Books

I was introduced to Tom Wolfe in the late 1970s, a year or two after I had begun my journalistic career as the literary editor at National Review, by Timothy Dickinson — an Oxford man working for Lewis Lapham, then editor of Harper’s — who was (as he doubtless remains) the sole ambulatory compendium of the British Museum. As Wolfe was fond of Middle Eastern cuisine, we met for lunch at a Lebanese place in Manhattan’s Garment District. While saying goodbye on the sidewalk out front of the restaurant after the meal, Timothy dropped his walking stick which was headless; only the screw that had once fastened the missing head in place protruding from the top of the shaft.

On Friday book-loving New Yorkers got a shock as the city’s largest bookstore — The Strand — announced that it risked going out of business. A post on Twitter from the company said: ‘We need your help. This is the post we hoped to never write, but today marks a huge turning point in The Strand's history. Our revenue has dropped nearly 70% compared to last year, and the loans and cash reserves that have kept us afloat these past months are depleted.’ https://twitter.com/strandbookstore/status/1319686649798905856 What followed included an appeal to the public to return to the store to ensure that the 93-year-old business could keep trading. Prominent writers and pundits rallied around, and in recent days lines have appeared outside.

For anyone who’s a little bit worried about the current state of the Union, Andrew Gimson’s book is a godsend. Donald Trump is often called the 45th president, but he’s actually the 44th — Grover Cleveland, president from 1885- 89 and 1893-97, is counted as the 22nd and the 24th. Among his 43 predecessors, you’ll find plenty of drunks, philanderers and incompetents. Suddenly, the teetotal President doesn’t look so bad after all. Gimson is a British journalist, but don’t let that put American readers off. He’s worked for the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator and knows politics well. He previously wrote books about the 40 British monarchs since 1066, the 55 British prime ministers since 1721 and a biography of Boris Johnson.

A decade ago — eheu fugaces labuntur anni — Stuart Evers’s debut story collection, Ten Stories About Smoking, was one of the first books I ever reviewed, and I’ve kept tabs on his career ever since, in that spirit of comradely competitiveness one feels for a writer of a similar age launching at the same time. I spoke warmly of his first novel If This Is Home and enjoyed his second collection, Your Father Sends His Love, when it appeared in 2015. But there was nothing in those earlier works to prepare me for the scale and ambition of The Blind Light. This extraordinary novel about Britain and Britishness spans six decades and uses the stories of two men and their families to delve revealingly into complex questions of class, fate and history.

Former Newsweek writer Jonathan Alter’s new biography of President Jimmy Carter is less a political biography and more a hagiography. Like all lives of saints, it includes a passage describing a time of sinning before redemption. That was early in Carter’s political career when he artfully appealed to the votes of segregationist Democrats. But, in Alter’s view, as soon as Carter became Georgia governor in 1970, he transformed himself into a superhero, one who can harvest peanut crops even as he is heralding the rapture.

I doubt most of the belligerents associated with Turning Point USA, the Daily Wire and Blaze TV would know what to do if they were dropped into a combat situation. If you dropped Candace Owens behind enemy lines, she'd bite the throat out of an Isis fighter and stroll back to civilization without a scratch. Not to say Ms Owens is insightful or honest, or even that she means what she says. She means to succeed, and no one will stop her.Owens’s new book Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation is far more entertaining than the recent duds from Dave Rubin and Charlie Kirk. That doesn’t mean it's a good book. Intellectually it is completely incoherent.

George Orwell once proposed that the specimen literary career takes the form of a parabola in which the downward curve is implied in the upward. You can see immediately how this theory might work with a major-league titan such as Thackeray (promising early sketches leading to Vanity Fair, then downhill to the trackless waste of The Virginians) or James Joyce (peaks in the early stretches of Ulysses before descending to the dream language of Finnegans Wake). But how does it apply to the 71-year-old former enfant terrible and, to borrow another useful French phrase, one-time jeune premier of English fiction, Martin Amis?

Michael Anton was working in his small home office, almost four years ago to the day, when his wife came in and told him the news. Rush Limbaugh was reading it, on the air, right now. ‘It’ was his essay, a now notorious essay, a soon to be life changing essay, called ‘The Flight 93 Election’. Anton had published it, pseudonymously, with the Claremont Review of Books a few days before. Like any writer, he wanted people to read his work, but, like every writer, he wasn’t too surprised when he wasn’t read. ‘Flight 93’ was posted on Labor Day, a Monday, and did a little traffic. Tuesday: the same. Wednesday? Well, Rush Limbaugh read the whole thing out, all 4,257 words, for three hours, to 13 million people.

We live at a time of universal polymathy. We don’t know everything, but there’s not much difficulty in being able to discover any given truth. But it’s also worth remembering just how hard it used to be to find things out. Thirty years ago if you wanted to research it meant a trip to the public library — and perhaps filling out a form for an inter-library loan. Or you could try your luck in a bookshop, new or secondhand. The whole process took a long time, and most people stayed within their professional competence or enthusiasm, frankly admitting to ignorance outside those limits. It was the age of the specialist, memorably captured by Michael Frayn in Donkeys’ Years and the character of Kenneth Snell.

Babies, look at them: waddling about the place, falling over, crying, needy. Those racist bastards. Yeah that’s right, you heard me. Babies are racists too, they always have been. Unless you start doing the work, they always will be. Haven’t you noticed? Don’t you have a toddling daughter, a farting son, a drooping nephew, a drooling niece? Haven’t you noticed the obvious: these days, babies are all racist bastards. When you’re not looking, your baby is secretly cutting eye-slits in a white bed sheet. When you’re in the kitchen, making their soft, puréed dinner, your baby is skulking by the letterbox, quietly waiting for a delivery of Mein Kampf. Babies are hanging out on 8Chan.

‘It’s a woman’s thing, creation,’ says Sarah, a girl accused of witchcraft in 18th-century Scotland, in one of the three storylines in Evie Wyld’s powerful new novel. Sarah is pregnant, having been raped and nearly killed. She is looking at a piece of sacking sewn by a sister and mother and continues: ‘You can see how they felt in each stitch, you can hear the words they spoke to each other and into the cloth.’ The Bass Rock is in many ways an amplification of these words spoken into the cloth, a feminine counterforce to the masculine violence that pulses viscerally throughout.

The facts are stark, if little known. Before World War Two, the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, Greece (Salonica, in its old Ottoman name) numbered over 50,000. Jews were this Mediterranean port city’s most numerous ethnic minority and had shared in many of its past glories. When the war was over, only 5,000, less than 10 percent, of the Salonica Jews survived. Between March 15 and August 10, 1943, the local Greek police, supervised by the SS, arranged the deportation of 45,000 men, women and children in 19 convoys, most of them bound for death at Auschwitz-Birkenau. My grandmother’s family was among them. Talking Until Nightfall is a grim and gripping family saga. It compiles the testimonies of three generations of the Matarasso family.

Don’t skip over the dedications in books. They can be as illuminating as the stories they precede and shine an intriguing light on the author’s private life and loves: Jane Austen and Edmund Spenser [caption id="attachment_9876775" align="alignnone" width="739"] Family portrait of Jane Austen[/caption] The dedication to Jane Austen’s Emma reads: ‘To His Royal Highness The Prince Regent, This Work Is By His Royal Highness’s Permission, Most Respectfully Dedicated, By His Royal Highness’s Dutiful And Obedient Humble Servant, The Author.’ The Prince Regent was George Augustus Frederick, uncle of Queen Victoria and the eldest of George III’s children. He was self-indulgent and excessive.

Perhaps contemporary ‘cancel culture’ officially began in 1989, when Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie for having ‘defamed’ Islam in The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was ushered into hiding and the Islamist assault on truth-speech in the West was on. But here’s what I also think. The day after Israel won its 1967 war of self-defense, the propaganda began in deadly earnest against both Israel and the West. Within two decades, perhaps less, Western universities were intellectually and politically ‘occupied’ by Stalinist and Islamist narratives. Balkanized social identities and victimology ruled.