Book Reviews

The Great American Novel is a holy obsession – the Everest every writer dreams of summiting. For most, that dream begins and ends with William Faulkner, whose winding sentences and sunburned Southern landscapes birthed prose that seemed to breathe. His words marched; crookedly, yes, but always with purpose. Louis C.K., a would-be Faulkner disciple, trudges into the same swamp in Ingram, minus the map, the bearings and any sense of control. What was presumably intended to echo the Mississippian’s hypnotic disarray becomes instead a masterclass in incoherence. The story, told in long and sweaty first-person narration, follows a boy wandering through a Texan landscape of mud, hunger and half-formed memories. The intention is noble; the execution is catastrophic.

I won’t attempt to explain Mitfordmania; we’d be here all night. Suffice it to say that fascination with the British sisters – Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah, born to the 2nd Baron Redesdale between 1904 and 1920 – shows no sign of waning. This year alone, the six have inspired Outrageous, a lavish (and fatuous) multi-episode television drama available on BritBox; The Party Girls, a play by Amy Rosenthal; and Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me, a graphic novel by cartoonist and fangirl Mimi Pond. Now comes biographer Carla Kaplan’s Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford. I did wonder if there was anything left to say. Famous for the muckraking classic The American Way of Death, Jessica also wrote two well-received autobiographies.

The film Ballad of a Small Player opens with a blast of classical music, a shot of the Macau skyline and Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) waking up in a hotel suite littered with Champagne bottles, cigarette butts and designer loafers that are starting to show their wear. While he dresses and shaves, a voice-over informs us he has three days to live. A sharp observer might notice he seems to have considerably less than that. Either way, for the next 100 minutes, director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave) treats us to a sumptuous vision of one English con man’s final spree before oblivion. It will take an even sharper-eyed observer to catch, as the final credits snap past, that they have just watched an adaptation of a Lawrence Osborne novel.