Books

The convention is that if you happen to meet authors and have just bought or acquired a book of theirs, you ask them to sign it. Particularly stuffy authors might refuse, but in most cases they feel flattered and duly inscribe your name and theirs on the title page or the flyleaf of the book in question. If the mood is right, they may add ‘with best wishes’ or something of the sort. At a superficial level, of course, such signatures are only the equivalent of an autograph album. There’s more to it than that, however. Added value perhaps, but association certainly. The human race lives by the stories we tell ourselves about our identity and our purposes, and that signature helps to make the author’s story part of the reader’s story.

‘Things that would have seemed utterly improbable now happen on a daily basis,’ Sir Salman Rushdie tells me. ‘The implausible has now become everyday.’ Isn’t this a problem for a writer whose books derive from the fantastical traditions of magic realism and science fiction, where crazy stuff happening is what sets them apart? ‘It is.’ The active threat to Rushdie’s life from radical Islam is two decades behind him. His novels have a way of dealing in sour, sometimes apocalyptic ironies. His latest, the Booker-shortlisted Quichotte, is set in what it describes as ‘the Age of Anything-Can-Happen’.

‘Buy pink baby clothes,’ Kim Jiyoung, the protagonist of this best-selling South Korean novel is told at the obstetrician’s office. Jiyoung’s mother responds: ‘It’s OK, the next one will be a boy.’ There are numerous births in this book. Births of girls are met with disappointment. The births of sons are celebrated. When Jiyoung is born in 1982, ‘abortion for medical problems had been legal for 10 years...aborting females was common practice as if “daughter” was a medical problem’. Her younger sister is ‘erased’.

Every history of London, and there have been many, has looked at the importance of migration to the city. Failing to mention that would be as inconceivable as not mentioning the River Thames. Both, after all — one literally, the other metaphorically — flow directly through the city’s heart. In this new and scholarly study, the difference is that London’s history of migration — its patchwork of settlement, its Irish ‘rookery’, its ‘colored quarter’, Huguenot silk-weavers, Jewish street-sellers, German bakers, Italian waiters, Chinatown, Banglatown — is put center-stage. The movement of all these people to London, the city’s extraordinary national, then continental, then international pull, is the story.

Now we’ve got time on our freshly cleaned hands, The Spectator’s literary luminaries are lubricating the wheels on time’s wingèd chariot and seizing the chance to boost their morale and brain function, reflect on the meaning of life and catch up on a good book or six. Each day, the Lockdown List carries our bibliophilic recommendations. Day 74: Indian summerRoss Clark The success of Black Lives Matter has deflected attention from a group which has no less a cause for grievance over its treatment throughout US history: native Americans. Indeed, to this day Native Americans, thousand for thousand, have an even greater chance of being killed by police officers as do African Americans.

An age demands a name when it’s an age of upheaval. The name should describe the ills of society and even suggest their cure. Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society aims to do exactly that — and succeeds in ways that he might not have intended. Douthat rejects the common view of decadence as Caligula-inspired orgies or Marquis de Sade-style perversion, or even excessive consumption of chocolate cake by women. For him, decadence is ‘neither empty of any judgment nor excessively deterministic’. He finds this sweet spot in the work of Jacques Barzun, who defined decadent times by their ‘deep concerns’ and ‘peculiarly restless’ mood.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. No one remembers Wendell Willkie. If you don’t believe me, mention him as a man worth looking up at your next cocktail hour. Then watch as even well-informed acquaintances wonder when, exactly, you started taking an interest in adult-entertainment performers or bothered to locate the inspiration for Arrested Development’s hit ‘Mr Wendal’. Even the learned (and let’s throw in friends who subscribe to the New Yorker to even things out), will struggle to recall that Willkie was not only referred to as ‘Private Citizen Number One’ by FDR.

'Sometimes the most vicious opposition to me,' writes Charlie Kirk in his new book The MAGA Doctrine, 'has come from the right, not the left.' Kirk thinks this is because 'older, established “conservative” publications' think his 'Turning Point' organization is 'a nuisance, an upstart'. Another explanation is that he is a hack. To be fair, The MAGA Doctrine contains some cheering passages. Kirk is right, in his introduction, that Trump has shattered the complacent Republican paradigm of Wall Street and foreign wars. He is right to bash the reckless adventurism of neoconservatives (he rightly details American military and financial losses, though he does not spare a mention for dead Afghans and Iraqis).

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Encapsulations of a particular art-world demographic nearly always fall wide of the mark. Just as there were plenty of people on hand in the 1950s to protest that the Angry Young Men were neither especially angry nor exclusively male, so countless chroniclers of interwar social life complained that the Bright Young People were neither bright nor young. But the critic Peter Quennell’s phrase ‘Lost Girls’ to describe the gang of female twenty-somethings who worked on the magazines and populated the parties of Blitz-era literary London carries an unmistakable tang of conviction.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Laramie, Wyoming In an age of extreme individualism complicated by racial sensitivity and class resentment, ancestry is an uncomfortable subject. But it remains a fact that a man’s ancestors are never irrelevant to who and what he is, though of course they determine neither. Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) said that he was conceived here in Laramie, before being delivered in Chicago following the usual interval of nine months. His American father deserted the family and his Anglo-Irish mother took her son to England, to be educated at Dulwich College.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The 20th century was a crowded century. Event piled upon world-historical event to produce a mass of history so heavy with the prospect of annihilation and so alive with the possibilities of individual emancipation that one of humanity’s most extraordinary accomplishments, the constitution of a liberal democratic republic on the Indian subcontinent, went largely unnoticed in the West. The significance of India’s birth was, however, not lost on a colonial world clamoring for freedom, or African Americans striving to unlock the full promise of America. India’s founding on August 15, 1947, W.E.B. DuBois rhapsodized, would be ‘remembered as the greatest historical date of the 19th and 20th centuries’.

For almost 300 years, the novel was a major art form, perhaps the major art form, of the modern world — the device by which we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves. Something new came into art during the transition out of the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and the Reformation, and into the modern age. We might call it the turn to the interior — an increasing agreement that domestic life and drama are real, not merely minor activities necessary to keep body and soul together while we play out our real lives on the world’s stage. Think how rare domestic drama was before the novel.

In order to cash in on celebrate Black History Month, Penguin Random House and Barnes & Noble planned a collaboration to achieve an amazing feat of wokeness. They were set to perform what I like to term as ‘positive blackface’ on a number of literary classics in order to show their support of diversity. Very much in the spirit of Justin Trudeau, they redesigned the covers of classic novels such as The Secret Garden and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz so that the main characters are more representative of ethnic minorities. Now, the more cynically-minded among those less in tune with what people of color want might see this promotion as a horrendously clumsy and lazy attempt at earning virtue points. Well, to that I say a resounding, ‘NO!’.

So I sat down to write the Great American Novel. And like with all improbable tasks, it’s helpful to map out potential issues to spare yourself from a career-ending catastrophe (and to provide excuses to wax poetic to your friends when you ultimately leave a manuscript incomplete). First, it’s helpful to take a cursory survey of the current literary landscape: writing about my time in China, Thailand, or Taiwan will launch the entire Berkeley creative writing class into chants of 'exoticism' and cause a Slate writer to prematurely return from a gulag LARPing weekend to pen a 1,200-word thinkpiece on literature as colonialism. Reading the room, I’m going to stay close to home.

My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide has caused a stir in Bosnia-Herzegovina and especially among the Bosnian community in the United States. Jessica Stern, who has previously written on the psychology of terrorists, attempts to get inside the mind of convicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, who has been convicted of orchestrating the genocide of Bosnian Muslims during the Yugoslavian wars (1991-2001). The recent excerpt in the New York Times — an excerpt which Stern, bizarrely, has disavowed — turns out to be representative of not only Stern’s methodology in interviewing Karadzic, but also the seductive spell under which she has fallen.

When I was four, I fell in love for the first time. The object of my affections was Jemima the rag-doll from preschool. That was a trial run. I was seven or eight when I got my first serious crush. She was an older woman: red-haired, wholesome, adventurous and intelligent. She was 16. She was always 16. Her name was Nancy. My love for her — like the young Julian Barnes’s love for an older woman — did a great deal to shape my life.The Nancy Drew mysteries (I didn’t know, then, that ‘mystery’ is what Americans call a detective story) were the first series of books to which I became completely addicted.

Flatiron Books has canceled the promotional tour for Jeanine Cummins’s new novel American Dirt due to ‘safety concerns’. Cummins’s novel, which follows a Mexican mother and her young son as they flee cartel violence and seek asylum in the United States, is intended to spur readers’ sympathy at a time when Americans are increasingly indifferent to the plight of refugees. Instead she is the target of rancor and her book the target of censorship.‘I’ve never in my life seen this kind of public flogging,’ said novelist Ann Patchett, defending Cummins even as other writers signed an open letter asking Oprah Winfrey to rescind her endorsement.The outrage is following a familiar script.