Books

Katy Hays’s involving, well-tuned debut novel takes its name from a real museum in New York, the Cloisters. Built by a Rockefeller, it resembles a medieval monastery and brims with glorious treasures. Ann, our provincial heroine (from Walla Walla, where she worked a menial job in order to fund college), would have preferred the Met, but when she’s serendipitously hired for a summer role, she finds herself swiftly pulled into the institution’s inner workings and the nefarious machinations of its well-heeled staff. The cutthroat nature of the museum is placed under the spotlight.

Stephen Rubin may not be a household name, but one gets the impression that doesn’t bother him much. Since he began his career in the '80s, he has built his reputation on publishing zeitgeist-baiting fiction and non-fiction alike, ranging from the undeniably good (John Grisham’s The Firm) to the undeniably bad but hugely lucrative (The Da Vinci Code), along with George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points. You may not like all, or even most, of the thousands of books that Rubin has been involved with, but you cannot deny his commercial acumen. He knows what people want to buy, and has been as responsible as anyone in the United States for bringing it to them.

A lot of new books grow old fast. It isn’t even the fault of their material, necessarily, but their milieu. Hour by hour, the means of cultural production are accelerating at an evaporative rate. Today more than ever before, irrelevancy looms large over the shoulder of the novelist. It’s an environment within which thirty days of relevance is a feat, but thirty years? A fiction in and of itself. Yet, throughout three decades of cultural churn, the words of Irvine Welsh have remained steadfast; as culturally relevant and artistically avant-garde as the day they first hit the shelves.

“I don’t know how many times in nearly forty years I have come back to this novel,” Graham Greene said of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, published shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. The fiction of both English authors — both converts to Catholicism — share a deep cynicism towards modernity and a depiction of the English establishment as decadent and in decline. The Good Soldier, whose original title The Saddest Story was canned by the publisher because it would render the book “unsaleable” during World War I, tells the tale of two married couples, one British (British Army Captain Edward Ashburnham and his wife Leonora) and the other American (John and Florence Dowell). Both pairs are, on the face of it, young, prosperous, and happy.

The Shards is about 600 pages long. “Should anyone even publish a 600-page novel?” asks its author Bret Easton Ellis. “I happen to believe, yes, if it’s justified.” Such books are rarely justifiable, and often, novelists become buzzed-about simply for executing them, but not many can boast that every word, scene and sentence is necessary. This is how it feels to read The Shards: not a detail is to be missed. It contains the thematic elements that run through Ellis’ oeuvre: the social lives of the wealthy, or nearly wealthy, drugs, sexuality and desperation painted over with bursts of violence. The through line that connects his work isn’t that sex and violence are taboo.

After a fair-to-middling 2022, it’s not unreasonable to hope that 2023 will see several stars burn brightly in the literary firmament. Whether what promises to be the most talked-about book of the year, Prince Harry’s Spare (Random House, January), is included in this number remains to be seen. On the plus side, the prince has the estimable J.R. Moehringer as his ghostwriter; on the negative side is the fact that his every public appearance over the past few years has been so combative that we might expect little more than a 416-page exercise in score-settling. More reliable pleasures await. Pamela Anderson’s memoir Love, Pamela (HarperCollins, January) should be a revelatory and fascinating dive beyond the usual bimbo clichés.

One of the great, pesky questions of human history has finally been answered. For thousands of years , as we all know, most great accomplishments were the works of men. But now and then there was an outlier, a woman doing great things. Esther in the Bible, Joan of Arc or Elizabeth I of England. It made no sense — but today, thanks to the tireless work of gender studies departments we know the truth: those weren’t women at all. They were actually men. This weekend we had further confirmation of this revelation from the New York Times which ran a piece revealing that Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, was a trans man. We know this because sometimes Alcott went by “Lou” and mentioned having a “boys' spirit.” I’m sold.

If you sit down and talk to an author for any length of time, you will hear gripes. (Writers will never be confused with the sunniest of people on this planet.) About the visibility of their books; about the size of their advances; about their sales, relative to their other titles and to their peers; about publicity campaigns; about cover designs. There will be a lot of gripes, and if you are cornered by an author in a bar, or at a party, you might be advised to make your excuses and flee. But if you have some sympathy for this much-maligned breed, it may occur to you that the basis of their complaints ultimately comes down to a simple lack of appreciation by their publishers: those all-powerful entities that have the power to make or break careers at the touch of a button.

The times, they are a-changing. For the past six decades, Bob Dylan has been one of the most enigmatic artists in American music, whose every public utterance has been pored over by his admirers and detractors alike. But one thing that Dylan has never been is a man who threw it all away: reputationally speaking, at any rate. Yet things at last have changed. In a simple twist of fate that Dylan surely never could have predicted, he has become embroiled in — of all things — a controversy over signed books. Dylan's most recent publication, The Philosophy of Modern Song, was released in a deluxe limited edition, retailing at $599 apiece.

The period of the First World War was a golden age for the spy novel. There’s nothing like a really cataclysmic global conflict to stir any halfway attentive author. And perhaps the pick of the literary crop was 1903’s The Riddle of the Sands, by the Anglo-Irish writer, soldier, and politician Erskine Childers. The novel mixes some gentle satire about the graded snobberies of the Edwardian class system with a seafaring adventure involving a couple of topping British chaps going after German spies in the Baltic. It’s not only a riveting tale in itself, but so cogent in its account of the state of Britain’s maritime defenses that it prompted the Admiralty to hurriedly install a series of new coastal gun batteries.

William Boyd Writing effective comedy is very difficult. True comic genius, the ability to create a unique tone of voice — deadpan, perfectly timed, self-deprecating, abjuring all whimsy (the British disease) and grandstanding — is extremely rare. One thinks of S.J. Perelman, Peter de Vries, the Grossmiths and P.G. Wodehouse amongst very few others. One name that can be added to this tiny and exclusive club is Theo Fennell who has published, this year, his memoir I Fear For This Boy: Some Chapters of Accidents (Bloomsbury, $35). It relates incidents in Fennell’s life where everything that could go wronnd Catholic Churches as he veered between them.