Drugs

A photograph from the late 1960s shows a lavishly underdressed Marianne Faithfull sandwiched between Alain Delon, the most beautiful man in the world, and Mick Jagger, the second most beautiful man in the Rolling Stones. The gulf between these two indefatigable tombeurs is not merely sartorial. Delon wears a sharp suit, gun-metal grey, and a black tie. There are the makings of a master/servant dialogue here, for Jagger, far from mondaine, is gauche and scruffy with mismatched socks, no doubt counter-cultural. His picayune mis-demeanour, and his fitting up by bad apples in blue such as Pilcher of the Met, might have been a glitch, but it all turned out cosily parish-pump and, further, a great career move, assisted by William Rees-Mogg’s indignation. No one died in that Sussex cottage.

At 6.58 p.m. on 30 April 2024, Siri Hustvedt’s husband of 43 years, the novelist Paul Auster, died of cancer in the library of their Brooklyn home. He was surrounded by family, including his adored daughter Sophie, who three months earlier had given birth to his first grandson, Miles. Hustvedt and Auster met at a poetry reading in 1981 and married later that year. It was she who proposed to him. Auster, aged 34, was not yet famous and Hustvedt, aged 26, was still a graduate student. By the 1990s, when she too became a novelist, they were New York literary royalty. In the 1970s, Auster had been married to the translator and short story writer Lydia Davis, with whom he had a son called Daniel. If Sophie was a summer’s day, Daniel was darkness.

This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (‘Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting ground in Britain.’) But it occurred to me more than once as I read it that it has the hallmarks of a particularly black London comedy by Dickens or Ben Jonson or Joe Orton. A violent knave, his activities previously limited to cheating the police, murdering his equally appalling criminal rivals, doing underhand deals and ripping off the rich, acquires an associate.

Film noir was the term coined by the French in the late 1940s to describe the genre of Hollywood crime movies which probed the darkness that lay in the shadows cast by all that bright Californian sunlight. The Beach Boys, who broke through in the early 1960s with a repertoire that hymned, in five-part harmonies, the Golden State’s promise of sun, sand and waves, bronzed bodies, beach-party ‘babes’, hot rods and open highways, were – and remain – the quintessential Californian band. But their story, an unhappy family saga featuring the three Wilson brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis) and cousin Mike Love, is, like that of California’s itself, as dark as it is light. Their presiding musical genius, Brian, died in June.

I must say, calling a book Fires Which Burned Brightly promises much. At best, from the jaded reviewer’s point of view, an autobiography of delusional self-aggrandisement; at worst, a wild mismatch between the, well, incendiary language of the title and the potentially humdrum contents. It might have been dreamed up by a master satirist intending to inflict maximum damage to the reputation of that noted gentleman of letters, Sebastian Faulks. I once invented a novelist named Julian Sensitive, whose only claim to fame was an autobiographical novel called, after T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, ‘My Trousers Rolled’. That was a crude joke compared with the hilarity inspired byFaulks’s title.

Colonel Tom Parker (1909-97) was the man who ripped Elvis Presley off and worked him to death. That’s the received wisdom about the person who managed the King from 1955 until his premature death, aged 42, in 1977. Peter Guralnick’s book, written with full access to Parker’s unpublished, witty, clever letters, now owned by the Elvis Archives, gives a more nuanced, sympathetic picture. The author is no biased sensationalist. His Elvis biography, Last Train to Memphis (1995), is one of the most serious and reliable. So, yes, Parker was a serial liar, not least when it came to his identity. Born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in humble circumstances in Holland, he fled, aged 16, to America and was then kicked out. He returned three years later, changing his name to Tom Parker.

Some people spend years squirming on a leather chaise longue before they come to understand, as Philip Larkin so pithily observed: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Few go on to make peace with the sagacity delivered in his next line: ‘They may not mean to, but they do.’ In My Sister and Other Lovers, Esther Freud’s sequel to her autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky, sisters Lucy and Bea – who spent their early childhood trailing after their hippy mother through 1960s Morocco – slowly edge towards such catharsis. Before that, however, comes a lot more turbulence, and Freud – whose great-grandfather pioneered the couch method – is acutely attentive to its psychological effects.

There is a lot of death in the latest, and potentially last, book on boxing by the South African journalist Donald McRae. In less than two years he loses his sister, both his parents and his mother-in-law. To cope with the trauma he returns to the sport that has sustained his life and work for 30 years. But when he reimmerses himself in boxing he does not like what he sees. He finds a sport where bouts are controlled by gangsters; where famous boxers dope and lie about it; where fights still have inadequate safety protocols; and where the centre of power has shifted from Las Vegas to Riyadh, lured by Mohammed bin Salman’s money. Each of these trends, McRae believes, knits boxing and death closer together. ‘I want boxing to sweep me away from real life,’ he confesses.

Jonathan Meades is, you might say, a baroque artist in a mannerist age. Whereas today’s younger and more widely feted writers think small – a Brooklyn sublet, a Camden Town love nest, the cracked mirror of the self – Meades goes big. And not just in physical terms (Empty Wigs tips the scales at nearly 3lb), but in scope. Where his contemporaries’ prose can be affectless and somehow skinless (a Paris Review interviewer said of Rachel Cusk, with apparent admiration, that her writing ‘feels contemporary, swift and “clean”’), Meades piles on the style, packing in metaphors, coinages and allusions until the crystals can’t take it, swooping between social classes, doing the police in different voices.