and our views in novels.
20150901170021 John Updike photograph (B&W) - Justin Cartwight on the Rabbit novels

The American Dostoevsky

Justin Cartwright on John Updike’s Rabbit Novels

I have read so much Updike, so many articles, so many collections of his criticism and journalism, and virtually all his many novels, that I sometimes think I know more about his thought processes than I do about my own. In his introduction to The Early Stories, 1953–1975, John Updike speaks candidly about his professional life. His inspiration, he says, has been drawn from life; he has always believed that ‘out there was where I belonged, immersed in the ordinary which careful explication would reveal to be the extraordinary’. And this, I think, gave him the leitmotif of his writing life and made him the writer he became.

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