Anxiety

In this clever, moving mosaic of a book, Sara Baume tells us she originally wanted to be an art critic and that she wrote exhibition catalogue copy. It has served her well, as Opening Night is an evolved form of that genre – including 39 excellently reproduced images of paintings by the subject, and one extra – but it is also a form of memoir. By that I do not mean ‘life writing’ or ‘autofiction’, as it is a work of remembering and memorialising, even if that involves recording the gaps and lapses. The lacunae operate like an undercoat: the occluded thing that changes how you see. Just before the pandemic, Baume states in the opening sentence: ‘I met Mollie’s paintings before I met Mollie.

Japanophiles, look away now. A country renowned for inspiring fascination, warm feelings and not a little envy in its rapidly rising numbers of visitors – from crime-free streets to clean and plentiful public toilets – is in the grip of problems deeper and darker than you might imagine. The classic Japan itinerary reveals little of those problems. You’ll enjoy hyper-modern Tokyo with its fabulous restaurants, flawless transport and non-stop shopping and entertainment. You’ll jostle tourists and schoolchildren for the perfect view of the Golden Temple in Kyoto without losing your enthusiasm for Japan’s ‘eternal city’. Then you’ll fly home with pretty much only good things to say about Japan and the Japanese.

It’s impossible not to love Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, the whip-smart Jewish-Korean- American child narrator of Vera, or Faith, Gary Shteyngart’s sixth novel, which is a masterclass in the author’s sardonicism, set in a frighteningly realistic near future. School is awful and Vera’s world is on the brink of imploding because ‘Daddy and Anne Mom’, her stepmother, aren’t getting on, what with Igor’s evening ‘mar-tiny’ habit and crumpling status as a ‘leftist intellectual’. The wider American world is in similar turmoil, with an escalating campaign for the Five-Three amendment. This calls for ‘exceptional Americans’ who can trace their roots to before the Revolutionary War to get added voting weight, heightening tensions.

Alice Mah didn’t enjoy finding her roots. Even though ‘ancestor tourism’ is increasingly popular among westernised descendants of Chinese émigrés like her, she felt a nameless sort of dread when visiting the village in the Cantonese county of Taishan where her great-grandfather came from. It didn’t help that she’d just attended the morbid Qingming festival, when the Chinese remember their dead by sweeping their tombs. Mah’s memoir opens here, and we nervously anticipate the tragedy or horror that will surely strike – and are left waiting. Other than the pushiness of Taishanese cousins, who demand ‘red pockets’ (a traditional way of gifting money in small red envelopes) and donations for the village from their richer compatriots, the trip seems uneventful.

What’s not to like about a world in which youths are involved in fewer car accidents, drink less and wrestle with fewer unplanned pregnancies? Well, think about it. Those kids might not be wiser; they might simply be afraid of everything. And what has got them so afraid? A little glass rectangle, ‘a portal in their pockets’, that entices them into a world that’s ‘exciting, addictive, unstable and... unsuitable for children’. So far, so paranoid – and there’s a delicious tang of the documentary maker Adam Curtis about the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s extraordinarily outspoken and well-evidenced diatribe against the creators of smartphone culture.

We are in the midst of a ‘psychedelic renaissance’. Not since the 1950s and early 1960s has there been so much interest in researching the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. The FDA approved a ketamine derivative for medicinal use in 2019, and has given both MDMA and psilocybin (the psycho-active ingredient in magic mushrooms) ‘breakthrough therapy’ status, putting the drugs on a fast track to approval in the US, with the UK likely to follow suit. Professor David Nutt is a neuropsycho-pharmacologist (say that three times fast) and head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College, London. He was the UK’s ‘drug tsar’ before getting sacked in 2009 for claiming that LSD and Ecstasy are less dangerous than cigarettes, alcohol or horseback riding.