Two-thirds of the way through Per Petterson’s new novel, its narrator, 37-year-old Arvid Jansen, finds himself up a tree. Perched on a branch of an old pine overhanging his family’s summer house, Arvid mulls a scheme for bridging the emotional gap that divides him from his mother.
On a London bench, two strangers talk about desire and terror: “People wear masks. These masks, they do not even know they are wearing them.”
In the preface to his translation of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, Marcel Proust wrote that while some people decorate their rooms with things that reflect their taste, he preferred his room to be a place “where I find nothing of my conscious thoughts, where my imagination is thrilled to plunge into the heart of the not-me.” Anyone who has stood looking at Proust’s reassembled cork-lined bedroom at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris—his armchair, his pigskin cane, his brass bed—and tried, unsuccessfully, to feel kinship with his spirit would be relieved to know that he had such a desultory relationship
Critics are shaky cartographers, experimental scientists, evangelical missionaries and psychoanalysts of the artistic id. We forge a map of our tastes — roads in the cultural landscape and through our own dark aesthetic woods. We make leaps of faith, hypothesizing an artist’s meaning in a remarkably limited context. We swagger up to the craps table and play with the thrill of risk flushing our faces. Occasionally, we are blessed with a work that’s undeniably a classic; bless that rare visitation from the heavens above.
Sometimes a book is so inventive, so interesting and capable and creative, that you have to put it down, walk around, take a deep breath, have a beer, and think about things. The book can challenge your idea of what it means to be a fiction writer. And these books tend to make you a little mad; you grapple through them—captivated but enlivened—reminded that there are different ways of doing things, ways you hadn’t imagined.
Sure, the economic collapse of 2008 impoverished many Americans, but it also enriched our language. Back in the days of home-equity-funded Viking Ranges and perpetually solvent 401(k)s, our cultural dictionaries were shockingly bereft of terms like “credit default swap” and “collateralized debt obligation.” One mere global financial panic later, they’re on everyone’s lips. It was only a matter of time, then, before celebrity geographer Richard Florida—who spent the fat years introducing Americans to the “creative class”—arrived on the scene with a trendy new coinage. Too late to christen the panic proper, Florida aims to label the Great Recession’s aftermath: The
In 1922, the German mark was shedding value so fast that anyone who visited the country holding a stable foreign currency could live like a kaiser. Ernest Hemingway crossed from France into the German town of Kehl and saw that economics was not wasted on the young. Students had figured out that their francs could take them a long way across the border. “This miracle of exchange makes a swinish spectacle where the youth of the town of Strasbourg crowd into the German pastry shop to eat themselves sick and gorge on fluffy, cream-filled slices of German cake at 5
In his wonderfully mischievous new novel, “The Thieves of Manhattan,” Adam Langer tells the story of an unpublished fiction writer who can’t seem to tell a story other than his own. Then he makes a pact with a handsome literary devil who provides him with a decidedly unsentimental education in genre, commerce, life and love.
Even if you’ve read “Cod,” “Tuna: A Love Story,” “King of Fish” or “Striper Wars,” you’ll still be hooked by “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food.” A lively and informative read by Paul Greenberg, it tells the story of four marine species whose flesh has the unfortunate (for them) fatty flavor that humans crave: salmon, tuna, sea bass and cod.
Music critic Rob Sheffield’s memoir Talking to Girls About Duran Duran appears at first to be founded on a fallacy—that Duran Duran are still huge, and that their ongoing fame speaks to something ineffable about . . . well, not so much the female psyche, but at least something that males want to know about the female psyche. (And which, one hastens to add, they never will: This is the band that sang, “All she wants is, all she wants is,” but, as Sheffield notes, never told us what “she” wanted.)
Christie Hodgen’s new novel, Elegies for the Brokenhearted, reminds us that an elegy is a mix of sorrow and exuberance, like an upbeat tune with rueful lyrics. It’s narrated by Mary Murphy, a self-described “mope . . . loner . . . drag . . . slouch,” living in a nameless postindustrial New England city. Early in the novel, a fourteen-year-old Mary, at a nearby beach with her family, contemplates a trio of British punks causing a stir on the boardwalk and wonders “what it would be like to walk through the world and leave a wake behind you, the
Comparing the rise of the web to the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press has become a familiar cliché, and there are few theorists of the internet age still able to wring any new significance from the association. Clay Shirky, however, is one of them. The printing press was expected to prop up the religious culture of the 15th century by making its central texts more widespread. Instead, it encouraged intellectual variety.
Anthony Doerr burst onto the literary scene in 2003 with The Shell Collector, a critically hailed volume consisting of eight exquisite stories. After a compelling detour into nonfiction, and a novel, Doerr has returned with a second collection, one that signals his arrival as an important American voice.
The global banking crisis that began in 2007 has brought some good books into being, volumes historians will consult when reflecting on these hard times. It has also given us some wild cards, unexpected treats that belong on the shelf once labeled belles-lettres but now more commonly known (thanks to Dave Eggers’s annual paperback anthologies) as nonrequired reading.
Like George Orwell, Henry James, and other untrusting souls, W. Somerset Maugham wanted no biography; but unlike them, he provided a lesson in the odium which an indiscreet account of a life can bring by composing his own. Written when he was 88, Maugham’s memoir, Looking Back, was met by disgust and dismay at the venomous portrait the author drew of his deceased former wife. “Entirely contemptible” (Nöel Coward), “a senile scandalous work” (Graham Greene), “shabby, sordid, embarrassing” and “a wildly faggoty thing to have done” (Garson Kanin) were some of the responses.
Sloane Crosley’s debut essay collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, earned her the sort of accolades that pave the way for disappointment and backlash at the very murmur of a second book. There were blurbs from Jonathan Lethem and A.M. Homes, raves in every magazine that covered the book, and comparisons to Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz, and King Midas. It was a lot to live up to on the second go-around. Crosley, however, is that rare kind of young writer for whom no one wishes failure, and her second offering is an affirmative giggle in the face
From cries of “Long live dynamite!” to arguments for vegetarianism, the anarchist cause has been a very broad church. Often naive and under-theorized – although it has always had highly intelligent proponents and sympathizers, a current example being Noam Chomsky – anarchism has also been dogged by a reputation for ill-directed violence, leading to what Alex Butterworth describes as “the movement’s pariah status in perpetuity”.
It seems foolish, if not downright irresponsible to feel good about the future in 2010. The disasters of the last decade piled up fast, and apocalyptic fear is now a standard ingredient in the morning commute. But what should one prepare for first? September 11-style attacks, oil spills, climate change, the death of languages, the last days of the polar bears, or the dark, multifarious effects of globalization?
Death Is Not an Option, Suzanne Rivecca’s lively, often lovely debut collection, explores how the blind lead the blind. In the tender story “It Sounds Like You’re Feeling,” a blind counselor with a guide dog makes a patient wonder what would happen if the canine lost his vision: “Would another, smaller creature be assigned to it, something with excellent eyesight, a trained raptor maybe, that would lead the way with the dog behind it and [the counselor] behind the dog, the caravan growing and growing as they all aged and deteriorated, on and on like a series of Russian nesting
After 13 years of marriage, David Pepin, a videogame entrepreneur, finds that a perverse daydream has come true: His wife, Alice, is dead—not from any of the violent ends he imagined for her but from anaphylactic shock after eating peanuts. And he is the prime suspect. Two detectives assigned to the case, Ward Hasteroll (who thinks that Pepin is guilty) and Sam Sheppard (who thinks that he is innocent), have their own marital miseries. Hasteroll’s wife is depressed and in bed; Sheppard’s wife winds up dead, in bed.
