Colson whitehead

Thursday

The Spectator

This month in culture: October 2024

Joker: Folie à Deux In theaters October 4 Set in the aftermath of the first Joker film, Folie à Deux returns to Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck in the Arkham State Hospital as he faces trial for five murders. While under treatment, he meets and falls in love with fellow patient Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, a woman obsessed with his Joker alter ego. The sequel is a smudgy Seventies crime noir deviation from the canonical material of DC Comics characters Joker and Harley Quinn; this Joker does not become the Clown Prince of Crime. With no Batman in sight, Joaquin Phoenix engages in a chaotic pas de deux with Lady Gaga as he stops taking his medication and descends into an MGM dreamscape of musical fantasia.

Culture

Tuesday

Amanda Craig

Cahokia Jazz is enormous fun

If you are a male, middle-aged, middle-class novelist, do not despair of being deemed unpublishable in our era of identity politics. On both sides of the Atlantic, the smartest chaps have turned away from the interiority of literary fiction. From Colson Whitehead and Marlon James to Mick Herron and Charles Cumming, they now write detective fiction, speculative fantasy, or a combination of the two. Francis Spufford, the award-winning author of best-selling novels such as Golden Hill, has come up with a zinger. Cahokia Jazz is set in a 1920s city in a counterfactual America. Here, the native Americans were not fatally weakened by a deadly strain of smallpox, but experienced the milder version which has just a 1 percent mortality rate and confers immunity.

spufford

Tuesday

Susie Mesure

The hell of the antebellum South: Let Us Descend, by Jesmyn Ward, reviewed

From our UK edition

Jesmyn Ward, America’s only female two-time National Book Award winner, has had more than her share of hellish experiences to fuel her literary life. Her Mississippi-based family endured Hurricane Katrina. Salvage the Bones (2011), set during the catastrophe, was Ward’s response. Her memoir, Men We Reaped (2013), tackled her grief at losing five men close to her, including her brother, who was killed, aged 19, by a drunk driver. In January 2020, Ward’s husband died of acute respiratory distress syndrome. Ward recreates the hell of the antebellum South for the ‘stolen’ people forced into chattel slavery Hell is very much the context for her fourth novel, Let Us Descend.

Thursday

James Walton

Quietly radiates a wholly justified confidence: BBC 1’s The Pact reviewed

From our UK edition

There was certainly no lack of variety among new TV dramas this week, with a standard British thriller up against more glamorous American competition in the shape of some extravagant Victorian sci-fi and an adaption by an Oscar-winning director of a Pulitzer-winning novel. (All three, mind you, did naturally feature a one-dimensional white bloke as the embodiment of sexist and/or racist villainy.) The surprising thing at this stage is that it’s the plucky British show that looks most promising. The Pact began, like many a thriller before it, with a frightened woman running through some dark woods. So far we still don’t know why — unless it was just force of TV habit.