Hello,
It's been a
challenging year, hasn't it. Got through a few books, anyway.
As is traditional, I start the round-up by telling you about my own writing, which I appreciate is pretty cheeky. Many of my favourite pieces this year, though, ran only in print, or hopefully soon will do:
1.
Goddamn Hell is the best thing I've written in
any year; I finished this novel in February. It's a love story about writing, mental illness and ice-skating musicals, centring on a lesbian screenwriter in Hollywood in 1937. It got all the way to the acquisitions meeting at one big publisher, then they passed on it, so we're still in the submissions process...
2. My two-pager on the majesty of Howard Hawks'
Only Angels Have Wings (1939) ran in
Empire last month. Here's an excerpt about Jules Furthman and the incomparable beauty of '30s screenwriting:
3. My Blu-ray essays this year included a look at Rita Hayworth's brutal physical transformation and Fred Astaire's post-Ginger struggles, for
Indicator's release of
You'll Never Get Rich (1941), which you can buy
here. I've crafted two more pieces (these really are a labour of love, deeply researched and lovingly written), which will be out by April. The first explains how the cult 1941 movie,
The Shepherd of the Hills, unwittingly chased the course of American cinema.
4. I reviewed
new cinema releases for the i Paper, and some titles relating to Old Hollywood for
Sight & Sound. Highlights? Well, I received a remarkable amount of unhinged abuse for admitting that
I don't really like Yorgos Lanthimos films. And here I am on the recent Bogart doc:
5. My spoken introduction for the
BFI's screening of
Captain Blood (1935) is available to read here
here.
6. A couple of years ago, I decided to curb my general gig-going quite a bit, but to see my two musical idols whenever I can. It was a great decision. Here's a piece on my trip to Norway to see
Susanne Sundfør's wonderfully esoteric church concerts in southern Norway. And
here are some thoughts on Adrianne Lenker's tour of Ireland and the UK. I feel so lucky to have been heard these shows, and really just to be alive at the same time as these two artists.
If you would care to follow me on
my Bluesky, I link to all my writing on there; I have major features for
Line of Best Fit and the
i Paper out in the first fortnight of the year.
Now I'll tell you about all the things I
read. To be honest, I've been so busy writing this year that I haven't been making my usual notes as I go, so this is mostly from memory (what a con), but here goes...
FICTION
Only one book made me cry on a train this year, so I guess
Intermezzo (2024) by Sally Rooney was my favourite novel of 2024. I think that, of all the writers I love, she'd be the easiest to pick holes in, but why would you?
Intermezzo is both her simplest and most complex book so far. Here, love is a more refined, straightforward thing, yet its ramifications as it comes into contact with society, with trauma, with disfiguring insecurity, are impossibly tangled. I find her work so deeply moving, and here her sadism – the recourse to moments of breathtaking, wounded cruelty – is offset by a warmhearted emotionalism that's filtered through realism but never buried. That quality is exemplified by Ivan, an autistic chess champion and recovering incel who speaks with a frowning sincerity. He's the most memorable character I've encountered in a year or two, and the way Rooney plays with your perceptions, shifting your sympathies slow or fast is ingenious. Is there anyone writing today more alive to the possibilities of the all-seeing third-person voice?
I'm pretty tired, just now, of pseudo-left culture wars tracts masquerading as literature (is that what art is
for?) Which is one of the many reasons why Cecilia Rabess'
Everything’s Fine (2023) was so refreshing. It's a provocative romance between a Black liberal woman and a white Republican man, in which she's not always sure and he's not always wrong. Instead of a didactic, spoon-feeding polemic, Rabess gives us something more ambivalent, asking us to sit out with our unease, and sneaking her more progressive ideas into a traditional genre template. The results are disquieting, nicely-phrased and pretty hot; dialogue-heavy but with an understanding of what dialogue can do. If the book dips just a little when its protagonist returns to Lincoln to wrestle with her past, it comes roaring back. Stunning, really.
I'd never heard of the Canadian stand-up, Norm Macdonald, prior to his death, but now spend around 40 per cent of my life watching
his stuff. He also wrote a memoir,
Based on a True Story (2016), which as you'll see is in the 'fiction' section of this round-up, as it's the most inspired kind of bollocks. Macdonald posed as a dumb fuck for comic purposes but was really a Tolstoy obsessive, and a pathological irrationality infects his characters, as they face fate, shoot up morphine and toss off strangers. I'd always thought that punching down was a thing I abhorred, but Norm does it with such twinkly-eyed postmodernist subversion that he burns all the rules. Or maybe, like he says, you can analyse it afterwards all you want, but laughter is involuntary. Here, he elicits it laughter by presenting himself as an oblivious, narcissistic monster, while throwing in an expanded version of
his legendary Moth Joke (again, inspired by classic Russian literature), allowing a ghostwriter called 'Charles Manson' to commandeer the narrative, and permitting a diversion in which a terminally-ill 10-year-old boy has his dying wish made true by a Make-a-Wish-like foundation: he would like to club a seal to death. The real Norm, like his literary alter-ego, was a compulsive gambler; it bankrupted him twice, but artistically the gamble almost always paid off. The two pages in which he flips the most celebrated episode of his career on its head (here being sacked for
refusing to keep making jokes about O. J. Simpson's guilt on
Saturday Night Live) is just the most inspired piece of alternate history. Reflecting on the supposedly shameful gags, he concludes: "We had mostly been fuelled by my lifelong institutionalised racism ... The only thing O. J. Simpson was guilty of was being the greatest running back in the history of football. And while O. J. Simpson had proven himself to be the greatest rusher, I had proven myself to be the greatest rusher to judgement."
If I'm ever stuck for what to read, or find myself trapped in a run of bad novels, I'll pick up a Graham Greene book. I read three this year.
The End of the Affair (1951) was my favourite, and, like many of his best, makes you pay in advance for the climactic moments of forgiveness, solace and beauty, positively drenching you first in its narrator's misguided bitterness. "One can't love humanity, one can only love people," Greene writes in
The Ministry of Fear (1943). That was one of his 'entertainments', as he called his less serious books, but while it's a noir thriller whose Macguffin is a cake, it's also an extraordinarily rich and resonant book, ruminating on the nature of (un)happiness, shot through with Catholic guilt – twisting into pity, endlessly regenerated by memories of a mercy killing – and offering, through words alone, an astonishingly vivid portrait of Blitz-era London. If Penelope Fitzgerald's
Human Voices remains some kind of highwater mark in that regard, that masterpiece focused more on complete sensory overload (the shoes crunching on glass!), whereas Greene's primarily visual approach offers a God's-eye view of a city broken into villages by the nighttime assault, each area meeting a different fate, before he zooms in to the bleak everyday surrealism of smoking ruins. I'm not sure if the book's second-act, in which we decamp to a psychiatric hospital is, in the moment, as dramatically or emotionally successful as the rest, but it is a crucial part of Greene's thesis (as well as his favourite part of the novel), smuggled in under the guise of cheap thrills: that love and life are only meaningful when we embrace the complexity of adulthood. It almost goes without saying that every one of Greene's characters is drawn so sharply as to be completely memorable. And that he ruminates at least once on the fate of mediocre men played like instruments by God or the Devil. Then there was
A Gun for Sale (1936), which even by his standards is eye-wateringly caustic as it introducing us to the worldview of Raven, a misanthrope with a harelip who kills for a living. Once more, though, its explicit nastiness is not the book's purpose, but a literary tactic, a rite of passage, a fire you walk through to reach a belated and misshapen humanity. He'll to meet a girl, you see, and almost love her, and in the end it'll be him you feel sorry for.
That's Greene, then. But if I'm feeling blue, I turn to Wodehouse. I must have felt blue at least four times this year. I'm working my way through the world of Jeeves and Wooster in order, and in 2024 reached the mid-'50s.
Ring for Jeeves (1953) was a palate cleanser and a curio but not a classic: a novelisation of a stage play, done in the third person and with Bertie nowhere to be seen. It all felt a little reheated, and gently dyspeptic about postwar political progress, but it was easy to take and funny in spots, blessed with the memorable supporting character of amorous colonial big-game hunter, Captain Biggar. I loved
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (1954), though, with Wodehouse close to peak form, juggling the usual elements (a necklace, a great chef, a furious aunt) with effortless command, and writing in that perfected later style. I greatly enjoyed his early rom-com
Piccadilly Jim (1937) too, and carried on my tour of Blandings castle and its environs in
Blandings Castle and Elsewhere (1935), which proves wonderful at Blandings, but conspicuously less so
elsewhere. The Hollywood-set short stories that make up most of the book's remainder are as subtly satirical as a sledgehammer to the face, feeling neither escapist nor remotely real.
Nathanael West's
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) is like a shot of neat vodka, or vinegar, or poison: a corrosive, startling, violent, vile, unhinged book about a Christ-fixated newspaper agony aunt who responds to the weight of his correspondents' agonies by going completely insane across 15 short, excoriating chapters. This being West, there is a rape fantasy, a disabled cuckold, and a nihilism ending in death that might be art but might just as likely be only a perverted and adolescent misanthropy. It has something, certainly, though I'm not sure that viewing life as unremittingly bleak, and people as unremittingly abhorrent, is any more complex or profound than the sunny musical fantasies West was soon writing in Hollywood. (As a screenwriter at Republic and a denizen of writers' hangout Musso & Frank, he earned a non-speaking cameo in
Goddamn Hell.)
The Eyre Affair (2001) by Jasper Fforde, in which a psychopath disappears into the pages of Charlotte Bronte's finest, was inventive and endlessly postmodern, but I think I liked it most when it was being entirely original rather than eliciting the words, "Oh that's quite clever". I enjoyed Tom Perrotta's sequel to
Election,
Tracy Flick Can't Win (2022), notably sympathetic to its sad and disillusioned heroine, though the way it is leading only to an act of male violence feels in retrospect like a journey to a lit-fic well that ran dry
years ago.
I got around to a few established classics that had previously eluded me.
Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov was a daring stylistic feat, with a dazzling first half and a staggering vocabulary in the guy's
second language, yet with a hundred pages to go I couldn't wait for it to be over. I'm still unsure whether that was because of an intentionally-engendered unease or a sort of sullied boredom at its repetition, and relentless griminess. George Eliot's
The Mill on the Floss (1860) couldn't compete with
Middlemarch, but then what can? Dealing with self-destruction in both its minutiae and cosmic significance, it's excellent right up until a curiously misguided final act.
Portnoy's Complaint (1969) was conspicuously less my thing. Sure, Roth was brilliant, but I preferred it when he applied that genius to subjects other than wanking.
Ironically,
Starter for Ten (2003) by David Nicholls already feels as old-fashioned as the Roth book, with its derivative nebbish hero, paper-thin female characters and broad comic situations, though the eponymous sequence it's leading to is neatly done. Also rather exhausting in its familiarity was Michael Chabon's
Wonder Boys (1995). The book's wonderful opening, full of impish invention and real feeling, gives way to baggy, aimless cliche. I think I may have read enough serio-comic novels now about irresponsible, pothead professors undone by their sexual appetites. Chabon's evocation of literary worlds within a world works well here and found its apotheosis in
Kavalier & Clay, but the
Lucky Jim/
A Good Man in Africa thing has just been done so many times now, and meticulous set-pieces in comic lit novels are usually little short of excruciating.
Erasure (2011) by Percival Everett was also several dazzling passages – most of them about the dehumanising simplification and ghettofication of black experience – in search of a coherent whole, while in Virginia Woolf's
Mrs Dalloway (1925) it transpired that the birth of modernism was challenging and occasionally relevatory, but for the most part genuinely quite dull, circling its pivotal events with the lithe grace of a slug. I read
The Shepherd of the Hills (1907) by Harold Bell Wright as research for my essay on the film; it's deeply Christian, profoundly Victorian and slightly confusing, but with moments of heartening sincerity. The central criminal gang in the book is called the "Bald Knobbers".
A couple of recent zeitgeisty novels deeply underwhelmed. Ironically,
Yellowface (2023) by R. F. Kuang has a narrator who complains that one random book is anointed as the chosen one and then pushed onto the public and... yeah. It's a pageturner about literary deceit that has virtually nothing to say, exiting the brain as soon as it's over. I enjoyed the start and the very end of Kaliane Bradley's
The Ministry of Time (2024), but the shapeless middle lost me, and I think this style of writing (distractingly flowery at the sentence level) just isn’t something I respond to.
I also got little (save some observations for an essay) from Hans Fallada's
Little Man, What Now? (1932), which became a beautiful Frank Borzage/Margaret Sullavan film. It was an international bestseller and an emblematic success for the New Objectivism, but while it's inescapably eerie in its depiction of the economic climate that enabled Nazism, on its own terms it's curiously unimpressive. Fallada is transparently in love with one of his own characters, Lämmchen, which rarely works out well.
The most breathtakingly tedious work of fiction that I read this year was
The Well of Loneliness (1928) by Radclyffe Hall. Somewhere in there is a good 120-page novel about gender and sexuality in the early part of the 20th century. I would argue that it is somewhat lost in an endlessly overwritten 500-page book that keeps cutting to horses for their insights (?).
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NON-FICTION
By far the best non-fiction work I read this year was Doris Kearns Goodwin's magisterial
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2004). Its USP – a joint portrait of four men who ran for the Republican nomination in 1860, then formed the administration that saw America through the Civil War – is arguably its weak point, since none of the other three politicians (Seward, Chase and Bates) are anywhere near as fascinating as Lincoln. He's the focus, though, and by the time you reach his assassination, he's no longer a dusty figure from history, his demise the basis for an old joke, but a vivid, complicated, truly heroic man whose death you can scarcely bring yourself to read about. This masterpiece is not just a study in leadership (which implies the chilling idea that it could be discussed on
The Diary of a CEO) but in power, and most importantly humanity.
I also loved
The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (2024) by Helen Castor, which deals with the fantastically shallow, vainglorious king ultimately usurped by his war-hero brother. Once you're 60 pages in and have a handle on who on earth all these people are, it's a pulsating read, with Castor effortlessly juggling the numerous narrative strands, and leaving the distinct impression that she was standing around watching these events transpire.
This was the year, though, of Janet Malcolm. In a sense, every year is the year of Janet Malcolm, but in 2024 I really binged.
What a writer she was: utterly unique. For newcomers, this Czech-American non-fiction writer, long of the
New Yorker, had an immediately recognisable style of prose, and of provocative thinking. In her ability to write in rhythm, to reach for the perfect word, and to unlock or expose her subject with an observation that another journalist would have cut if they hadn't missed it entirely, there really was nobody even remotely like her.
Still Pictures (2023), published posthumously, may just be her greatest achievement, and certainly her most personal: a series of singular snapshots, triggered by literal snapshots from throughout her life.
In the Freud Archives (1983) was her breakthrough: a piercing and piquant mixture of insight and gossip about the struggle for control of Freud's papers, climaxing with one of the great literary pay-offs.
The Crime of Sheila Gough (2000) is the brilliantly offbeat study of a saint-like lawyer who was essentially jailed for being extremely irritating. In
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1993), Malcolm wages war on the very concept of biography (while coming down on the side of Ted Hughes), only to offer her own addition to the genre:
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007) a startling, dual sketch-portrait of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, with the author, as ever, leaving one discovery up her sleeve for the final moments. Malcolm's third essays collection,
Nobody's Looking at You (2019), has more misses than the previous anthologies (two features are atypically tame: a gushing interview with fashion designer Eileen Fisher, and a toothless celebration of author Alexander McCall Smith), but most of the pieces have at least one telling detail, startling insight or inspired and extended rhetorical gamble with which to dazzle you. If Malcolm arguably hit her peak in the '90s, when she seemed to reach a peak of both precision, and clarity of structure, as well as creating her single most influential work (
The Journalist and the Murderer), almost everything she wrote was remarkable to some degree. And though she's best known for her interview profiles, some of the other items here are extraordinary: a vivid account of supreme court confirmation hearings (2006), a revisionist battering of popular translations of Tolstoy (2016), and an evisceration of a sensationalist biography of Ted Hughes (2016). Of the seven Malcolm books I luxuriated in this year, only
Iphigeneia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial (2011) slightly missed the mark: the point of the thing being lost somewhere along the way.
Patrick Radden Keefe's excellent
Say Nothing (2018) compares favourably to the similarly-themed (and desperately dry)
Killing Thatcher, weaving together four human stories to illuminate the Troubles. Its more novelistic leanings have proven controversial, but I found it hugely impressive.
There But for Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs (1996) by Michael Schumacher is the principal biography of my guy, a Dylan who genuinely cared: probably too much. Ochs grew up loving America, and just wanted to be one of its pop stars. By 1963, he was a folk-singing radical; by '68, he was a key figure of the counterculture; by '76, he was dead. Ochs was undeniably complicated: his concept of social justice was overwhelmingly male, his relationships with women tended to involve visiting brothels, and his struggles with bipolar disorder and the mania and alcoholism it led to resulted ultimately in explosions of self-hating violence. He was, in his way, also one of the most moral people I've ever encountered, refusing to compromise on his ideals even when it meant harrassment from the FBI, career death, and the deterioration of his own mental wellbeing. In Schumacher's book, this inspiring, heartbreaking story is told fairly well; after a strong opening chapter, the writing becomes mostly functional and unpolished, save for a sequence in which Ochs' schizophrenia spirals, and the author literally replaces him with his alter-ego John Butler Train, a remarkable gamble that proves devastatingly effective. The research is extremely impressive, even if the conclusions it leads to can be questionable, and, perplexingly, periodically unpicked. While music is, like so many things, subjective, I'd also argue that Schumacher wildly underrates Ochs' masterpiece, the astonishing post-Chicago record,
Rehearsals for Retirement.
Speaking of Bob, Elijah Wald's
Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties (2015) is an impressive feat that has led to something unspeakable (a biopic starring Timothee Chalamet). The book effectively allows you to stroll around Newport during the festivals of 1963-5, an incalculable treat, with Wald an agreeably nuanced and nerdy companion, explaining the intricacies, complexities and internal contradictions of the folk revival, and what was lost, as well as gained, when Dylan plugged in. I've just written a piece on the subject, which is out in a fortnight's time. Suze Rotolo, Dylan's girlfriend pictured with him on the front of
The Freewheelin'..., published
A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the ‘60s in 2008. It's incoherent in structure, and suffers somewhat from Rotolo's reserve, which is both impressive to behold, and slightly frustrating when you've just bought her book. Despite a few candid moments, she doesn't come across as interestingly as in Dylan's own unreliable memoir,
Chronicles, which may be because she has a fairly flat prose style and he is one of the greatest writers who has ever lived. She seems like a nicer and wiser person, though.
I read a couple of other Dylan books too, to get me in the mood for his Albert Hall shows this year:
Clinton Heylin's The Double Life of Bob Dylan: Vol. 1, 1941-66 – A Restless, Hungry Feeling, and
Vol 2, 1966-2021 – Far Away from Myself (2022). These are puzzling books. Heylin knows more about the minutiae of Dylan's life, and his creative process, than anyone alive. But he isn't very relaxing or empathetic company, his constant digs at rival scholars are exhausting, and these new volumes based on discoveries in the recently-opened Tulsa Archive can feel more like bibliographies or appendices than conventional biographies.
Vol. 1 starts off almost in an
SPQR or
The Silent Woman vein: more about the sources than the story itself, getting lost in paperwork. Yet there are revelations every few pages, and the section at the beginning of
Vol. 2 on Dylan’s creative block from 1969-73 is a small masterpiece of research and reevaluation. It's a shame then that Heylin is so perpetually disappointed by Dylan, a man he is fixated upon, and has grown to loathe, as if the investment of time and the lack of reciprocity or absence of human perfection has begun to sicken him. He is endlessly vocal, too, about Dylan's supposed lies in print. I'm not sure what the author expects: a person to reveal, at all times, and in public, the full details of every aspect of their life? Dylan's an artist, whose mythmaking isn't mere cowardice or shifty secretiveness or even protective obfuscation, it's
part of the art. Heylin also appears furious at his subject for the cut-and-paste collaging in some of his later work, but isn't that what Heylin is doing here, writing sentences that so often end with phrases taken from Dylan lyrics? By the end of the second book, it has all become simply an exercise in gossip and spite; when Heylin reappraises 'Tin Angel' (a lost gem from 2011's
Tempest), it's particularly striking, as you suddenly realise that the author has barely said anything nice about his subject for about 300 pages, or 20 years. The endnote and acknowledgments, in their unexpected sweetness, only serve to compound the issue.
How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (2024) by Peter Pomerantsev is a rather wonderful biography of the offbeat, roguish Anglo-German propagandist, Sefton Delmer, focusing on his black broadcasts into Nazi territory during World War Two. Where the book falls down is when the Kyiv-born Pomerantsev, understandably blinded by grief, attempts to apply the lessons learnt to the contemporary world, and frequently elides the current Russian state with Nazi Germany, which is not a coherent comparison.
Other sporadically interesting non-fiction books included John Ganz's
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (2024): essentially a succession of loosely-linked essays about the far-right during that period, its short-term failure, and the warnings that weren't heeded.
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer (2006) by James L. Swanson was potentially intriguing but hobbled by its ambitious hour-by-hour structure, while in
Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism (2023) noted public masturbator Jeffrey Toobin hurriedly rewrote a book about the Oklahoma Bombing in the wake of the January 6 uprising. It was still at least a good deal better than
American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck (2001/2015), in which the writers got catastrophically close to McVeigh, sentimentalising him (the early stretches as rosily reverential as a presidential biography) and taking almost everything he said at face value. The result is simply bad journalism – tasteless and hopelessly skewed – though as an unfiltered portrait of how America’s most notorious domestic terrorist saw himself and his act of senseless slaughter, it is unwittingly fascinating. At the time, McVeigh was depicted in the press as an unusually well-read and articulate mass murderer, a portrait that wasn't only irresponsible but false, given that he was a thick piece of shit.
Most of my reading about movies this year was piecemeal: I had so many sources to inhale for work that I couldn't hope to read them all in entirety. I did that with a couple, though.
In and Out of Character (1962) is the memoir of Basil Rathbone, an actor who exists in the popular imagination as the screen's first real Sherlock Holmes, a role he played 14 times on screen, and a couple of hundred times on the radio. It is really, though, a portrait of an English gent of a certain period: gooey about dogs, suspicious of gays, racist towards the Chinese, and scarred by his experiences in World War One, where he won a Military Cross and lost his brother. Rathbone wrote the book himself, which I always prefer, since if the point of autobiography is to give us as close to the unfiltered person as possible, then it is the shortest route to that. In this case, Rathbone is a frustrated writer whose prose oscillates between the elegant and amateurish. There are deeply moving sections fuelled by overpowering feelings of nostalgia, and lively passages dealing with Rathbone's childhood (fleeing South Africa, where his dad was apparently a spy) and stage work (the conception of Judas in his labour-of-love play is totally fascinating), alternating with stretches of anodyne waffle, anecdotes about strange psychic happenings, and endless uninteresting tales about his dogs. He also hates TV with a mixture of righteousness, prescience and frothing insanity. On the subject of Holmes, the author is both grumpy and extremely sentimental; curiously, he chooses to include three short stories as part of the book: two of them deal involve fantasies in which he meets either Holmes or Watson. Otherwise he deals with his film career only fleetingly. His wife, Ouida, a screenwriter and notorious snob and social climber who appears to have been one of Hollywood's most inveterate partygivers and most disliked people, is the subject of numerous gushing tributes of the 'tell don't show' variety; her chief virtues appear to have been that she was loyal and very organised. The promisingly-titled
The Purple Diaries: Mary Astor and the Most Sensational Hollywood Scandal of the 1930s (2016) by Joseph Egan is undermined by the fact that the diary in question has never been made public and the sections reported in the press were apparently false. That's a shame, then. Egan does a fair job of explaining what happened, though his periodically gushing tone isn't ideal, and it would have been great if what happened had been more interesting.
Some Men in London: Vol. 1 – Queer Life, 1945-59 (2024), edited by Peter Parker, has a great title, a great cover and a great concept, being an anthology of diary entries, extracts from novels, and court reports intended to paint a picture of life as it was for gay men in the capital following the war, but before the legalisation of homosexuality. Sometimes it works: there are moments of poignancy, humour and insight, but the selections are ultimately too samey, and the clear strain of paedophilia in several of the entries is to be honest pretty fucking alarming. I was also left rather underwhelmed by
Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater (1996) by John Joseph Brady, a biography of George H. W. Bush's blues-loving dirty tricks specialist, who remains as elusive at the end of the book as at the beginning, where his supposed Damascene conversion is comprehensively overplayed.
1999: Manchester United, the Treble and All That (2022) by Matt Dickinson is rendered almost incomprehensible by its baffling 99-chapter structure. I was hoping to revel once more in the happiest season of my football-going life, when I was 15, living in Manchester, and United-mad, yet within a few disjointed chapters we've been forced to spend time with Piers Morgan, Greg Dyke and Martin Edwards. The highlight, beyond the chance to relive the football, is the now thoroughly discredited Ryan Giggs bringing Jesper Blomqvist into the United dressing room on the Swede's first day at the club, turning him round so his back was now facing David May, and saying,
"Maysie, you'd recognise this guy now, wouldn't you?"
We move on now to the absolute stinkers.
T. V. – Big Adventures on the Small Screen (2023) is Peter Kay's decidedly half-arsed cash-in third book. The excerpts from the scripts of
Phoenix Nights and
Car Share show how funny and talented the guy is (
Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere, not so much), but also suggest the padding of a book that consists primarily of mentioning TV shows from the '70s, describing scenes from his own work that we could just watch instead, and telling us that he won some awards. There are a few fun bits of behind-the-scenes gossip (special mention for the cameo from
Phoenix Nights' little people), but if I'd paid full whack for this book, the lazy repetition of language would make me feel like someone had their hand in my pocket. Luckily I got it for a quid on the Kindle. It's interesting to compare
T. V. to Norm's book, not just in the sense that one is art and the other is shite, but how here the punching down seems gratuitous and ugly, with innumerable dismissive jokes about disabled people. For a writer who has created warm and deft and subtle work, there's also an awful lot of material here about farts and shitting. At one point he criticises
The Sunday Show for "ripping the piss out of celebrities" and then spends the next few pages doing exactly the same thing. Curious.
The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What’s My Line TV Star and Media Icon, Dorothy Kilgallen (2016) takes us unwantedly into the head of a conspiracy theorist. Its persuasive circumstantial evidence could be neatly summarised in a couple of sides, but it goes on for over 300 fucking pages (!), with author Mark Shaw repeatedly recounting the same few facts, prefaced with the crank's mantra, "Remember how...". That book looks like Truman Capote at his zenith, though, compared with
Capote’s Women (2021) by Laurence Leamer, the first and worst book I read this year. Its story might have made a decent long read, focusing only on the moment of betrayal. But stretched out interminably, it is instead about uninteresting rich people and the clothes they’ve put on. Vacuous and terribly written.
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Thanks for reading. I'll write Part 2, about movies, next.
