Books

"My God, the suburbs!” John Cheever, the short-story writer who has rejoiced in the nickname “the American Chekhov,” had what can only be described as ambivalent feelings about the twentieth-century housing developments that grew up on the outskirts of major cities. He said of them that “they encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity, and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.” Cheever was not wholly consistent himself.

The St. Brice’s Day Massacre? I must admit I hadn’t heard of this “most just extermination” of Danes in Oxford at the instigation of King Aethelred the Unready in 1002, perhaps because the teaching of history in Britain tends to kick off in 1066. You certainly don’t think of Oxford as a place that pioneered techniques of ethnic cleansing. Crypt is a collection of seven essays that unearth details about how certain people lived and died in the past. If you didn’t already know Alice Roberts’s background as an anatomist and biological anthropologist, you’d have a good chance of deducing it from this book.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the immaculately Brylcreemed megastar of the golden age of Catholic television and radio evangelism in the United States, famously hated hearing the confessions of nuns. Doing so, Sheen is reported to have said, was “like being stoned to death with popcorn.” Despite this, Sheen — at one point broadcasting to over 30 million Americans — found himself hearing a lot of nuns’ confessions in his later career. He was reduced to this, alongside what was rather euphemistically referred to as his “international cassette tape ministry,” having fallen foul of the archbishop of New York, the doughty Cardinal Spellman.

Call it a prejudice if you like. Living in Japan in the 1970s, I had a slight aversion to a particular type of westerner. He — for it was mostly a he — usually lived in Kyoto, sometimes wore a kimono and liked to sit in ancient temples chasing after that presumably blissful moment of enlightenment, awakening, satori, or whatever one wishes to call it. These seekers were less interested in Japan as a society of human beings. They wanted to float in higher spheres. As Christopher Harding explains in The Light of Asia, the Zen adepts, the Buddhist chanters, the rock-garden worshippers, the kimonoed fools (in my no doubt blinkered eyes) were part of a long western tradition.

In Salman Rushdie’s new memoir Knife, there is a powerful and moving moment — amid the many other powerful and moving moments — in which Rushdie visits his ailing friend Paul Auster at the latter’s house in Brooklyn and describes his sorrow at seeing him so reduced by illness. It may have been that the extent of the cancer that killed Auster had not been made public knowledge, although a statement was released about his condition, until Rushdie’s description of his encounter — and some might accuse him of indiscretion or indelicacy. Yet the news of Auster’s death, anticipated though it undoubtedly was, has meant that such questions recede almost immediately — and instead a consideration of his legacy as a writer, rather than an invalid, can begin.

A good place to start with The Blues Brothers, Daniel de Visé’s engaging account of the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd comedy classic, is in the spring preceding the movie’s summer 1980 release. By this stage, the production was mired in controversy and a martyr to industry scuttlebutt. Press reports put the expenditure at anywhere between $35 million and $40 million (in fact it sailed home at a mere $27.5 million) — and this at a time when over-subsidized box office calamities such as Steven Spielberg’s 1941 and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate had prompted many a lament about Hollywood hubris. The rough cut came in at a mammoth three hours, at a time when two were reckoned excessive.

When Ohio senator J.D. Vance arrived at the Munich Security Conference in February, he had a clear message meant for the world: the Republican Party was no longer the party of Ronald Reagan. Standing outside the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, he informed reporters that he did not believe American support for combat against authoritarian regimes should extend to Ukraine — and that he would continue to oppose efforts to “increase the supply of weapons in Ukraine because we’ve already expended so many of our munitions and resources” to achieve a victory that he does not foresee. Vance’s bootstrap story is well-known — he’s a Marine veteran turned Yale Law grad turned venture capitalist made prominent by his bestselling Appalachia memoir Hillbilly Elegy.