American literature

Back in the winter of 1980, a young Martin Amis found himself on the London set of Miloš Forman’s movie Ragtime. The plan was to inspect what Norman Mailer, whom Amis was profiling for the Observer newspaper, was doing with the part of Stanford White, the real-life architect murdered by the deranged husband of New York chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit. Impressed by the lavish million-dollar backdrop, Amis looked on as the nattily dressed and neatly bewigged author of The Executioner’s Song, accompanied by his sixth wife, Norris, made his way into a reconstruction of Madison Square Garden.

Whisper it, very quietly, but the now 87-year-old author Thomas Pynchon is having something of a moment in 2025. Not only has his 1990 novel Vineland supposedly served as the loose inspiration for the eagerly awaited new Paul Thomas Anderson-Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration One Battle After Another, but the near-impossible has been announced: Pynchon will publish a new novel, entitled Shadow Ticket, around the time of the movie’s release. It will be his first book in more than a decade, his ninth novel and his third consecutive noir-influenced story.

When the journalist Steve Paul began his biography of the writer Evan S. Connell, a young librarian was helping him access research material. She happened across a photograph, and remarked, “What a suave-looking dude.” Connell had movie-star good looks. Of his eight novels, two are now packaged as classics of American literature. This on top of a biography of Goya; a 2009 Man Booker International nomination for lifetime achievement; and a bestselling history of a battle in the Great Sioux War of 1876. Acolytes recommend his greatest book, Mrs. Bridge, with the confident smile that looks forward to welcoming another member to the exclusive band of Connellites.

A recent controversy rocked the literary world when coverage of author Blake Butler’s memoir, Molly, about his late wife, notable poet Molly Brodak, hit tabloids and spun for the worst. The coverage sparked debate over the ethics of writing about relationships, as online attackers made accusations that the widower weaponized Brodak’s private life and exploited her death for fame or revenge.   Claims gained ground that it was a “shameless cash grab,” “literary revenge porn,” or that it shouldn’t have been published due to privacy concerns, since the memoir reveals Butler’s discovery of his late wife’s affairs after her passing.

What makes a novel funny? As well as being too enormous a question to tackle properly here, such an enterprise would, I suspect, require so clinical an approach to reading comic fiction as to remove entirely any possible joy or amusement. As the old saying goes, deconstructing a joke is like dissecting a frog: nobody laughs, and the frog dies. However, the question came to me again recently, as I reread John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. I howled with laughter from the initial farcical scene outside a department store, through Ignatius J.

All is not well at the literary journal Hobart Pulp, Cockburn has learned — and it's all down to one of our mischievous Spectator contributors. His words have caused violence, apparently, as nearly the entire staff of the journal have resigned in protest. Last month, Alex Perez sat down with Hobart Pulp's top editor, Elizabeth Ellen, to discuss the state of the literary and publishing scene — ranging from MFAs to woke writers to how he got his start in writing. Perez, a Latino writer who graduated from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, had some choice words about the cowardice of writers and editors today. The interview, originally posted to the Hobart Pulp website last month, didn't make much of a stir until this week, when its editors and contributors began to take notice.

I have always thought “Call me Ishmael” to be a rather camp introduction to a novel. Given the line’s conspiratorial intimacy, I have long imagined it whispered by a drag queen in a dive bar at 3 a.m. This, however, is the fault of my own unseriousness. The resonance of the name Ishmael — Abraham’s illegitimate son by Hagar who is destined to wander the desert — remains the opening example of one of the clearest, cleverest and most consistent of themes in Herman Melville’s magnum opus Moby-Dick, namely, the quest for God. Religion runs through Moby-Dick. We might almost say that the Bible haunts it. There are the names, mostly of Biblical characters, and even the direct invocation of prophets: Ezekiel, Elijah and, of course, the ur-whale wrestler, Jonah.

By her own account, Eudora Welty had an idyllic childhood. Born in 1909 on Congress Street, two blocks from the state capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, Welty spent her early years playing with friends from school, reading voraciously and riding her bicycle to the local store to pick up some flour or eggs for her mother and, of course, a treat for herself. Her father, who was devoted to his wife and children, advanced from a cashier to vice president at Lamar Life Insurance before his daughter had finished high school. He had, as Welty put it, a love for “all instruments that would instruct and fascinate,” including a toy train set, a telescope and a folding Kodak, with which he would teach the young Eudora the pleasures of photography.

In 1920 Warren G. Harding was elected president of the United States, after campaigning on a promise to the American electorate to return the country to what he called “normalcy.” Exactly one hundred years later, Joe Biden assumed the same office having offered the same thing, in different language. In July 1922 Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt, a bestselling novel about a normal middle-class American businessman living in a normal small-sized Midwestern city: the quintessential personification of “normalcy.” Around the middle of the same decade, H.L. Mencken, a good (if necessarily patient) friend of Lewis’s, predicted that America would “blow up” in a hundred years. 2022 is Babbitt’s centennial year.

I first encountered P.J. O’Rourke’s writings as a teenager in a copy of Modern Manners my father encouraged me to buy while we were browsing the secondhand offerings of an offbeat little bookstore (looking back, I can’t imagine who in their right mind would part with such a book). “You should get that, he’s funny,” dad said. That evening, I read some G-rated excerpts to my traditionalist parents, who laughed out loud. For me, it was love at first quip. I finished the rest of Modern Manners in one sitting, completely taken by a style of writing I found blended the best qualities of a person. It was smart, perceptive, clever, sensitive and, of course, good-humored. Reading P.J. O’Rourke inspired me to want to write in a way that informs and entertains.