Books

Americans are about to get what they desperately need: another book from the Biden family! Valerie Biden Owens isn’t just the president’s little sister; she's also the author of Growing Up Biden: A Memoir. The book’s cover features a photo of a young Valerie and her siblings sitting on a couch with their mother. According to Amazon, the book "details Valerie’s decades-long professional career in politics, and the central role she played in her brother’s life as an insightful adviser, an ever-loyal advocate and best friend.” The timing of the book’s release — it will hit shelves next week — is almost as terrible as Joe Biden’s recent poll numbers. Almost.

The English author and curmudgeon Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) is today best known for his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. A luxuriant evocation of the beauties of pre-World War Two Oxford, coupled with a cautionary narrative about the destructive power of Catholic guilt, it has remained a constant favorite with everyone from college students to literature scholars. It was memorably filmed for British television in 1981, and it launched the careers of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews as, respectively, the novel’s narrator Charles Ryder and the flamboyant aesthete Sebastian Flyte.

A development has reshaped the world of letters. The literary universe is no longer a boys’ club but the playground of woke Brooklyn ladies who’ve swallowed up editorships and literary-agent gigs. The results continue to be predictable: a constant bombardment of books from elite white women about the travails of neurotic Brooklyn ladies, and victim narratives about brown suffering. The fetishization of people of color has come to define the woke relationship with so-called marginalized communities. Virtually every literary book — except for those based in Brooklyn — details the struggles of a victimized minority. The Booker Prize longlist or the National Book Award finalists will annually bombard you with weepy tales of generational POC suffering.

Did you read Proust in lockdown? Lockdown, it seemed, offered the eons of vacancy apparently required to finally get around to À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, aka “The Big One”: a book to be attempted only by the pretentious one percent in the discharge of their services to intellectual snobbery. I did. I read it twice. I read it because it’s always a pleasure and a novelty, and because I want to get it made as a long-form television series. Proust is perfect for TV: better than anything else, the format can show the passage of time. This is the sine qua non of any Proust reckoning, and it has defeated all attempts so far to make the book into a feature film. We are doing well.

Gene Wolfe’s sci-fi novella, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, was published fifty years ago this year. It is a minor masterpiece. Set in the town of Port-Mimizon on the imaginary planet of Saint Croix, the story follows a family who are descendants of French colonizers. A sister planet, Saint Anne, was also colonized by the French. The original inhabitants of both planets were shapeshifters, and one of the early questions of the novella is whether the current inhabitants of both planets are in fact French or shapeshifters who, according to one theory, killed the would-be colonizers and permanently took on their form. The story is narrated by one of two brothers, who live in a large house on 666 Saltimbanque.

"It feels almost like there is money in writing again.” So the historian and New York Times bestselling author Dan Jones tells me. Is he referring to increased book sales, or lucrative adaptation deals? Not this time. Instead, he’s discussing Substack, which launched in 2017. It has now become the platform of choice for writers to develop their careers on their own terms, without having to give substantial percentages away to agents, publishers and lawyers. For years, authors have felt that they have been little more than galley slaves, flogging themselves and their wares for the profit of multinational corporations. Now, finally, they have been given an opportunity to take back control of their own careers and destinies. The format is a simple one.