Books

When Roland Barthes wrote his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” he probably didn’t intend that, fifty-five years later, a major American news outlet would be provocatively suggesting that the world’s bestselling author should be de-personed, de-platformed or de-materialized from history. And yet that is exactly what has happened with the New York Times. They recently ran a series of advertisements on the subway featuring a reader named “Lianna” who is, as much of their subscriber base now are, “breaking the binary,” experiencing “queer love in color” and meditating on “heritage in rich cues.” So far, so predictable. But the ads took a grimmer turn when one suggested that Lianna was “imagining Harry Potter without its creator.

“Women Dominate Shortlist for International Booker Prize,” reads the headline of Alex Marshall’s Thursday article for the New York Times. He notes that five of the six books on the shortlist this year were written by women. The novels do look interesting — I haven’t read Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob or Jon Fosse’s latest in his New Name series and want to pick up both — but it’s hardly news that women “dominate” the International Booker. They have dominated every major literary prize in the last few years. Four of the last six winners of the International Booker have been women. While winners of the Booker (not the International Booker) over the last six years are split right down the middle, women outnumber men twenty-two to fourteen on the shortlist.

Americans are about to get what they desperately need: another book from the Biden family! Valerie Biden Owens isn’t just the president’s little sister; she's also the author of Growing Up Biden: A Memoir. The book’s cover features a photo of a young Valerie and her siblings sitting on a couch with their mother. According to Amazon, the book "details Valerie’s decades-long professional career in politics, and the central role she played in her brother’s life as an insightful adviser, an ever-loyal advocate and best friend.” The timing of the book’s release — it will hit shelves next week — is almost as terrible as Joe Biden’s recent poll numbers. Almost.

When you think of 1972, what comes to mind? Corduroy flares, President Nixon and the first installment of The Godfather? Or bra-burning, feminist “consciousness-raising” meetings and debates about abortion and birth control? America in the early 1970s was not just a nation of Vietnam War vets and oil crises, but one of significant feminist liberation. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and helped found the National Organization for Women in 1966, and the decade after saw a whole host of similar organizations, such as the Women’s Radical Action Project (WRAP) and the catchily named Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH).

The English author and curmudgeon Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) is today best known for his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. A luxuriant evocation of the beauties of pre-World War Two Oxford, coupled with a cautionary narrative about the destructive power of Catholic guilt, it has remained a constant favorite with everyone from college students to literature scholars. It was memorably filmed for British television in 1981, and it launched the careers of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews as, respectively, the novel’s narrator Charles Ryder and the flamboyant aesthete Sebastian Flyte.

Hope is seen as “an unqualified good” today, Adam Potkay writes in his excellent history of the idea. We hope that things will get better in the world — that peace will come to Ukraine, that religious violence will stop in Burkina Faso, that fat-cat sexual predators in Hollywood will be brought to justice. For members of the world’s three monotheistic religions, it is a virtue to hope in life after death. This hasn’t always been the case. For ancient Greeks and Romans, Potkay observes, hope was mostly a vice.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the last pages of Naked Lunch at dawn looking for an angry fix of good literature, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection between plot and prose, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up reading Kaddish, who bared their brains to the delights of On the Road in the pursuit of just a fraction of the “angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated.” Everyone knows the Beats: from Jack Kerouac to William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg, their influence has been undeniable, if not always delightful. And on March 12, their lodestar, Jack Kerouac would have been 100 years old.

The life of poète maudit and gunrunner Arthur Rimbaud is a puzzle to nearly everyone who knows it. A precocious student who won a regional concours académique for a poem in Latin, Rimbaud left school at fifteen, shortly after the start of the Franco-German War. After two attempts to escape home for Paris, he finally moved in with the poet Paul Verlaine in the fall of 1871, where he succeeded in insulting all the literary lights of Paris in three months. The two men began an affair, which ruined what was left of Verlaine’s marriage to Mathilde Mauté (whom Verlaine regularly beat). They made two debauched trips to London and eventually fell out in Belgium, where Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist.

Usually, it’s poets who chance their arm with a novel. Rare is the established novelist who switches to verse. This could be because, while poetry is technically daunting with its rhyme and meter, the novel is apparently the easiest of all forms, without even the conventions and directions of the most basic screenplay. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Love Peacock was the most successful poet to turn to fiction, but in our own times poet-novelists rank among the most talented: Sylvia Plath, Ben Lerner, Vikram Seth, Craig Raine, Grace Nichols. Now, after half a century of writing superb novels, the English author Paul Bailey, well into his eighties, is publishing his second book of poems.