Culture

Wish You Were Here is Graham Swift's ninth novel, and he adopts a trending topic among the literati, namely the 'war on terror'. But he does so at a slant. Rather than the dinner-party debate staged by his contemporaries, Swift domesticates the war on terror within a very personal story of loss. The novel centres around the death of Tom Luxton, a soldier in Iraq, and the effect it has on his elder brother, Jack. But Tom's death is merely the trigger for a Proustian excess of memory, as Jack begins revisiting 'all the things that had once been dead and buried' including his mother's death, his father's suicide and Tom's teenage escape flight from the suffocating restrictions of 'agricultural ruin' to the army. It is an odd novel in many ways.

Prior to his suicide, David Foster Wallace gave an interview to Ostap Karmodi for the New York Review of Books. The interview, which has just been published by the NYRB, concentrated on consumerism and its effects on culture. Here is the opening excerpt: Ostap Karmodi: Do you feel we’re living in an age of consumerism or is that just a media concept that doesn’t have any real meaning? David Foster Wallace: This question, as you know, is very complicated. I can give answers that are somewhat simple and I can really talk only about America, because it’s really the only society that I know.

Clarke Hayes has written the Bookends column in this week's issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: I am in love with Jackson Brodie. Does this mean that, in a literary homoerotic twist, I am actually in love with Kate Atkinson, his creator? I think it must. Sometimes I think I am Jackson Brodie. We share many traits: 50-odd, mid-life crisis, a lost (though in my case not murdered) sister. I know that it’s really Kate Atkinson who is Jackson Brodie. She must have a lost or murdered sister, mustn’t she?   I came upon the Brodie novels (Black Swan, £7.99 each) quite by chance, through a Waterstone’s deal. When Will There Be Good News? caused me wonder and confusion in equal measure.

It’s Bloomsday. If Joyce is your bag, then here is a link to the Bloomsday page on the official James Joyce website. Joyce is an acquired taste and can be bitter when you’ve got it. Ulysees is too great a slog to contemplate for some. But an old drunk in Soho once told me that the way to crack Ulysees is to get someone to read it for you. Oddly, I think there’s truth in his involuntary offering of wisdom, though perhaps not in the way he intended, as I hope the above clip of Marcella Riordan reading the last lines of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy proves.

Close the nominations. Unless someone publishes proof of Shergar pulling a plough in the Yemen, it must be a good bet for William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011. Twirlymen is the absorbing maiden work by Amol Rajan, a journalist at the Independent.  His aim is to celebrate spin bowling’s impressive survival in the face of change and the often unjust machinations of cricketing authorities; to remind us of spin bowling’s past dominance; to explode myths; to raise off-spin, ‘an ugly ducking in cricket’, to its rightful plinth; to extol the mastery of the basics over the capriciousness of mystery; and to celebrate the great Twirlymen.

1.) Clive James has returned to TV criticism. He was poached out of retirement by the Telegraph who proudly billed their latest catch as the 'world's greatest TV critic'. It sees him resume where his groundbreaking Observer column, written between 1972-82, left off. Widely cited as turning TV criticism into serious art, James collected his weekly musings into three volumes of TV criticism: Visions Before Midnight, The Crystal Bucket and Glued to the Box. A compendium volume, On Television, was published in 1990. All are available here.   2.) James is a man of many genres. He has published verse (most recently Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958-2008), four novels, five autobiographies and numerous collections of essays (including the magnum opus, Cultural Amnesia).

One of the most irritating things about the launch of a Jeffrey Archer book is the high pitched whine of indignation and scorn from that small, bitchy and endangered species, the literary community. Well, after God knows how many years and the sale of 350 million books, they have been remarkably reserved about his latest, Only Time Will Tell. In fact, the old rascal has had some favourable reviews from some unexpected sources, The Guardian and The Independent. And well deserved too. No doubt they will be punished by having to read every Booker prize winner’s offerings for the last 20 years. How cruel is that? This is a cracker of a read. And quite unputdownable. The whole thing about Jeffrey is that he has always had the knack of producing page-turners.

Mark Mason has written the Bookend column in the latest issue of The Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. It is 1979. You are a 15-year-old boy starring in a hit US television show. You’ve seen the crowds of screaming girls outside the gates as you arrive for work, and are therefore very excited to have received your first fan letter. You open it eagerly and begin to read: ‘Dear Mr Rob Lowe, You are a great actor. Can you please send me an autographed photo of yourself? If possible in a bathing suit or in your underwear. Sincerely, Michael LeBron. #4142214 Pelican Bay Prison.’ Anyone who thinks of Lowe as Action Man made flesh (blandly handsome, zero personality) will be pleasantly surprised by his autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends.