Books

Sally Rooney is preparing to publish her new book, Beautiful World, Where Are You. But reports are emerging of near-hysterical behavior more suited to a (pre-cancellation) J.K. Rowling Harry Potter novel than an elegantly written work of literary fiction. Pre-publication proof copies of the novel have sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars, despite the US publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux having explicitly asked recipients of the advanced reading copies not to resell them, and even a promotional canvas tote bag is realizing nearly $100. Meanwhile, when the book is published in the US and UK on September 7, 50 British retailers will be opening their doors early on the day, so eager purchasers can get their Rooney fix shortly after daybreak.

If you were lucky enough to know Richard Scarry, you might get a postcard from one of the world’s most successful and celebrated children’s book authors. If you were lucky enough to be Scarry’s friend, you might get a letter from Lowly Worm. If you were lucky enough to be a close friend and also a storyteller, you might get advice from the master storyteller himself. I was very lucky to be all three. I met Dick Scarry in 1959, when Dick bought a sailboat from my father in Westport, Connecticut. The two men had become friends based on a love of all things nautical. My father was an artist-illustrator and writer before he gave up the Madison Avenue rat race and opened a yacht brokerage and ship’s chandlery in Westport.

Many books claim to describe junctures that changed the world, but few examine ones as consequential as Conquistadores. Hailed by the Romantics as courageous explorers, the Spanish conquerors are increasingly seen as violent and rapacious exploiters. That, says Fernando Cervantes, oversimplifies the complexities of the early modern period. Cervantes, a Mexican historian, places the conquest of the Americas in Spain’s political context. In 1492, at great cost to the royal purse, Spain recovered Andalucía from the Moors. So when a charismatic Genoese navigator proposed to sail southwest in search of a new trade route to Asia, Ferdinand and Isabella approved. Columbus’s voyage was the first step to transforming a young nation into the greatest imperial power on Earth.

For Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, the Duchess of York, it must be the best and worst of times. Even as her former husband Prince Andrew sinks ever deeper into the reputational mire brought about by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, she can console herself with the recent news that her Mills & Boon novel, the absurdly named Her Heart for a Compass, has become a bestseller. Granted, it may have sold just over a thousand copies in the past week, but, in the quiet month of August, this is enough to add ‘top novelist’ to Fergie’s many other accomplishments. The duchess was suitably gracious in celebration: ‘I am absolutely delighted to have embarked on a new career as a novelist at the age of 61 and to be rewarded with a top 10 bestseller.

‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?’ asks the speaker in Robert Browning’s poem ‘Memorabilia’. Yet few of Browning’s contemporaries are as hard to see plain as his own wife: the poet who was known to her family as ‘Ba’, signed herself ‘EBB’ and published a number of popular works under her married name, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During her lifetime she was one of the most admired poets of the age: a framed portrait of her hung in the bedroom of Emily Dickinson, and when Wordsworth died in 1850 there was serious talk of her becoming the first female poet laureate. Since her death in 1861, however, her reputation has sunk like a bad soufflé.

The false sense of complacency in Washington DC, now restored as the imperial capital of the world, is only matched by a tone of utter bafflement. History has apparently renewed its march toward a progressive utopia, and the American cabinet seems as epidermally diverse as it is ideologically totalitarian. But there remains a sense of unease. The imperium suffered a systemic shock in 2016, one that needed and still lacks explanation. The shock was not limited to America. The Guardian struggles to comprehend that British Indians tended to support Brexit, and that members of their community such as Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel have risen to influence in the Conservative party and high office in the government.

Have you met Will Tripp? He’s the pugnacious dwarf lawyer who starred in Harry Stein’s Will Tripp: Pissed Off Attorney at Law. That was probably the funniest book of 2014, certainly the most amusing novel I read that year. Will, whose credo is ‘Shut up, and get on with it’, was busy paying his way through law school by means of his athletic prowess, sort of. He specialized in being tossed back and forth by the inebriated patrons of a local bar until some do-gooding crusader took time away from battling against secondhand smoke and carbon emissions to intervene to Save the Dwarfs and got the sport of dwarf tossing declared illegal. Will had to find new employment, inspecting sewers.

My body is limp and naked but for a thin, sullied sheet strewn around my waist. I’m on my back, my arms hang outstretched in a submissive crucifixion. My hair is matted and caked with dried blood around my right ear, my eyes clenched shut with fear. The downpour is relentless. Then my body flinches, my nostrils flare. Small expressions pop and twitch as I recover consciousness. The invisible straitjacket of sleep paralysis loosens. The dream recedes. And then my nightmare begins. Desperately parched, I pry open my cracked lips to take in the water, only to be shocked by its bitterness. My senses now tripped into awareness, I peer up and shock turns to disgust as it dawns on me that the rain is cascading from a penis protruding from a tangled forest of pubic hair.

John Dollard (1900-80), trained in sociology at the University of Chicago and in psychoanalysis at the Berlin Institute, brought the sensibility of a novelist to a five-month study in Indianola, Mississippi, which he wrote up as Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937). Dollard went south, but what he found applied in the other direction: The ‘caste line is drawn in the North as effectively, if not as formally, as in the South,’ which meant ‘We are still deliberately or unwittingly profiting by, defending, concealing or ignoring the caste system.’ Caste, Dollard argued, had far-reaching implications: ‘Our social system has come under world inspection and is literally being looked at by several billion people or their competent agents.

We should save ourselves some time and ban all books. They’re too much trouble. For example, Elin Hilderbrand, author of Golden Girl, hates Anne Frank. We know this because a teenager in the novel quips that hiding in a friend’s attic for the summer would make her 'like Anne Frank’. Didn’t Hilderbrand get the memo? Teenagers are not allowed to make jokes (or mistakes). One presumed reader wrote to the book’s publisher, 'As a Jewish woman, one who lost 18 members of her family in the Holocaust I'm disgusted in you as a publisher that you allowed that line to be published. It's inexcusable.’ Good for her! Hilderbrand was clearly insulting Anne Frank’s legacy, making excuses for the Holocaust and pledging her allegiance to Hitler.

Ignoring the padlocked gate, my six-year-old son Nicholas and I climbed through a break in the metal fence and pushed into the mesh of undergrowth. This was the site of Ducker, the open-air swimming pool that once belonged to Harrow School in London. Here the young Winston Churchill romped (naked, since trunks were for prefects), as, in his own day, did my dad. When I arrived at Harrow in the 1980s, the pool — far bigger than Tooting Bec Lido, which is now the UK’s largest — had just been abandoned. It was covered with graffiti, the haunt of skateboarders. Returning in 2021, I looked for changes wrought by three decades of neglect. Google Maps showed a J-shaped artificial lake, 98ft by 492ft.

Since the racial riots last summer, Flannery O’Connor has been scrutinized by literary critics and activists for reasons wholly unrelated to her literary artistry and her formidable oeuvre, whose size, though not large, is remarkable for a writer who died at the age of 39 after having been diagnosed in her mid-20s with lupus. The abruptly renewed interest in Miss O’Connor could be said almost to amount to an O’Connor revival were it not focused on a single question: ‘Was Flannery O’Connor a racist, or was she not?’ Attempts to answer it have involved an evaluation of her character based on her novels, stories and voluminous correspondence, and led in one instance to the critical conclusion that she was ‘not a saint’.

A politician publishing a novel is a bit like the lead singer of a rock band declaring that not only are they going to release a solo album but it is going to express their newfound interest in electronica. Expectations are low — or high depending on your appetite for other people’s failure. Still, for all the mean things you could say about Stacey Abrams’s new legal thriller While Justice Sleeps, you could say some kind things as well, the foremost being that it is not cynical. This is not some kind of botched cash-in. (For that, look forward to my editors asking me to review Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming novel State of Terror.) Abrams loves to write.

Sohrab Ahmari is an ogre sent by Satan to annihilate American freedom. At least, that’s the reputation he has with liberals of the more excitable sort. His new book ought to soothe their twitchy nerves. The Unbroken Thread is an easy going, ecumenical, rather cosmopolitan tour of 12 moral questions and select thinkers who responded to each of them. ‘My primary purpose,’ writes our implausible theocrat, is ‘not to offer definitive answers, drawn from any one particular tradition, but to explore the possibility that our contemporary philosophy might be wrong in crucial respects.’ Ahmari has been much vilified for his criticism of Drag Queen Story Hour, an event in which crossdressers introduce themselves to children in public libraries.

In the 1880s a new group of women was entering newsrooms. Not content to write society sketches or cover the fashionable hats of the season, they went for bold reporting — often going undercover or participating in other dramatic ‘stunts’. The antic that launched Nellie Bly’s career in 1887 was getting admitted as a patient on Blackwell’s Island in New York, then an insane asylum for women. She had told the editor of the New York World she would do anything fora job on the paper, and this was what she was assigned. She went to a boarding house under an assumed name, pretended to be unhinged and was duly committed. Rescued after 10 days by a representative from the World, her exposé of the indignities suffered by patients in the asylum was a sensation.