Books

In an interview with Stern magazine at the end of July, Sir Salman Rushdie was asked about the current circumstances of his life. Given that this is a question that he has faced since 1989, Rushdie might have been expected to respond with boredom, even irritation — as, understandably, he has done in other public conversations, when the subject of the fatwa that he has been under for nearly three and a half decades has been raised by an inquisitive or prurient journalist — but he responded with reasonably good cheer. Describing his everyday existence as “very normal,” he even ventured a light-hearted remark, saying, “A fatwa is a serious thing. Luckily we didn’t have the internet back then. The Iranians had to send the fatwa to the mosques by fax.

In the United States a century ago, a single poet dominated the literary sphere. He was not only the recipient of the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Poetry — which he would win twice more during the course of an internationally distinguished career — but would be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature on four separate occasions. He was beloved by presidents, described by one admirer as “more artful than Hardy and more coy than Frost” and found himself one of the bestselling writers in America. His reputation seemed assured forever.

T.S. Eliot once made the significant point, in an essay on Philip Massinger, that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Eliot knew exactly what he was talking about (himself). However, change “poets” to “novelists” and the same pertinence applies. In fact, this wholesale, covert purloining may be true of all artists in all ages in all the seven arts. Let’s start with some backstory. Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), as they say, needs no introduction. William Gerhardie (1895-1977) is almost wholly forgotten today, but in the 1920s he was the luminous young wunderkind of English literature — a kind of Donna Tartt or Sally Rooney of his times.

Summer has arrived in full force — at least here in southeastern Virginia, where the temperature has been creeping up towards 100 degrees — and so, too, have those lists of the best beach books, hottest summer reads, high temp tomes, etc. But fall is just around the corner, so why not take a peek at what’s in store? Here are a few forthcoming books that piqued my interest for one reason or another. This isn’t a list of the fall’s “biggest” books. Some of these might not be covered at all in the national press. But if you want a list like that, just wait. You’ll have 20 to choose from before long. Here is mine. Robert Crawford’s Eliot after The Waste Land (August 23, FSG), the second volume of his biography of T.S.

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.

"Oxford I do not enjoy,” wrote T.S. Eliot to Conrad Aiken in February 1915. “The food and the climate are execrable, I suffer indigestion, constipation, and colds constantly.” The poet was clearly having one of his bad days. Since arriving at the university the previous October, he had found himself in and out of love with the place, which was hardly surprising, given the timing. Most of the undergraduates at Oxford had either left or were on the verge of leaving to fight for their country, meaning that the lecture and tutorial rooms were almost empty, the sports fields green through lack of use, and the centuries-old traditions stalling like motor cars on the long stretch of the High.

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.