Book review

When reading A.M. Homes’s fiction, you’re never quite sure what to expect. In 1996, she made waves with the publication of her “vile and perverted” novel The End of Alice: a none-too-edifying tale narrated from the perspective of an imprisoned pedophile and child-killer, who spends the book in correspondence with a nineteen-year-old girl about how to seduce a twelve-year-old boy. In a rare instance in which the UK was more prudish than the United States, a large chain of British booksellers refused to stock the work. More recently, her 2012 novel May We Be Forgiven — for which she won the 2013 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction — features a fatal car accident, a psychiatric hospital, an extramarital affair and a homicide. And that’s all within the first chapter.

One of the few issues about which the American left and right agree is that higher education is, as Orwell would say, in a bad way. But even in that source of agreement lurk countless points of dispute, regarding the sources of dysfunction (corporate greed, grade inflation, libezoomers?) and possible solutions (ending tenure, forgiving debt, creating safe spaces?). In After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — and How to Fix It, Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, argues that the cause of the higher-education crisis is conceptual: we see higher education as a personal privilege rather than a public good, something to be earned rather than a right that is owed.

You think life is complicated enough now? Try factoring in the arguments and counter-arguments that adorn — or something like it — the drive to define conservative instinct and policy. I mean, once upon a time, a true conservative subscribed to National Review and wore an “AuH2O in 64” lapel pin to tout the presidential aptitudes of Senator Barry Goldwater. (Pssst: I did both.) Ah, well. Today, as everyone presumably knows, we have libertarian conservatives; we have common-good conservatives; we have constitutional conservatives; we have integralist conservatives — all generally identified with the Republican Party. Amid this mélange of the outspoken, as well as the agreeably entertaining, the law professor Francis H.

When Thomas de Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821, he could not possibly have guessed what he would set in motion. Over two hundred years later, the addiction memoir looks different: less subversive, more sentimental, undeniably more commercial. Since the advent of Alcoholics Anonymous in Akron, Ohio, in 1935, the formula of the recovery memoir now yokes the moral to the medical: alcoholism may be a moral disorder, but it is underwritten by a chemical condition marked by incessant craving — in recovery parlance, an “allergy,” a state of “dis-ease.” For Matt Rowland Hill, the two are inextricably combined. Original Sins is the debut memoir from a writer whose two great loves, “Jesus and heroin,” never quite slip out of one another’s grasp.

First disclosure: I do not appear in this book. I say that only because — second disclosure — I consider myself a YIMBY, and I am familiar, at least online, with many of the characters and figures quoted or interviewed. However, I learned a lot about this loose movement and found it fascinating to read a book on a phenomenon that I would have trouble viewing with a detached, scholarly distance. Yes to the City, by the cultural sociologist and urban policy scholar Max Holleran, must have been a difficult book to write, not least because YIMBY (“Yes in my backyard”) is as much a rallying cry or a slogan as it is a movement, let alone an organization. The YIMBY nemesis, NIMBY (“Not in my backyard”), is equally amorphous.

No one ever expects an author simply to minuet her way into a book deal and, if lucky — merely “talented” doesn’t usually do the trick — into commercial success. But the publishing jukes and vaults that have earned Helen DeWitt the title of “America’s Great Unlucky Novelist” rather resemble the vertiginous motions of a mazurka on pogo sticks. Disagreements with her editors led DeWitt to attempt suicide twice. Her first novel, The Last Samurai, remained out of print for eleven years after its publisher went bankrupt. Before DeWitt was able to publish her second novel, Lightning Rod, another ten years lapsed.