Books

"They don’t treat people nowadays, let alone penguins.” When Americans ask what went wrong after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this wry comment on the state of Ukrainian healthcare in the 1990s isn’t a bad place to start. It’s also typical of the darkly funny Death and the Penguin, an account of a young writer in Kiev and his pet penguin, Misha, formerly of the city zoo. Did I say Kiev? Of course I meant Kyiv. It has lately become unfashionable to mention the commonalities between Ukraine and Russia, lest you give aid and succor to Vladimir Putin. But Putin’s propaganda resonates because it contains a grain of truth. Despite war and ethnic conflict, Russia and Ukraine have a great deal of shared history.

“I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job. I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.” So wrote Anthony Bourdain in a text to his ex-wife and confidante, Ottavia Bussia-Bourdain, according to an unauthorized biography being released in October. Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain, written by journalist Charles Leerhsen, isn’t a retread of Bourdain: The Official Oral Biography, nor is it another Roadrunner, the movie about Bourdain released earlier this year. In Leershen’s own words, his motivation for writing it was that “We never had that big story, that long piece that said what happened, how the guy with the best job in the world took his own life.

There are so many examples of narcissism-on-steroids that litter Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner’s memoir that it’s difficult to point out just one. But the following is typical: in 2001, Wenner was invited to a recording session for his friend Mick Jagger’s solo album Goddess in the Doorway. Wenner, long out of practice in writing for his magazine — clear prose was never his forte — submitted a review to his editor, who, knowing of the friendship, gave the album four stars. Wenner intervened, bumping it up to five stars, and reflected: “There was some snickering [in the office] about being on Mick’s leash, but so what, and what if I were?” Wenner’s torturously long memoir is a very bad book.

When the Queen died a fortnight ago, it was widely speculated that the perfect writer to describe both her death and its aftermath was Hilary Mantel, but now that will never be. Mantel died from a stroke yesterday at the age of 70, leaving behind a unique legacy in transatlantic literature not merely as someone whose weighty novels about royalty in the Tudor era have sold millions, but as an acute chronicler of our own time, too. Not for nothing is her most controversial short story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, a subversive account of what might have happened if a woman she felt "boiling detestation" for had been killed in 1983.

The virtue of chastity is often confused with the state of virginity, or the practice of abstinence. For the Christian man or woman, chastity is more a frame of mind, an integrated approach to love and sex. While virginity or abstinence can result from chastity, they are themselves beside the point. Naturally, these distinctions are lost on the “sex-positive” movement, which tends to reject religious views of sex out of hand as repressive and weird. In her memoir Rated X: How Porn Liberated Me from Hollywood, Maitland Ward tells the story of how she went from being a struggling, miserable actress to a successful, “happy” porn star.

I recently had a bout of Covid. The symptoms were pretty mild aside from persistent brain fog, which in my case has been a good cover for creeping senility. A much younger friend of mine confessed that she and her family celebrated their defeat of Covid with a summer beach holiday in Delaware. She and her husband still had a bit of Covid-brain — enough, apparently, that when they drove back, they came back in one car. They had driven up in two. It took them four days to figure this out. My own sense of disorientation, confusion, and fatigue has not been so dramatic. I might have fired off the odd, undiplomatic email. But I often do that. I might have wondered about where I left my reading glasses. But they are invariably suavely tilted back on my head.

Philip Larkin — whose centenary was this week — was a misogynist. A “casual, habitual racist and an easy misogynist,” according to the literary critic Lisa Jardine. Alan Bennet, Britain’s favorite playwright and supposedly a friend of Larkin’s, even described the poet as looking “like a rapist.” Not content with one insult, he even compared him to the necrophiliac serial killer John Christie. Tough review, that one. The sheer number of reviews, essays, and articles which decry Larkin’s character and attitudes — “a porn-addled, two-timing, racist misogynist” reads the headline for one — seem to suggest this is a settled judgment. And, indeed, the evidence is all but damning.

The news coming from New York State that the author Salman Rushdie has been stabbed onstage is both frightening and grim. It is frightening because, without full details of how seriously injured Rushdie has been, it is tempting to fear the worst. Media reports initially suggested that Rushdie was well enough to walk off stage, but the news that he has been transported by air ambulance to a hospital after being stabbed in the neck suggests his injuries are severe. It is grim because any violence being done to a public figure is abhorrent, but in the case of Rushdie, it is almost inevitable that this particular incident has been occasioned by one of the most notorious cause celébrès that has ever been seen in the publishing world, namely the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.

At the beginning of 2021, author Blake Bailey might have been forgiven for thinking that his literary career was not merely assured but stellar. He had gathered significant accolades for his writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Books Critics Circle Award, and he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He had specialized in writing about heavy-drinking Great American Novelists, including the perennially underrated Richard Yates, John Cheever and The Lost Weekend’s Charles Jackson. His most recent subject was the elusive Philip Roth, a man whose literary brilliance was matched by his checkered reputation both on and off the page. Eighteen months later, matters have changed beyond recognition.

T.S. Eliot once made the significant point, in an essay on Philip Massinger, that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Eliot knew exactly what he was talking about (himself). However, change “poets” to “novelists” and the same pertinence applies. In fact, this wholesale, covert purloining may be true of all artists in all ages in all the seven arts. Let’s start with some backstory. Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), as they say, needs no introduction. William Gerhardie (1895-1977) is almost wholly forgotten today, but in the 1920s he was the luminous young wunderkind of English literature — a kind of Donna Tartt or Sally Rooney of his times.

I put off writing this article for ages. Initially, I decided I would write it from bed, but the temptation of simply giving up and falling asleep again was too great. A change of tactic proved no less helpful: out of bed, it took every ounce of effort I had to avoid getting straight back in again. Not a jot was left over for the exertion of writing and typing. This isn’t the status quo for my productivity, I promise; it is more a reflection of the subject matter. It is absolutely impossible to write about indolence while running around busily ticking off a to-do list. You have to relax into it. Call it method article-writing, if you will. Indolence gets something of a bad rap these days.