Culture

Mark Z. Danielewski is best known for his House of Leaves, a typographically delirious horror novel about a manuscript written by a blind man describing a film which showed an impossible house. It seemed to exhaust a particular kind of postmodernism of footnotes, cryptography, metatexts, pop culture and more, yet remained at heart a story about grief. Tom’s Crossing is more immediately accessible, but it is every bit as clever and even more emotionally devastating. The bulk of the action takes place over five days running up to Halloween in 1982, although with a preface, ‘Some of what happened before’, and a longer epilogue, ‘Some of what happened after’.

To read Albert Camus’s Notebooks – comprehensive, newly translated and expertly annotated by Ryan Bloom – is to enter the engine room of the writer’s mind and to glimpse its complex workings and components stripped back to their essentials. They comprise an intellectual and spiritual autobiography, not an account of his life. But of course they contain seductive vignettes lifted straight from experience among the aphorisms, observations, drafts and schemas for writings, stitched together in a collage that reflects a remarkably agile mind in constant motion. The Notebooks bring to mind the fertile chaos of an artist’s studio.

A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever – credited to the late Rob Reiner, with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, as well as to their Tap alter-egos Marty Dibergi, Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins and Derek Smalls – serves as a fitting companion to This is Spinal Tap (1984), the mother of all mockumentaries, much beloved by middle-aged men and their poor put-upon children. (My wife and my daughter, I should say, absolutely hate it: but then they prefer Pitch Perfect – and Pitch Perfect 2. So there’s no accounting for taste.) Part oral history, part behind-the-scenes memoir and part self-aware parody of rock memoir, the book’s a bit of a mess – much like the fictional band.

Harper Lee’s writing career was brief, but her single novel became one of the most famous in American history. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) won the Pulitzer Prize, sold tens of millions of copies and remains a fixture of classrooms and popular memory. She published almost nothing else until Go Set a Watchman – an earlier draft of Mockingbird – appeared in 2015, just before her death and perhaps without her meaningful consent. The Land of Sweet Forever gathers apprentice stories written before Mockingbird, along with a few later magazine pieces. Most are slight and the volume is more commercial than literary.

It’s tricky for writers to gather up pieces of old work and collect them in significant literary form. It’s risky for former politicians to publish outdated commentaries, with no agenda other than to show politics on the ground and as a record of their efforts and prejudices. Most hazardous of all is titling a book in such a way that it eschews the established geographical and psychological identity of the region it describes. These are the challenges Rory Stewart sets for himself in Middleland. The book consists of the granary-floor sweepings of journalistic pieces published in the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald while Stewart served as MP for Penrith and the Border.

Robert Langdon is a symbologist, and that is the meta joke – the only joke – of Dan Brown’s series of blockbusters, of which this is the sixth. Langdon, an Everyman – Frodo Baggins but taller, and with a professorship at Harvard – is a monied, moderate intellectual who likes swimming. And he is very ordinary – until he isn’t. All novels have subtexts, even if they don’t really want them. They can’t help it. This one is: a monied, moderate intellectual can be interesting, and interesting things can happen to him. (I think Brown spends a lot of time at his desk. I also think he prefers ideas to people.) Langdon can set off the fire alarm in his hotel and jump out of the window into the river.