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Thursday

Elisa Segrave

Fish in troubled waters

‘Help!’ I thought, when I read the Author’s Note. ‘It’s about salmon, and I hate fishing.’ But by the first page I was hooked. Adam Weymouth writes well. He is poetic, but also precise. His subject is the return of the ‘king’ salmon to their birthplace and final destination, the north ridge of McNeil Lake in Canada. These fish are many pounds of muscle, toned from years of swimming headlong into Pacific storms, and their flesh is as red as blood. They force against the Yukon’s current, shouldering their way upriver, setting their fins like sails. Eventually they will push thousands of miles into North America’s interior. They will reach mountain lakes; they will reach the clouds.

Patrick Skene-Catling

From New York to the New Hebrides

Publication of a debut novel is an experience comparable with the birth of a first child. Literary gestation is normally a longer process, and delivery of a book is more deeply fraught. Here is some evidence that the labour can be worthwhile. Asymmetry (Granta, £14.99) by Lisa Halliday, a young American now living in Milan, is a lopsided triptych of admirable erudition and stylishness — in effect, two novellas and a short story: a Manhattan romance, an Iraqi reminiscence of the devastation of Baghdad, and a BBC interview on Desert Island Discs. In the initial, most enjoyable episode, Alice, an assistant editor of a New York publishing house, would like to move to Europe to write.

Ferdinand Mount

Keeping Faith

It’s because it’s the land of the loner that the United States is so loved or loathed. Yet to me the most beguiling novels that have zipped across the Atlantic in the past half-century or so are mostly about groups, specifically groups on campus, usually a rather classy campus at that. Mary McCarthy’s Group were at Vassar; Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is set in an elite liberal arts college in Vermont. Even The Catcher in the Rye, though legendary as a portrait of moody adolescence, is also a brilliant picture of life at the sort of college Salinger himself went to. But no novelist I can think of has majored on the group portrait with quite such verve, wit and sympathy as Meg Wolitzer.

James Walton

Women on the warpath | 31 May 2018

In a 2013 interview with a Canadian newspaper, Rupert Thomson acknowledged the strange place he occupies in the literary world. ‘If I had a dollar,’ he mused, ‘for every time I’d heard someone say, “Why aren’t you more well known?...”’ Looking back on his reviews, you can certainly see what he means. For more than 30 years, virtually all his novels have been not only warmly acclaimed; they’ve also been greeted with the sadly inaccurate declaration that now, at last, he’s bound to achieve the wider fame he deserves. But, as Thomson also acknowledges, in the past decade those missing dollars have taken on a less metaphorical significance.

Dominic Green

Suits you, sir

The tailor’s art is a triumph of mind over schmatte. Not just in the physical cutting and stitching, but in the faith that style makes content. This, not the question of which way you dress, is the secret compact between tailor and client. ‘Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of clothes wisely and well, so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress,’ Carlyle wrote of the dandy in Sartor Resartus. Tommy Nutter was one of Tommy Carlyle’s dandies, a ‘clothes-wearing man’ and a ‘poet of the cloth’. From 1969 to 1976, Nutter bestrode the world of tailoring like a Narcissus. Though he could barely manage a backstitch, his designs rewrote the book on male style.

Sam Byers

Rough justice

Asked how he achieves the distinctive realism for which his novels and screenplays are famous, Richard Price, that sharp chronicler of the American underbelly, tends to cite Damon Runyon’s biographer Jimmy Breslin, who said that Runyon ‘did what all good journalists do — he hung out’. Set in the brutal confines of the Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, and, through flashback, in the equally unforgiving milieu of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, Rachel Kushner’s third, extraordinarily accomplished novel, The Mars Room, glows with the kind of authentic hyper-detail only a good deal of hanging out can capture. Whether she’s describing the ‘clammy fingers of fog...

Christopher Bray

Been there, done that

Lucky bastard. Such are the words that come constantly to mind while you’re reading Clancy Sigal’s two volumes of posthumously published autobiography. Blacklisted as a (self-confessedly lousy) actor for refusing to name names in the McCarthy era, working as the agent for the likes of Peter Lorre, Rod Steiger and — sigh — Barbara Stanwyck in 1950s Hollywood and freelancing on Fleet Street in countercultural London (including reviewing films for The Spectator), Sigal was at the centre of every piece of action going. Should Black Sunset and The London Lover ever be gathered into a single volume (perhaps taking Sigal’s earlier memoir, Going Away, along for the ride), ‘Been there, done that’ would make a good catch-all title.

Thursday

Oliver Balch

Romancing the stone wall

We all tell stories about ourselves, every one of us. ‘I’m a useless cook.’ ‘Spiders don’t scare me.’ Not all these stories are true, but then self-perception has never held much truck with truth. Our stories are our own,to hold, repeat and believe in. But what if your story isn’t your own? What if you start out on life’s journey and discover that your story is, in fact, someone else’s? This deeply unsettling scenario provides the driving narrative to this confessional, heartfelt, if somewhat scatty memoir. Whitney Brown was, as we’re frequently reminded, an A-star student, a valedictorian. Growing up in small-town South Carolina, she was the kid deemed ‘most likely to succeed’. But at what? There’s the rub.

Julie Mcdowall

Fingers on the nuclear button

In 1983, Soviet spies skulked in our midnight streets to check the lights were out. The Kremlin, convinced the West was planning nuclear war, launched Project RYAN, whereby agents watched for signs of impending attack. One was that lights would burn all night in government buildings, as fiendish mandarins drew up the war plans. It didn’t occur to them that lights might indicate nothing more than cleaners on a late shift. Soviet paranoia was such that they saw menace everywhere, and agents, eager to please Moscow, reinforced this fear. ‘The more alarming the reports, the more the agents were congratulated for their diligence.’ RYAN became self-fulfilling.

Stephen Daisley

The tough guy of Israeli politics

Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the most unloved and unlovable figures in Israeli politics, a solid finish in a competitive field. Yet when it comes to polling day, his Likud party watches ‘Bibi’ pull off another win. Many consider him venal, duplicitous, arrogant, vain and loutish. His opponents have even worse things to say. Israeli elections were once decided on the question of socialism vs. capitalism, and later peace vs. security. Today Israelis are divided over whether Netanyahu is a bastard or a necessary bastard. Anshel Pfeffer belongs to the former camp. His new biography, Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, is a forensic character study of Israel’s first native-born prime minister and of the Israel he has birthed across 12 years in power.

Clinton Heylin

Wells of silence

Someone has gone to a lot of trouble choosing the jacket cover of Robert Hilburn’s authorised biography of Paul Simon (reproduced right). It is both flattering and enigmatic, which is entirely appropriate, given its contents. Half of Simon’s features are lost in a shadow cast across his face — again, entirely appropriate, as Simon wrestled with Hilburn for more than two years, determined to ensure his true self remain partly or wholly in the shadows. One can’t help wondering why thesinger-songwriter even agreed to sit for what the jacket copy assures us was 100 hours of interviews; or, indeed, what happened to the other 99.

Michael Bywater

The stuff of life

‘I didn’t realise we were carbon,’ said a friend to whom I mentioned this book. She was the first of several. It’s odd to think of clever and educated people not knowing that we are made of such stuff. But The Many Lives of Carbon is an odd book to come to grips with. Its title promises plain speaking about carbon, which the book then delivers. Nothing to lose sleep over. Yet one does. This is partly because it mines a rich seam. I fell asleep thinking about the carboniferous period, and dreamt I was one of the seven dwarfs, trapped underground with a pickaxe and a vile hod, and woke myself up with a sepulchral groan of horror, which woke the dog, and there was nothing for it but to go downstairs and put the kettle on.

Suzi Feay

All their wits about them

From Aphra Behn to Virginia Woolf, women who make a living by their pens have frequently felt the need to announce their singularity; to be, as Mary Wollstonecraft announced, ‘the first of a new genus’. Each of the women in Michelle Dean’s survey of mostly American essayists, reviewers and novelists had to defend her right to debate, critique and observe. The lives of Sontag, Arendt, Parker, West, Didion, Ephron and others are woven into a thick braid running the length of the 20th century and into ours. It’s not quite a group biography, but more a study of how their lives and work dovetailed with each other and with the major political and cultural movements of the era.

Jeff Noon

The murderous past

How can you defend a man you hate? John Fairfax, in his Blind Defence (Little Brown, £16.99), explores this dilemma. Diane Heybridge is found dead in her London flat. She was poor, working-class, without much of a future to look forward to. But did she take her own life, or was she murdered by her callous, jilted partner, Brent Stainsby? Into the fray steps William Benson, an ex-con, a murderer himself, now turned maverick barrister, a person the press and the public love to hate. With his legal partner Tess de Vere, he takes on Stainsby’s case and finds himself defending a man that nobody likes, and that Benson himself despises. As the true and hidden nature of the victim’s life is uncovered, the moral fog turns even murkier.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Trigger-happy madcap

This is a biography that begins with a bang, swiftly followed by puddles of blood, shrieks of ‘Murder!’ and a chase through the foggy streets of Victorian London. On 8 December 1854, a French émigré was walking through Fitzrovia, close to the heart of radical London, having recently left a pistol-shooting range in Westminster. He had a companion: a mysterious woman with a letter in her pocket and unknown intentions in her heart. It was a cold, wet night. At just past eight o’clock, they arrived at 73 Warren Street, a narrow town house near Tottenham Court Road, where George Moore (a soda water manufacturer who had employed the émigré as an engineer) lived, and were shown into the plush parlour to wait for him.

Thursday

Mike Jackson

A brave, bold failure

In the high summer of 1944 the Allies achieved their major victory in Normandy with the closing of the German pocket centred on Falaise. By the end of August, Paris had been liberated, and the Wehrmacht was apparently in full flight; Brussels fell to the Allies in early September. For many, the end of the war in Europe was in sight — perhaps by Christmas that year. But Allied success brought serious logistical problems: supplies were still having to be landed on the Normandy beaches and transported forward along increasingly distant lines of communication.

A.N. Wilson

Prejudice and Popery

Once won, rights and freedoms are taken for granted. We all find it difficult to imagine life before the Married Women’s Property Act, when everything belonging to a wife — goods, chattels, children — automatically became the sole property of her husband. Those born since the 1960s can’t really envisage what it was like for practising homosexuals in those days. By a similar token, the mind can scarcely take in the fact that in Penal times, Catholics could not buy or sell land; or that it was an imprisonable offence for Catholics to run a school. It was a legal offence to dress as a monk or a nun out of doors.

John R. MacArthur

Analysing the dream

The figure of Donald Trump looms over Sarah Churchwell’s new history of American national identity, which highlights the ugliest features of the country’s ingrained traditions of intolerance and bigotry. But it is the current president’s father, Fred, who first leaps off the page in a startling cameo appearance. On Memorial Day 1927, as Churchwell recounts, the white supremacist, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan organised a march in New York City’s borough of Queens, home to the German-American Trump family, whose patriarch, Friedrich Trump, had emigrated to the United States in 1885.

Alastair Smart

How ever did they find time to paint?

Those with long enough memories may remember Desmond Morris as the presenter of the hit ITV children’s programme of Zoo Time in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Or perhaps as the author of the 1968 bestseller The Naked Ape, in which he argued that, beneath our sophisticated veneer, humans are nothing more than primates. Now aged 90, he has written an uproariously funny book on the ostensibly unlikely subject of the Surrealists. I say ‘ostensibly’ because, before becoming a successful zoologist, Morris was actually a painter and even had a joint exhibition in London with Joan Miró. In The Lives of the Surrealists he takes on the role of a latter-day Vasari, penning mini-biographies of 32 artists who were associated with Surrealism.

Thursday

Roland Elliott Brown

An accident waiting to happen

In the early days of the atomic age, Soviet students debated whether it was nobler to become a physicist or a poet. Some of them seem to have been genuinely torn, and one of those may well have been Anatolii Diatlov, who was the deputy chief engineer at Chernobyl during the late-night turbine test that led to the 1986 explosion. Such was Diatlov’s reverence for verse that he described the great blasts of steam, hot water and machine oil, along with the violent crackling and popping of the inundated electrical system, as ‘a picture worthy of the pen of the great Dante’. The disaster, as Serhii Plokhy shows in his haunting new history, left Ukrainians grasping for similes and allegories. One of Diatlov’s colleagues reached for ‘Hiroshima’.