Do people who tote around thousands of sonically flattened, Pro Tooled songs in their iPods know that most of what they’re hearing is closer to a computer program than it is to music? Nowadays, pop music is mainly fast food to be gobbled on the go, to be heard through earbuds or on portable docks with plug-in speakers. As long as it sounds good enough, nobody seems to mind.
Possessed of both imaginative empathy and an astringent wit, rigorously nonjudgmental yet armed with a state-of-the-art bullshit detector, Zadie Smith’s nonfiction glimmers with the same cultural and emotional acuity that illuminated her novels White Teeth and On Beauty. In Changing My Mind, a collection of criticism, essays, and reviews for outlets such as The New Yorker and the U.K. Guardian, her instincts are expansive, inclusive, democratic, yet fiercely personal.
A concentrated dose of sixties mythology, Zachary Lazar’s 2008 book Sway puts a fictional spin on the Manson family, the rise of the Rolling Stones, and the Lucifer-referencing underground filmmaker Keneth Anger. One of the first things you’ll notice about Sway is that its characters are based on and named after real people, but the author states in an introductory note that the book is a work of fiction. And it is: Lazar’s story might weave around and intersect with actual historical moments (Altamont, for instance), but it is primarily interested in imagining how its intertwined characters push beyond the
The premise of Under the Dome is very simple: an invisible and impenetrable barrier of unknown provenance envelops the small Maine town of Chester’s Mill, instantly transforming this latter-day Grover’s Corners into a snow globe. The dome is in place by page three, and thereafter things start going to hell. About 980 pages later, they get there. Under the Dome is sprawling, messy, bizarre, infuriating, intermittently wonderful, and above all else, addictive. It’s Our Town meets No Exit, on a scale that makes Bleak House look like Of Mice and Men; a deeply flawed pop gem that’s hard to classify
Near the middle of the Inferno, the poet Brunetto Latini tells Dante, “If you follow your star, you cannot fail to reach a glorious port.” The scene is doubly poignant. The first prick comes with Brunetto’s encouragement of his former student, a gesture of generosity that Dante answers with a gratitude that “will be found, as long as I live, in my language.” The second and more lasting poignancy arrives when we remember that Brunetto is speaking from a script of Dante’s devising. The teacher says what he says because those are the words his student wanted to hear.
George Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker since 2003, is plainly a master of his craft. The eight years’ worth of reporting collected in his new anthology, Interesting Times—culled from the New Yorker as well as several other general-interest magazines—showcases his eye for the telling detail: “The children’s legs swelled for lack of salt,” he notes in recounting the plight of a family from Sierra Leone chased into the bush by marauding rebels. The anthology also nicely points up his ear for the cutting and memorable quote: “We’re like a frigging organ transplant that’s rejected,” an army officer
After a run of books with increasingly decrepit protagonists, Paul Auster’s 13th novel returns to a highly recognizable “young Auster” cipher and some metafictional gamesmanship. Adam Walker is a literature student at Columbia with French fluent enough to translate medieval Provençal verse. An aspiring poet, Walker is strapped for cash but avoiding his affluent parents. It’s 1967, and his college ambition, as much as anything in this impoverished period of life, is to beat the draft.
Istanbul, with its many signs of the time when it was the center of the world, becomes something of a museum in the work of Orhan Pamuk, a writer clearly in love with memory itself, and his hometown, and everything that’s been lost there. In his 2003 memoir, Istanbul, the five-story Pamuk Apartments in which he spent nearly all his first five decades are described as a “dark museum house,” cluttered with sugar bowls, snuffboxes, censers, pianos that are never played, and glass cabinets that are never opened. The people inside the rooms have something of a neglected and left-behind
After 78 years of life, 14 collections of short stories, and prizes too numerous to list, it’s not surprising that Canadian writer Alice Munro should turn her attention towards old age and death. The characters that populate the 10 stories of her latest collection are mostly women—though a few are men—who are not yet incapacitated by old age, but who have many more years behind them than they have ahead. Thoughts of mortality have crept into much of Munro’s work over the years; in this case, however, death not only lurks in the dark spaces of her stories, but prowls
The Greek historian Thucydides has long been a favorite of American secretaries of state. For George Marshall, the History of the Peloponnesian War illustrated many of the diplomatic pitfalls of the cold war. A generation later, framed on Colin Powell’s State Department desk was the more ambiguous and ultimately ironic paraphrase of Thucydides: “Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.”
In his prime, author Knut Hamsun wrote beautifully, poetically, and savagely. And yet the author, personally and politically, was a monster. He berated his friends and cheated on his wives; he could be horrible to his children. Famously, he was a fascist. Less famously, he was a career racist, who allied himself early with the Nazis.
At the beginning of 2000 Little, Brown published “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. It was an auspicious time for both the calendar industry and the publishing world. Mr. Gladwell had a deductive style and a teacherly simplicity that would make him one of the new century’s most frequently quoted and widely imitated writers of nonfiction. He went on to write “Blink” and “Outliers,” and all three books went to the top of best-seller lists. What can this tell us about Mr. Gladwell or about the people who read him?
Nick Cave, post-punk’s self-styled dark prince, has long walked the razor’s edge between balladry and literature. Beginning as early as 1983 with the release of The Birthday Party’s “The Bad Seed” EP, which featured the song “Swampland,” whose mad visionary of a narrator prefigures Euchrid Euchrow, the central character in Cave’s not unaccomplished 1989 Southern gothic pastiche And the Ass Saw the Angel, and continuing with The Bad Seeds’ moody, heroin-haunted fourth and fifth albums, “Your Funeral, My Trial” (1986) and “Tender Prey,” (1988) that showcase, respectively, tales of moribund, carnival nags and convicted killers who may or may not
This week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg used choice language in describing the state of play at the World Trade Center site. Over and against those who complain that the administration has been sitting on its hands for much of the last eight years, Bloomberg demurred, “Larry [Silverstein, the developer] has everybody by the proverbials—he really does.”
Only now, with a half-century of my life already over, have I finally learned whom to turn to for a good potboiler in my next wasting sickness!
After his scrappy and occasionally amusing head-banger memoir Fargo Rock City hit stores in 2001, Chuck Klosterman soon morphed from bucolic hair-metal apologist to city-slicker pop anthropologist: The native North Dakotan moved to New York and become the voice of anti-elitism at elite print-media juggernauts such as Spin, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated. This privileged position required him to dive deeper for salvageable meaning in the Dumpsters of popular culture, even while continuing to reject anything reeking of “alternative” exclusivity.
For two years, Rich Benjamin insinuated himself in some of the fastest-growing communities in America: “Whitopias,” places in Georgia, Idaho, Utah—and even parts of Manhattan’s Upper East Side—where white people are currently migrating in massive numbers. Searching for what these “refugees of diversity” are running from and towards, he attended churches and poker games, posed as a prospective house buyer, hosted potlucks, and even participated in a three-day retreat with white separatists. It’s a topical and conceptually sensitive project brimming with promise, especially given Benjamin’s self-professed boredom with the black-white divide (Benjamin himself is black). The 26,909-mile journey recounted in
Mashing up genres, switching historical periods, and unfolding tales with supple and convincing omniscience, Possession author A.S. Byatt continues to challenge and entertain her readers.
Often praised for her lack of sentimentality, Rachel Sherman doesn’t hesitate to capture her characters’ weird, unbecoming thoughts. She doesn’t sugarcoat adolescent experience, nor does she avert her eyes from painful or explicitly sexual scenes. And sex isn’t the only subject rawly depicted in her first novel, Living Room: grief, cruelty, and claustrophobia are all depicted with great skill.
What to do with all the empty white space that drifts over the 733 pages and nearly 200 fictions of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis? Make origami, maybe. Like Don DeLillo, who drafted Underworld at the pace of one paragraph per sheet of paper, Lydia Davis is as much sculptor as writer.
