Books and Arts

Monday

February 27, 2023

Why does a new Tolkien biography remain elusive?

Last year’s big-budget, much talked-about television series, Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, had a somewhat unlikely figure as its presiding genius. For one thing, he has been dead half a century this year, and for another, he was a mild-mannered Oxford don with a particular scholarly interest in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature. His reputation rests on four novels published during his lifetime, which have not only been bestsellers since their publications in 1937, 1954 and 1955, but continue to attract millions of readers, who are unusually ardent in their appreciation.

Art Tavana

Vince McMahon: the modern-day P.T. Barnum who changed America

Book reviews should be like Car & Driver: flip over the page to a concrete, plainly written piece — no writerly words or literary drivel — by someone who’s test-driven the book and punched up a nuts-and-bolts guide. The reader should get a look under the hood: polished steel and chrome cylinders. Does it hum? Vroom, we’re off the races. I say this because I’m reporting on a prototype I’m afraid of driving: an advance reader’s edition, uncorrected, not for sale or quotation. I can’t rev this baby for you, or even kick the tires, but here goes.

Philip Womack

Tom Crewe’s The New Life is sophisticated, intelligent and gripping

Tom Crewe’s highly accomplished debut novel, The New Life, concerns the suppression of sexual feelings, and how utopian visions can falter when they come up against cold hard reality. It begins with John Addington (closely, though not entirely, based on the nineteenth-century man of letters John Addington Symonds), fantasizing about a homosexual encounter in a London underground train. The carriage is crammed: a man is pressing his buttocks into John’s crotch; John’s excitement cannot be concealed; soon they are in the throes of passion, despite the crowds around them. It’s a claustrophobic, tense, almost nightmarish scene, executed with minute attention to detail.

Anmol Irfan

The enigmatic rise of Colleen Hoover

The world’s bestselling author is a forty-three-year-old mom you probably haven’t heard of. In fact, unless you’re an extremely online fiction reader between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, Hoover is likely to be a bit of an unknown quantity. It’s hard to see how she can stay that way: with 1.1 million followers on TikTok — her fans call themselves her CoHort — Hoover is the platform’s most popular author. As a result of her #BookTok fame, “CoHo” is now the second most followed author on Goodreads; while most authors have a single book on the bestseller list, Hoover dominates with multiple books at a time. In late January this year, her books held three of the top five spots on the New York Times bestseller list.

Matt Purple

The magnetism of His Dark Materials

When I was in middle school back in the 1990s, there were two sets of books every boy seemed to have in his backpack. One was the Redwall series, Brian Jacques’s swashbuckling tales of heroic mice and tyrannical wildcats. The other was the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. It’s no coincidence, I think, that both Jacques and Pullman are British. What made these books intriguing, beyond their carefully wound plots, was that they were marketed to children yet addressed subject matter that was very much adult. In Redwall, it was the brutal violence. His Dark Materials had some of that too (in the first chapter of the first book, we witness an attempted killing; in the first chapter of the second book, we witness an accidental fatality).

William Newton

Greg Lansky: the artist with a scandalous past

St. Paul points out that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Despite that inclusive “all,” human nature inclines toward exclusion of the “other,” which is a very difficult thing for many of us to overcome — me included. Enter Greg Lansky, pornographic-film producer. Perhaps no one in recent memory has made a greater profit from the highly lucrative commerce paradoxically known as “adult entertainment” than Parisian-born entrepreneur Lansky. Within the span of about fifteen years, he went from dropping out of school and having few realistic prospects to making fortunes from adult media, partying with celebrities and receiving glowing profiles in magazines such as Forbes, GQ and Rolling Stone.

Mitchell Jackson

Mary Blair, doyenne of Disneyland

On a cold day at Disneyland, I walk through sugarplum-scented air, past a midcentury-modern poster for Alice in Wonderland, and beneath a plaque that reads, “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.” Walt Disney — the controversial impresario of twentieth-century animation and escapism, not the corporation that bears his name — intended his magic kingdom as an escape, a real-life never-never land devoid of the politics and troubles of the everyday. But on this visit to the park, I encounter the here and now around every corner. Passersby notice that an empowered female pirate has replaced the bride-auction scene in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. (“Did anyone really believe pirates were role models?” one visitor asks.

Robert S. Erickson

& Juliet and Titanique: two newly minted cult classics

Fears that the new pop-parody musical & Juliet would be a vehicle for steamrolling Shakespeare are understandable but unfounded. It’s true that, on Broadway as in the rest of the arts, holding dead white males up for flagellation is now almost a cherished ritual — a recent example being last season’s Six, a glitzy feminist paean danced on the grave of Henry VIII. There’s a healthy dose of girl power in & Juliet, too, and I don’t doubt that a few heedless theatergoers came with tomatoes in hand, hoping to find the Bard pilloried. Let me tell you a secret: the theater world still adores Shakespeare, even in 2023. To renounce him is to swear off your mother’s milk.

Wednesday

January 25, 2023

David J. Garrow

Hoover damned

When J. Edgar Hoover died in May 1972 at seventy-seven, he had been director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for forty-eight years, ever since progressive attorney general Harlan Fiske Stone had promoted the then-obscure twenty-nine-year-old Justice Department bureaucrat in 1924. With fewer than 400 agents, limited responsibilities, and a reputation badly tarnished under a corrupt previous attorney general, what was then called the Bureau of Investigation offered modest prospects. Still, the new boss set out to clean house, institute stringent hiring standards and impose a culture of science-based crime-fighting on his federal agents. One new hire in 1928 was Clyde A.

Alexander Larman

The art of the royal memoir

By the time you read this piece, Prince Harry’s autobiography Spare will have been published in the United States. The question of whether it’s any good will be decided swiftly by the newspaper and online literary critics, but we in the monthly magazine trade have, alas, been denied the opportunity to see it before our publication deadlines. Under normal circumstances, this would bode very badly indeed. As with films that are not screened for critics beforehand — “because we want the audience to discover the magic for themselves” — books that have very tight publication schedules and are embargoed to the hilt are usually seen as flops-in-prospect.

Amanda Craig

From Russia with love

Most readers, myself included, are sick of “fan fiction,” depending as it does on hijacking classic literature for its own feebler energies, but Vesna Goldsworthy’s Iron Curtain is a shining exception. Having successfully recast The Great Gatsby as the exploits of a Russian oligarch in twenty-first century London (Gorsky), and imagined the afterlife of Anna Karenina’s son in postwar Britain (Monsieur Ka), her latest novel has as its model something far more sinister. Its narrator, Milena Urbanska, is the daughter of “the second most powerful man” in an unnamed Soviet satellite country, and a creature of privilege, “the only fully convertible global currency,” as she remarks.

Philip Womack

Behind closed doors

Katy Hays’s involving, well-tuned debut novel takes its name from a real museum in New York, the Cloisters. Built by a Rockefeller, it resembles a medieval monastery and brims with glorious treasures. Ann, our provincial heroine (from Walla Walla, where she worked a menial job in order to fund college), would have preferred the Met, but when she’s serendipitously hired for a summer role, she finds herself swiftly pulled into the institution’s inner workings and the nefarious machinations of its well-heeled staff. The cutthroat nature of the museum is placed under the spotlight.

York Underwood

Bret Easton Ellis’s comeback is a bloody masterpiece

Bret Easton Ellis has a secret. It’s what happened to him and his friends in the fall of 1981 in his senior year at Buckley, a private high school in Sherman Oaks, California. It’s about a hippie cult and serial killer known as “The Trawler” and the disappearance of his friends. It’s about how all this is somehow tied to the arrival of a new student that year, Robert Mallory. It’s a true story. The Shards is Ellis’s seventh novel, published nearly thirteen years after his previous book, Imperial Bedrooms. He has tried to write this novel twice before, once when he was nineteen and again when he was forty-two. That second attempt led to an anxiety attack that had Ellis rushed to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai. At least, that’s the story.

Jack Sinclair

Quentin Tarantino’s iconoclastic obsessions

Quentin Tarantino’s inevitable first volume of film writing presents a challenge: how can an established artist, especially one this famous, pivot to criticism? No matter how insightful his opinions, it runs the risk of merely illuminating what he values as a filmmaker. To his credit, Cinema Speculation doesn’t pretend it’s not taking you through a highly personal journey of one man’s cinematic obsessions. The tone isn’t too far off from the hundreds of interviews he’s given for thirty years. References to his own films are common, and unlike serious critics, he can pepper his criticism with quotes from sources he can call at any time — from critics (Elvis Mitchell) to filmmakers (Walter Hill) to miscellaneous others (Robert Wuhl).

Anne Sebba

The struggle of the female musician

In July 2022, hundreds of elegant opera-goers gathered on the lawns of Glyndebourne Manor in Sussex to picnic in the interval of a rarely performed early twentieth century work, The Wreckers, by the suffragette composer Dame Ethel Smyth. This strikingly powerful piece of music, which tells the story of Cornish villagers who lure ships onto rocks in order to plunder them, was the first opera by a female composer to be staged at the prestigious British festival and was extremely well-received. The Times of London praised its “wild waves of passion.” Yet The Wreckers has had a difficult history.

Robert S. Erickson

The Some Like It Hot revival is cream-puff theater

The new Some Like It Hot on Broadway has bass player Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee), disguised among Big Sue’s Society Syncopators as “Daphne” to hide from the Chicago mob, decide to embrace the drag lifestyle and elope with his elderly suitor Osgood (Kevin Del Aguila) by the show’s end. (The 1959 film closes with Jerry straining to extract himself from Osgood’s clutches.) Many theatergoers will not expect this update, setting up a bit of dramatic irony too delicious to be unintentional. What’s a drag show, after all, without a few surprises? To my knowledge, this irony has gone entirely uncapitalized by headline-writers across the nation. Some Like a Hot Dog! Speakeasy, Don’t Tell! Billy, but Wilder! Jack’s Lemon!

Sam Wasson

The death of the movie star

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were not, as the title of a recent documentary would have us believe, the last movie stars. Nor are movie stars — as Jennifer Aniston suggests in a November Variety profile — extinct. As long as there are big screens, stars will occur, perhaps only accidentally. The reality, though, is that the business may no longer need them. Before Hollywood figured out how to sell you a movie you didn’t want to see, way back in the old studio days when advertising a movie was as easy-breezy as sticking up a poster and few lobby cards at your local theater, you didn’t need to be sold a movie to take an interest. You just needed to be told it was coming. Because if it had a star you liked, you’d go. That’s what a star was: a means to sell you a ticket.

Mitchell Jackson

Playing God with Paramore

From the moment Hayley Williams founded Paramore with three Christian boys in Nashville, she was consumed by Biblical levels of conflict. Williams signed as a solo artist with Atlantic on the heels of Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.” Her male bandmates performed and recorded without a contract. To counteract the narrative that a major label had engineered Williams, Atlantic released Paramore’s 2005 debut album, All We Know Is Falling, through the “sub-label” Fueled by Ramen. Critics caught onto the ruse, with Gigwise writing, “The band are an A&R man’s fantasy.” But Williams connected with angsty teens partially because the critics seemed to be bullying her. The bullying continued when Paramore changed their lineup and released the 2007 sophomore album Riot!

James Panero

In Claude Monet’s postmodern garden

There are few topics that rankle the art critic more than “immersive exhibitions.” They must be second only to “nonfungible tokens,” whatever those are. I speak of the immersive spectacles where images of famous artwork are flashed on the walls and floors of a large white room in which you sit. Certainly, this should be outside the remit of my union card, I might think. Until now, if you were looking for some opinion on this-or-that out-of-copyright projection venue slash tourist trap, I would simply say not my job. Maybe go see the real thing. Then we can talk. And yet, with art on the walls, real or imagined, judgment always comes calling. Suddenly we seem to be immersed in immersion. It can be a challenge just to keep your head above the digital waters.

Adrian Brune

The shock and awe-inspiring art of Iraq

The road from Erbil consists of one large, tarmacked lane, no separation marks, no shoulder, despite seemingly never-ending ascents and descents and a barrage of trucks carrying huge oil tanks. As soon as the mountains of the Iranian border appear, the cars form a bottleneck into Sulaymaniyah, the “cultural capital of Kurdistan.” It leads to a maze of circular streets, where finding anything — let alone an old tobacco factory turned arts center — becomes a challenge, even for two journalists armed with Google Maps and a local fixer. Yet after some circling, a phone call, a bit of translating and the opening of two twelve-foot, light-beige metal gates, the artist Tara Abdulla appears, smoking a cigarette.