Book review

Very few of us could evade accusations of pretension if we quoted Faulkner in everyday conversation. The characters conjured up in Lorrie Moore’s fiction are granted an exception, though not always solely by virtue of their earnestness. In her novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, which traces a journey toward a final burial in the American South, allusion to As I Lay Dying is particularly apt. Moore has made a name for herself as one of America’s masters of the short story, with her inimitable style on display ever since her first work of fiction, “Raspberries,” was published in 1977. In this, her first novel for fourteen years, she once again wields her wordplay playfully and powerfully, striking a balance between levity and gravity.

Like those of his wartime ally Joseph Goebbels, the diaries of the Italian fascist foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903-44) have proved a mainstay of academic research into the frequently banal inner workings of the Axis dictatorships. Both men were entirely aware of their journals’ historical and commercial value. In 1937, Goebbels struck a lucrative deal with Max Amman, the Nazi Party publisher, for the release of his warped musings on race and politics twenty years after his death, which in the event came sooner than he might have imagined. Ciano in turn used his diaries to barter unsuccessfully for his life when arrested on charges of treason.

As a little boy, Luke Turner, like so many other little boys, was fascinated by World War Two. He used to spend hours carefully making Airfix models of warplanes, and his favorite haunt was the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon, a suburb of North London. Men at War, his second book, is an attempt to explore and explain both this interest and his own sexuality (he is bisexual, with a female partner), in response to what he sees as the dominant, jingoistic attitude propagated via general British cultural discourse. He claims that we do not see those who fought as individuals, but as clipped, heroic avatars, like Captain Sir Tom Moore, who raised millions of pounds for NHS charities during the lockdowns: dignified, silent, brave.

David Grann is one of a very select club of writers: those whose books of history are so diverting that they almost seem implausible. Their narrative constructions are so effective, the dialogue so apposite, that jaded readers might think everything has been made up or twisted to give the books life, in novelistic fashion. And yet — as with the books of Erik Larson — that’s not true at all. It’s all there in the notes: everything between quotation marks was actually said or written. It’s a remarkable skill. This is a hell of a story, and I use that word appropriately. Those who shipped out from Portsmouth on HMS Wager in 1740 — part of George Anson’s circumnavigation of the globe — struggled through hell.

Storm Swimmer, Ernest Hilbert’s fifth collection of poems and winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, is obsessed with bodies of water, especially the ocean. Even before the book begins, Hilbert declares this preoccupation through three sea-based epigraphs, running a wide gamut from Apollonius of Rhodes to Rachel Carson and Iris Murdoch. Over the forty-four formally various and adept poems that comprise this ninety-page, seven-section text, Hilbert engages repeatedly with different aspects of the oceanic to dazzling effect. Often he effects our encounter with the sea through the experiences of the swimmer, who almost always is a struggling figure. Sometimes — as in the case of the title poem — he must contend with the weather: “Without the sun the sea is tangled steel.

Alice Winn’s beautifully written and engrossing debut, In Memoriam, comes hot on the heels of Tom Crewe’s debut The New Life, which followed the tortured relationship between two men at the turn of the century, and was loosely based on the life of the scholar John Addington Symonds. Winn has turned her impressively attuned eye to World War One, and two young men who fall in love at their public school (old money, military and aristocratic connections, tailcoats and buggery), before heading off to the front; the flower of their generation, doomed to die as the mechanistic future tears apart chivalric ideals, and society starts to question its very nature.