Books and Arts

"When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.” The final installment of Deborah Levy’s “Living” biographies, Real Estate, begins with this quote from the artist Georgia O’Keefe. It would be neat — oh, so neat! — for me to remark that if her memoirs were each a single flower — the world of the writer unfurling between its papery leaves — her latest book, The Position of Spoons, is a bouquet: a collection of variously published and unpublished letters, essays, short stories and poems spanning her entire life as a writer. But The Position of Spoons is not neat. Instead, reading it feels rather like rummaging through Levy’s desk.

William Shakespeare’s tragedies stand apart. Their impact is profound and lasting, in cultural, artistic, emotional and psychological terms. Who could forget the ghost’s first appearance in Hamlet, or Lear bearing the dead Cordelia? No other dramatist has achieved what Shakespeare did: in subject matter, emotional heft, innovative usage of source material, character development and startling deployment of language Shakespeare is (and there is no other word for it) extraordinary. He surpasses both his predecessors (sorry, Thomas Kyd!) and those that came after him. He built on the foundations the classical playwrights established, and then, almost casually, bettered them, too.

Long before the #MeToo movement shattered the careers and reputations of people like Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey; long before Jeffrey Epstein and R. Kelly were locked up for committing heinous sex crimes; and long before we’d become familiar with names like Monica Lewinsky and Virginia Roberts Giuffre, there were the Kennedys. In very basic terms, that’s the premise of Maureen Callahan’s book Ask Not — a title that riffs on JFK’s inaugural address — which salaciously chronicles how men from three generations of one of America’s most exalted families spent their lives perpetrating violent misogyny and psychological abuse without suffering so much as a polite slap on the wrist.

The books that most vividly and expansively illustrate the human experience are not the ones that grapple with life’s most romantic or fantastical tribulations. Charles Baxter’s latest work is splendid proof of this abiding literary fact. Baxter, a Minnesotan who is author of a multitude of novels and short story collections, returns with Blood Test, a book that delves into some quotidian yet disconcerting aspects of modern American life. He is well-known for 2000’s The Feast of Love, which garnered a National Book Award nomination, and 2020’s The Sun Collective, among others; his new offering continues his tradition of blending the mundane with the extraordinary.

Will Self’s recent, exceptional fictional trilogy, comprising Umbrella, Shark and Phone, displays a deep preoccupation with the ways that time, memory, family, psychosis and history interact. The novels are complex, multigenerational narratives, composed in a late modernist style as engaging as it is experimental. Formal playfulness, with the prose switching between its characters’ consciousnesses, sometimes even midsentence, is married to solidly satisfying plots. Having already excavated his own life in a memoir, Will, Self has now turned to his mother in a novel, Elaine. Self has written about Elaine Rosenbloom before (in the short story “North London Book of the Dead”); she also appears as the narrator, Lily Bloom, in How the Dead Live.

In 1961, the folk guitarist Barry Kornfeld moved back to Manhattan after spending a year in Boston. The Greenwich Village folk musicians he called friends, who before his trip to Boston had been enduring a hand-to-mouth existence, were now making a living playing their music in clubs along MacDougal Street — not necessarily “a good living,” Kornfeld noted, but certainly enough to get by. Kornfeld spotted another difference, too. Audiences at clubs weren’t merely clapping; they were snapping their fingers in appreciation, which felt like the hippest thing ever. Rolling Stone writer David Browne’s latest book, chronicling the history of Greenwich Village music, pivots around 1961.