I’d heard that the title essay of Jonathan Franzen’s new collection was about his punishing experiences on a rough and tiny island. Some of what happened there is by now well known. The inhabitants of this island welcomed him by printing the wrong version of his novel Freedom, necessitating the pulping of its entire first print run.
If anybody asked me, particularly in a plaintive tone of desperation, for a comprehensive backgrounder on the uprisings that have convulsed much of the Arab world since December 2010, I’d have no hesitation in pointing them to The Battle for the Arab Spring. Lin Noueihed, a Reuters editor, and Alex Warren, a consultancy expert, have joined forces to produce a remarkably far-reaching and exceptionally precise summary of the uprisings generally, but unfortunately, referred to as the “Arab Spring.” Particularly for the uninitiated or those seeking a synoptic but relatively detailed account of what has and hasn’t happened in the Arab
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad,” Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) announces in the warm-up to his famed populist outburst in Network (1976), inciting his millions of viewers to rush to their living room windows and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Beale ticks off a standard litany of 1970s-era social woes—inflation, unemployment, bank failures, violent crime—to stoke the audience of his nightly news broadcast. In the end, his undoing proves to be not hubris but civics. He tries to goad Americans into thinking critically about the ultimate
When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents’ boarding house, in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing Amazing Stories, with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination. Soon after, the creative beast in me grew when Buck Rogers appeared, in 1928, and I think I went a trifle mad that autumn. It’s the only way to describe the intensity with which I devoured the stories. You rarely have such fevers later in life that fill your entire
Barack Obama’s life, says his latest biographer, David Maraniss, was to an astonishing extent “the product of randomness.” His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, the only child of a couple from Kansas, met his father, Barack Hussein Obama, a student from Kenya, in an elementary Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, and the young Barry Obama would grow up in Hawaii and Indonesia, taking an odd, zigzagging and totally improbable road to the White House. And yet, Mr. Maraniss makes clear, despite the bewildering role that chance played in Mr. Obama’s story, he has been very much the author
Good reporters go hunting for nouns. They want the odd verb too, but the main thing is the nouns, especially the proper ones, the who, what and where. The thing British schoolchildren call a ‘naming word’ was, for Hemingway, a chance to reveal what he knew, an opportunity to be experienced, to discriminate, and his style depends on engorged nouns, not absent adjectives. But at times it strikes you that the cult of specificity in Hemingway is a drug you take in a cheap arcade: lights flash on the old machines and a piano plinks overhead. One evening it came
Near the end of this thick volume, the fourth in his celebrated saga of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Robert A. Caro describes the War on Poverty as the most sincere and boldest initiative of a normally cynical and utterly practical politician. It did not matter that LBJ’s advisers warned him the plan to uplift the nation’s forty to fifty million poor would gain him no additional votes in the next election. “That’s my kind of program,” the new president insisted just a day after he took office in late November 1963. “I’ll find money for it one way or another.”
Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying neo-fascist Golden Dawn movement – which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police – have been patrolling the street and beating up all the
“A curious grunting sound”: This was the noise emitted by celebrity stalker-photographer Ron Galella whenever he consummated a shot of—perhaps more precisely, at—his preferred subject, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, or so she testified during one of their numerous courtroom encounters. You can imagine her delicately wrinkling her nose while saying it. Everything you need to know about Galella is that he was the one who instigated the lawsuit, rather than Jackie: Not content to merely hound her, he also sued her for $1.3 million, claiming that Secret Service agents (assigned to protect the Kennedy children) were preventing him from doing his
At its most romanticized, fin-de-siècle Vienna was defined by nihilistic revelry, fueled by an excess of booze, pastry, and existential angst. Yet by the time Austria was absorbed into Nazi Germany in 1938, this world had undergone a collapse more thorough than any in modern history. As if overnight, social distinctions entrenched since the Middle Ages became meaningless. Dynastic titles like “Habsburg” and “Auersperg” lost currency in a society now based on a single binary: Aryan or Jew. Washington Post journalist Anne-Marie O’Connor’s first book, The Lady in Gold, illuminates this cultural moment and its subsequent implosion through Gustav Klimt’s
Writing in the middle of the 19th century, Karl Marx predicted that the gulf between the newly rich and the miserable urban poor, made much worse by the Industrial Revolution, would continue to widen indefinitely. This ever greater disparity, he thought, would ultimately undermine capitalism. Marx turned out to be wrong. Income inequality in Britain (and, from what we can tell, elsewhere in Europe too) began to narrow after the 1860s, and inequality in wealth peaked by the time of World War I. In America, inequality in both incomes and wealth began to lessen after the 1920s. The rich continued
“Children know normal better than anyone,” says Dell Parsons, the narrator of Richard Ford’s luminous and utterly forlorn new novel, and certainly Dell when he was a child knew far better than most what a normal life, especially a normal American life, is likely to turn out to be. The opening sentences of the book, which are bound to go straight into the collective literary memory, tell us what he, and we, are in for: “First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.”
Higher Gossip, edited by Christopher Carduff, is a posthumous selection of John Updike’s prodigious output, matching six substantial previous volumes mainly of critical or personal prose. The set amounts to seven pillars, if not of wisdom then something not far off, of warm scrupulous attentiveness. To salute Updike’s professionalism, though, is to insult something more important, as he pointed out when accepting an award for a previous selection (Hugging the Shore) in 1984: “to be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is aesthetically boring – an anti-virtue where we hope to be
There are many reasons to love Lena Dunham’s HBO television show Girls, and some of them have nothing to do with sex, but I’m going to begin with the sex scene in the second episode that most critics have mentioned and described with some amount of repugnance or lament. It’s one of the most complicated and intelligent sex scenes I’ve seen. The fact that it’s part of a funny, winsome, half-hour television show makes it all the more astonishing and exhilarating a thing to see. In reviews and profiles of Dunham, journalists, most of them admirers of the show, have
For a moment, he was obscured by the Havana night. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been before coming to Cuba, in the midst of revolution. Then a burst of floodlights illuminated him: William Alexander Morgan, the great Yankee comandante. He was standing, with his back against a bullet-pocked wall, in an empty moat surrounding La Cabaña—an eighteenth-century stone fortress, on a cliff overlooking Havana Harbor, that had been converted into a prison. Flecks of blood were drying on the patch of ground where Morgan’s friend had been shot, moments earlier. Morgan, who was thirty-two, blinked
Boarded Windows must be appreciated as one of those debut novels that strike their own dizzy balance. It’s a rock’n’roll story couched in Proustian delicacy, a Beat reconfiguring of the family that moves towards pomo deconstruction of any reliable relationship—and withal, a hybrid of highly pleasing shape. Indeed, this fiction derives in part from another medium, that of the folk song. Doesn’t Bob Dylan (slyly alluded to here) insist that folk is about mystery, its details like glimpses between boarded windows? And isn’t this Dylan (Hicks, the novel’s author) also a singer-songwriter, with three well-received albums to his credit (and
Rebecca Stead chose to set her children’s novel “When You Reach Me”—winner of the 2010 Newbery Medal—in nineteen-seventies New York partly because that’s where she grew up, but also, as she told one interviewer, because she wanted “to show a world of kids with a great deal of autonomy.” Her characters, middle-class middle-school students, routinely walk around the Upper West Side by themselves, a rare freedom in today’s city, despite a significant drop in New York’s crime rate since Stead’s footloose youth.
Late in John Irving’s 13th novel, “In One Person,” the narrator, an aging writer named William Abbott, recalls visiting a high school friend dying of AIDS. It’s the early 1980s, the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and Irving evokes the deathly terrors of that period, a time when people seemed, literally, to evaporate, to become, in the words of the late David Wojnarowicz, “a dark smudge in the air that dissipates without notice … glass human[s] disappearing in rain.”
Someone really should write a compelling history of the diary. Those books we often associate with childhood have been, after all, vehicles for some of the most illuminating accounts of history: Samuel Pepys had his famed journals of seventeenth-century life, John de Crèvecoeur his observations of the American settlements, and Lewis and Clark used them to chronicle their travails through the American West. And that’s to say nothing of figures like Franz Kafka or Virginia Woolf whose private entries have enhanced our understanding of their public work. A diary can be, in the right hands, a document that enlightens its
Looking back to what he called the “First Machine Age” of the early twentieth century, the architectural critic Reyner Banham, writing in 1960, noted how his own age had been given numerous epithets: the Atomic Age, the Jet Age, the Detergent Decade – to which might be added the Age of Conformity, of Affluence, of Television, and of Advertising. The 1950s also saw, Banham wrote, a Second Industrial Revolution, one of “domestic electronics and synthetic chemistry”, characterized by the way in which technology revolutionized the “small things” of everyday life. Television was the “symbolic machine” of the age, part of
