Books

Patrick Ryan’s second novel is a small-town family saga that spans three generations, four wars, 11 presidents and many a watershed moment along the way. Ryan understands that big stories are made of small moments, not the other way around, and Buckeye is a fine illustration of how drawing-room tensions can fester and become matters of historical significance. In 1945, very few young men can be seen walking the streets of Bonhomie, Ohio. Cal Jenkins, a hardware store clerk with one leg shorter than the other, is one of them. The superheroes in the comic books he reads are versions of himself, but for the limp. Cal is married to Becky, whose occasional séances with her childhood friend Janice he initially brushes off as an innocuous, if slightly odd, pastime.

Noel Parmentel’s quote, “The right wing was fun back then,” is one of the takeaways from Daniel J. Flynn’s new book The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. Fun? The progenitors of post-World War Two American conservatism were, as portrayed here, a high-spirited lot. They were also intemperate, combative, self-destructive, often brilliant, not infrequently loony – and always deeply interesting. One could apply those qualities to the subject of the book, a character who looms large in the minds of intellectual conservatives and hardly anywhere else. Frank Meyer is not a household name like William F. Buckley Jr.

The 20th-century French writer Albert Camus remains a living author, a permanent contemporary, in a way that the far more dogmatic and ideological Jean-Paul Sartre does not. The latter provided a caricature of “existentialism,” nihilism dressed up as absolute freedom, beholden to no limits and no enduring truths. In contrast, the author of The Stranger and The Plague rejected Sartre’s facile nihilism, as well as his repellant accommodation with murderous messianism, typically conveyed in fashionable leftist nostrums. The more hopeful side of Camus comes through in his recently re-released Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World.

The arc of Gustav Mahler’s career was staggering. Born in 1860 to a poor Jewish family in Bohemia, through tenacity and talent he climbed to dizzying heights, nabbing the conductorship of the Vienna Hofoper, New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. He became a celebrity, hounded by paparazzi as he zipped back and forth across the Atlantic by steamer, a forerunner of today’s globetrotting conductors with their NetJet commutes.  Yet Mahler was plagued throughout his life by nagging existential fears, serious illness and marital strife. He poured this angst into his composing. “Why have you lived?” Mahler wrote in a letter to a friend. “Why have you suffered? Is it all some huge, awful joke?

I don’t think anyone has ever come up with a word to describe an authorized author. It’s not quite a tautology. The writer, who has been invited to write a novel continuing the body of work of another, might, possibly, be an example of literary parthenogenesis. Or, more pejoratively, karaoke. Who knows? But either way, it’s a growth industry. You will have seen the new authorized James Bond novels, the recently crafted Miss Marple and George Smiley outings that have appeared on the bookstore shelves over the past few years to some fanfare – despite the fact that those characters’ creators are very much pushing up the daisies.

To speak of Mark Twain is to speak of the American psyche laid bare: forever restless, with an insatiable appetite for reinvention and biting commentary. Twain was not just a novelist or humorist: he was, in many respects, the nation’s most accurate mirror. He wrote the truth and then laughed at it. He carved his stories out of riverbanks and war zones, courtrooms and campfires. In his storytelling, Twain blurred the lines between truth and falsehoods, rage and laughter, freedom and fate. He gave us some of the greatest figures in American fiction. But Twain (1835-1910) was a creation more vivid, more volatile and more enduring than any character he put on the page. The “father of American literature,” as William Faulkner called him, didn’t hide behind his fiction.

Wonks are a useful sort to have around; no governing class should be without them. A wonk is someone who makes technical improvements to the existing order of things while remaining obedient to its premises. No social order can run entirely on its own propaganda. There does, somewhere, need to be some group of sober and dutiful people applying themselves to secular problems. For 21st-century America, this has been the “juicebox mafia,” a group of liberal bloggers who came of age in the early 2000s. Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas and Noah Smith were self-conscious wonks – the first, indeed, to treat wonkery as a personal credo. They called their articles “explainers” rather than op-eds.

In the middle of the 18th century, on the north side of the Palais Royal gardens in Paris, there stood a magnificent chestnut tree called the Tree of Cracow. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 2000, Robert Darnton explained that the name Cracow probably derived from the heated debates that took place in Paris during the War of the Polish Succession, but also from the French verb craquer: to tell dubious stories. News-mongers or nouvellistes de bouche, agents for foreign diplomats and curious members of the public gathered round the tree, which was at the heart of Paris’s news network, a nerve center for transmitting information, gossip and rumors.