Author, Author David Lodge Secker & Warburg, 389pp, £16.99 ISBN 0436205270

Genre-bending seems back in fashion, in the shape of biography more or less artfully bent into novel form - John Updike on Jackson Pollock in Seek My Face, William Boyd conjuring up every big name from the first half of the 20th century in his Any Human Heart, and now David Lodge fictionalising Henry James. Fictionalising James: the very words illustrate the awesomeness of the endeavour, not least since Colm ToibIn has also recently attempted the same, in The Master. What chance has Lodge, a lightish novelist albeit a serious scholar and critic, of successfully evoking an author of legendary avoirdupois whose speciality it was to create an atmosphere of misty indeterminacy by slicing living sentiments ever finer and stringing them, still quivering, into endless sentences? Compared to James's, Lodge's fictional style, at its most utilitarian, can seem like boiled cabbage cut up into strips. The simple solution, naturally, would be to take this overblown literary antique apart, aerating his opaque persona with "irreverent" bubbles of jokiness, and have fun with poor Henry's sexual problems.

Which is exactly what Lodge, who probably reveres James the literary critic too much to give him the conventional treatment, declines to do. Any temptation to guy an old master few people read but whom everyone knows about - long-winded closet queen, right? - has been manfully resisted, in favour of a valiant stab at the truth about James. There is little levity, even when James takes up bicycle-riding, and mercifully few attempts to caricature his hero's literary manner, or force the staid old body, by anachronistic lan-guage or psychology, to lighten up. Boldly - controversially, almost - Lodge has refused to populate James's sensual wilderness with a Wildean telegraph boy or two, or retrospectively insert lubricious dreams of ephebes into his over-cerebral, balding head. Sexually, he is presented as irredeemably low-voltage - Lodge claims he never did anything with or to anyone - though with a weakness for young male friendships, and as suffering from occasional mildly concupiscent impulses which, swiftly sublimated, did not drive him to distraction in the way we sexually superior moderns insist they must.

His hero's blunted emotional life is depicted convincingly, by reference to the record, but his real crisis is one of creativity. Yet was a novel the best vehicle to convey these not especially dramatic facts? Here one senses Lodge the academic colliding with Lodge the novelist, an ambivalence that shows itself in textual tergiversation as the book alternates, sometimes violently, between fictional and conventional biographical mode.

So why not a straightforward biography in the first place? Clearly, Lodge has done his research. Equally clearly, Leon Edel (Henry James: a life) got there first, though that was 30 years ago and Lodge has an interesting personal take on James. Perhaps the reasons he has disguised biography as fiction are similar to those that drove James to do his own genre-bending when, after people gave up trying to get to the end of his novels, he tried writing them more succinctly, as rather literary plays. A biography of James, unless it was unconscionably sexed up, would have stood as much chance of competing with the cornucopia of revelations about Oscar Wilde as James's doomed drama Guy Domville had of outselling The Importance of Being Earnest.

Lodge's dilemma about form is important, given that he has placed the conflict between the tragic and more marketable muses at the heart of his novel. "Something had happened in the culture of the English-speaking world," he has James reflect. "The spread and thinning of literacy, the levelling effects of democracy . . . the distortion of values by journalism and advertising, which made it impossible for a practitioner in the art of fiction to achieve both excellence and popularity . . ." Either Lodge is lightly mocking James, implying "it was ever thus", or - more likely, given the tone of the book - he sympathises.

If you read Author, Author this way, the space devoted to James's close friendship with the Punch illustrator (and devoted family man) George du Maurier makes better sense. For it was the rightly unassuming du Maurier who, at the very moment James's reputation was faltering, published Trilby, a melodramatic novel that became a colossal success, complete with stage adaptation and, in America, associated merchandise. Trilby was a winning confection of devilishness (anti-hero: Svengali, pronounced with a long "a"), sentimentalism and sauciness (girl poses for Parisian artist in the altogether, in vie de Boheme mode, but we forgive her).

Meanwhile, the opening night of Guy Domville is taking place, simultaneously with Wilde's An Ideal Husband. This, the book's centrepiece, is nicely done. Unable to bear the tension of attending his own, James goes to Wilde's play, where the sight of the audience gurgling with pleasure at the mechanical inversions of Wilde's sometimes facile wit makes him feel worse. The admiration/envy/sexual apprehension James feels towards Wilde is well evoked, and again it is bold of Lodge, in our worshipful times, to allow it to be suggested that there might be something a trifle tinselly about Oscar. Lodge could have pointed up the astuteness of James's critique of the source of Wilde's appeal to English audiences. Among the direct quotations he uses, Lodge might have included the following from a letter James wrote in 1892 after seeing Lady Windermere's Fan:

There is so much drollery - that is, "cheeky" paradoxical wit of dialogue, and the pit and gallery are so pleased at finding themselves clever enough to "catch on" to four or five of the ingenious - too ingenious - mots in the dozen, that it makes them feel quite decadent and raffine, and they enjoy the sensation as a change from the stodgy.

(Add "stalls" to pit and gallery, apply it to "cheeky" art as well as to Wilde, and think how little has changed.) Alas, poor Henry, with his 200,000-word Princess Casamassima flopping, was coming to be classed among the stodgy. Lodge is informative about just how little he was beginning to sell, and how low were his advances: £70, at one point, for a new book.

The tale is well enough told, but faction is rarely satisfying, on or off screen, and the seams are visible, as straightforward biographical passages are stapled to fictional sections, made more perilous to the novelist by the resonance of the names. At James's opening night Arnold Bennett, G B Shaw, Ellen Terry and H G Wells are in the audience, which wouldn't matter, except when they are given lines such as:

"What's this you said your name was?"

"Herbert Wells. I write as 'H G' Wells."

"Ah yes . . . Interested in science, aren't you?"

Elsewhere we have Guy de Maupassant shocking James by trying to pick up a woman in a restaurant. "I want a woman. Not an emancipated one, just an ordinary one, as long as she has a pretty face and a nice arse." Cut to James's appalled expression. Maybe the Frenchman said it, maybe this is Lodge in clunky, cinema mode. The demotic imperative obliges him to compensate for all this literary toffery with painfully stylised below-stairs chat between ever so warm-hearted servants. Even as a joke, it is impermissible to write dialogue such as the following, when one of them has a stab at reading James's books:

"Couldn't make head nor tail of it."

"Well, they weren't written for the likes of us."

Such passages do not confer life and dignity on humble folk; they reduce them to social marionettes. Even in the generally sensitive lines attributed to James there are occasional lapses. On the subject of smoking, Lodge has him saying: "I resort to the occasional gasper myself." On the other hand, the flatly factual descriptions of late-Victorian London and of Rye, where James bought a house, bear the dampening imprint of sedulous research.

Does Lodge manage overall to "harmonise fact with fact by the plastic solvent of an idea", as the master once wrote? Writing a work of fiction about a genius of human consciousness was always going to be a tall order. What emerges is a goodish, lightly dramatised biography, worth reading for instruction and understanding, and for Lodge's empathy with James. As a novel, however, it doesn't work, and had it not been a novel at all it might have been a better biography.

George Walden's most recent book is Who's a Dandy?: dandyism and Beau Brummell (Gibson Square)

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