ANITA BROOKNER PUBLISHED HER FIRST NOVEL, A Start in Life (the author’s title, used in the UK, was The Debut), in 1981. She was fifty-three years old. Hilary Mantel’s assessment was that Brookner “seemed to have arrived perfectly formed, as if she had hatched from a marble egg.” Over the ensuing twenty-eight years, Brookner would […]
“IN GENEVA, IN 2017, when I first saw the pile of letters to John from Lorraine Gill, I wanted to believe their relationship couldn’t have been that significant or consequential,” writes Tom Overton in John Berger: From Life. “A confused sense of loyalty made me want Anya’s life to be less complicated, less painful,” he […]
He was thinking about secrets. Why do we need them and what do they mean? —Libra I am the false character that follows the name around. —White Noise I. She speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in her eye that’s halfway horny: meet Cleo Birdwell, the first female to lace up for […]
THE FRENCH MARSHAL Ferdinand Foch, it is said, paced his headquarters in the early hours of November 11, 1918, waiting to hear whether the German plenipotentiaries had agreed to a cessation of hostilities. If they hadn’t, he was prepared to order the Allied troops under his command to advance into German territory. At 5 a.m., […]
THE BBC RECENTLY reported that Nigeria has the worst natal care in the world. “One death every seven minutes,” the headline dourly states. The reasons are as you would expect—poor health-care infrastructure and widespread insecurity, worsened by sluggish and ineffective government policy. Shortly after, the publication released an investigative report on scams in which illicit […]
I WENT INTO A BOOKSHOP in Montreal and saw that the bookseller had Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M, open on the counter beside the till. Did she like it? She loved it, going on for some minutes about the way Cusk illuminates objects and other non-subjects before arriving at a notion, a concept, […]
Watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, I too want to go home. Like all Nolan’s films, it is dour, hammy, and too long, with dialogue from a tin can. “The gods help those who help themselves,” Matt Damon as Odysseus says. Ah, the pure serene. Homer’s man of twists and turns is unrecognizable in […]
AESTHETIC JUDGMENTS MAY NOT be objective, but that does not mean they are subjective either. To be sure, they are always made by specific persons, and are in this sense personal, yet this fact is often taken to be the end of the argument, when it ought to be the beginning of analysis. What goes […]
Emma Cline’s latest novel is a dark night of the soul that spans the last five days in the life of David Hastings, a recently retired businessman. “A busy-ness man,” David thinks. He belongs to the demographic of Americans that was able to make a lot of money just by doing what was expected of […]
IN NINTH STREET WOMEN, her landmark group biography of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Mary Gabriel insists that the power brokers of the mid-century New York avant-garde worked to refashion art as a macho enterprise. Until then, male artists in America were thought to be rather suspect: “elitist” […]
PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW the teachings of Wittgenstein, whether or not they do so wittingly, find nothing more frightening—or more potentiating—than a state of wordlessness: the end of the world. We can see this clearly in the time of live-streamed genocide, when the avowal that “there are no words” is often what passes for attunement to […]
THE DANISH WRITER Tove Ditlevsen divorced her fourth husband, the tabloid mogul Victor Andreasen, in 1973. They’d been together for twenty-two years. Andreasen was then in his second stint as editor in chief of Ekstra Bladet, the tabloid he’d saved from financial ruin. Soon after their divorce, Ditlevsen published the following anonymous personal ad in […]
WHEN THE WORLD ENDS, what will you miss most? I’ll miss running in the woods, and the buttery, grassy smell of a horse’s cheek. In Earth 7, Deb Olin Unferth’s third novel, characters miss what they never knew: Earth in her prime. From their perspective, the golden age of Earth includes our own current moment, […]
GWENDOLINE RILEY, THE FEROCIOUSLY TALENTED forty-seven-year-old British novelist, is deeply and rightly admired—by younger female readers in particular—for a body of work that now comprises eight increasingly sophisticated novels, all of them short and lacerating. Riley’s oeuvre, in other words, has become an object of widespread readerly love even as her books themselves can seem […]
SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s antihero, gives himself one of many pep talks about why he might have been right to have murdered an elderly woman. There are naturally two types of man, he tells himself: the inferior, who can only reproduce what already is, and he who has the […]
NEARLY EVERY MILLENNIAL WOMAN I KNOW carries with her a bone-deep knowledge of the same frightening folktale: a girl-child, blonde and beautiful, is born in Nowhere, USA, and becomes public property by virtue of her talent. She turns sixteen, and as the clock strikes midnight a transmogrification occurs, turning her into a plastic thing, an […]
Late in The Vivisectors, the aloof protagonist, Agathe, theorizes about the state of the contemporary novel. “There are no places and barely any proper names,” she reflects ruefully. Agathe is the daughter of a renowned literary critic, who has his own theory on the state of modern fiction, that fiction must now “move as smoothly […]
IN HOUSEPAINTER’S LINGO, there is a term for a missed spot or a patch of uneven coverage: “a holiday.” As in, somebody took one! As in, make sure to get that holiday by the garage before you go home. A fleck of some forsaken color marks a gap: a slick of neglect, a tiny relic […]
SOMETIMES IT FEELS LIKE THERE ARE THREE TRUE OUTCOMES FOR MILITANTS. You run, you’re imprisoned, or you die. Sometimes it’s all three. The Weather Underground (WU), perhaps the most notorious of the late-1960s American radicals, met all these fates—including, most famously, accidentally blowing up three of their own. Born locally out of the violent splits […]
THREE HUNDRED and twenty-three pages into Lonesome Dove, the eight-hundred-and-fifty-eight-page Western epic that propelled Larry McMurtry to a level of literary celebrity that’s hard to imagine today, his two principal characters ride into San Antonio for the first time in many years. The era is the late 1870s, the twilight of the American frontier. The […]
