All the books I read in 2022, capriciously ranked, compulsively reviewed.
FICTION
At the risk of
repeating myself following last year's rhapsody on the subject of
The Age of Innocence, my favourite novel of the year was by Edith Wharton. Her Midwest masterpiece,
Ethan Frome (1911), is heartbreaking, then horrific – a devastating trick on its audience that leaves you slack-jawed and queasy. Abandoning the drawing rooms, wood-panelled libraries and elegant witticisms of New York for the inarticulate sincerity and abject poverty of rural America, her pen alights on Ethan Frome, a man irreparably damaged by some physical and spiritual smash-up in his distant past. And then we get the whole story, climaxing with the gut-punch to end them all. The prose is beautifully balanced, the emotions so real that they're yours, and if the villainy initially seems too simplistic, that's all in the service of the pay-off. "I doubt I’ll read a better book this year," I wrote in March. And reader, I didn't.
There was serious competition, though, as I plunged into a host of classics I'd been long neglecting. George Eliot's
Middlemarch (1872) will be with me for a long time. Dealing with three pairs of lovers in a rural English town of the 1830s, it’s wise, emotionally overpowering and blessed with a remarkable psychological complexity. Like the best of Philip Roth, it is preoccupied with the unknowability of others. I haven’t read a book that captures so perfectly the way in which we talk with one another at cross-purposes, our readings of situations coloured by our peculiarities, prejudices and degrees of self-obsession. Eliot makes us complicit in those misreadings, leading us in one direction before catching us red-handed, her narrator cautioning us to not be too hasty. She draws her characters so sharply – with an almost merciless clarity – but then forgives them their transgressions. None of that, though, makes her forget to be a smartarse. It’s a book about life, really: about self-delusion, change, and the way our hopes are variously realised, modified or crushed.
I suppose that's what
The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is about too. It's a masterpiece of a slow-burner from Henry James, presenting a young American woman, drunk on freedom, full of ideas, a little too full of pride, who unwittingly entrances a vigorous industrialist, a stolid lord and a consumptive aristocrat, before being manipulated into a relationship with a monstrous aesthete. It took me a while to become attuned to the turns of James’s mind and pen – his long and mannered sentences, overflowing with complex concepts, dressed in the superfluities of Victorian prose – but once I did, I was riveted. And if the serialised nature of the book’s creation results in an imperfect pace, that has virtues of its own: a languorous opening section that we look back upon as an evocation of a lost Eden, followed by lurches forward in time and rapidly accreting plot twists, time going too quickly now, dragging us away from that which is irrevocably past. It's a book driven by its characters, who perform roles out of melodrama (victim, villain, fallen woman, tragic hero) while possessed of a minute and complex shading. Not for James the crisp immediacy of his friend and contemporary, Wharton; he is more obscure and stealthy, his lady graduating from a glazed and bright-eyed complacency to a dreadful greatness and a fate made inescapable by both her virtues and flaws.
I do occasionally read novels that are less than a hundred years old. Like P. G. Wodehouse's
The Code of the Woosters (1938), a mere 84, and quite possibly the funniest book I've ever read. Having come to Jeeves and Wooster absurdly late, I've been going through the oeuvre in order. While
the short stories are mostly terrific and, after the misstep of the first novel (with its rather dated commitment to extended periods of blackface),
the second proved to be a return to form, this third full-length outing is on a completely different level. The plot – which sees Bertie tormented at Totleigh Towers by the continuous re-appearance of three inanimate objects: an antique silver cow creamer, a policeman's helmet, and a notebook filled with bile – is masterfully assembled, and somehow every word that Wodehouse chooses is the correct one. I must have laughed out loud a dozen times. One to return to whenever I need a bit of cheering up, I think.
Though I watch Orson Welles' 1942 film of
The Magnificent Ambersons all the damn time, and voted for it in
my Sight and Sound top 10, I only just got around to reading Booth Tarkington's source novel. It was a sensational success in 1918, winning the Pulitzer, but is now largely derided or dismissed. I found the book deeply moving and surprisingly modern – aside from its occasional yet eye-watering racism and an impenetrably dated opening chapter during which I had to google half the words (they mostly turned out to be types of hat). It’s about the fall of a wealthy Midwest family, and the comeuppance – and ultimate redemption – of a prideful mother’s boy named George Amberson Minafer. He reigns over an aristocratic (though nouveau riche) milieu and possesses no real ambition beyond being “a yachtsman”, but as the automobile is introduced and the town changes (“It was spreading, incredibly. And as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself, and darkened its sky”), the old world dies, and, as it does, George makes the fateful decision to interfere in his widowed mother’s lovelife. Like many (most?) great novels, it’s an ambivalent book: a paean to a lost world, but a world that produced Georgie, that handsome but overweening monster. It is also vividly atmospheric and wonderfully witty, with unforgettable characters, a rich sense of irony, and a great rhythm and poetry to its dialogue. Only the ending stutters, radiating “oh shit, how do I wrap this up” vibes, as a central character makes a sudden and bafflingly-conceived visit to a psychic medium.
The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman (1998), the first novel by
Withnail & I writer-director Bruce Robinson, knocked me sideways. In the wind-blasted Broadstairs winter of 1957, Thomas goes in search of some grubby photographs and instead finds himself – or lack thereof. This book reads like a challenge, in which Robinson must fashion a heartrending coming-of-age novel from the most offputting material imaginable. Its 15-year-old hero – on the surface irredeemably damaged – begins the book by repeatedly soiling himself, before poring over animal porn and indulging in animal torture, while trapped in an airless house that stinks of dog shit, violence and boiling meat. The result, somehow, is deeply and enduringly affecting, more sustained than Paul McVeigh’s
The Good Son and more authentic than Joe Dunthorne’s
Submarine, illuminated by Robinson’s vast, buried reserves of empathy (it has at least four great love stories at its centre), and extraordinary facility for language. It’s also extremely funny, both in its asides and the meticulously-engineered set-pieces, the best of which has Thomas being interrogated about enemas, by a vicar. So in a sense it's quite like
Middlemarch, which also has a vicar.
Another contemporary favourite was Meg Mason's
Sorrow and Bliss (2021), which is brilliant on mental illness, but even better on a specific person with mental illness: cruel, self-destructive and lovely. It's lit fic vaguely masquerading as commercial, with a narrative voice that's up there with
Boy Parts: hilarious, but punctuated with sucker-punch sentences of great sadness. I knew I'd love the book as soon as I read this immaculately-phrased joke:
"The letting agent told us it was an Executive Home, in an Executive Development, and therefore perfect for us – even though neither of us are executives. One of us a consultant specialist in intensive care. One of us writes a funny food column for Waitrose magazine and went through a period of Googling 'Priory clinic how much per night?' when her husband was at work."
, Mason's subsequent utilisation of the words 'Me Cookie' (to denote the taking of pills) merely cemented the deal. The book has a couple of small flaws, I suppose – not all of the supporting characters are fleshed out as well as the main ones; the narrator's journal feels more like a plot device than an organic character element – but dwelling on those seems churlish. It is a stressful, valuable and compassionate book, truly remarkable in the way that y it slowly reveals its central character's great – and perhaps missed – calling in life.
If there's one writer I admire (and look to emulate) more than any other, it's Penelope Fitzgerald.
At Freddie's (1982) is another of her semi-autobiographical masterpieces: small and beautifully-carved, its melancholia and humour in effortless balance, and every sentence perfectly weighted. Its story of devotion, artistry and compromise plays out in a shrewdly-drawn hinterland at the fringes of the West End, where the glorious, quasi-monstrous Freddie runs her rundown stage school for precocious kids. Fitzgerald’s work is so uncommonly atmospheric – the Blitz glass crunched under feet in
Human Voices or the rainfall on fat green leaves in
The Beginning of Spring – and her evocation of this greasepaint-streaked world is unstintingly remarkable, while shot through with an irony that’s neither good-natured joshing nor naïve luvviedom, but something heightened and touching and true. The only time her unerring gift threatens to fail her is during an extended diversion into the love life of two teachers, and yet their climactic meeting in a Lyons’ tearoom is one of the great set-pieces of her career, possessed of a piercing specificity in terms of era and national character that renders it at once a passage of deep and backwards-looking longing, and a work of brutal anti-nostalgia. The book is sad and subtle – its characters’ triumphs fleeting, their disasters enduring – and yet Fitzgerald writes with such unstinting empathy about human bungling, self-delusion and mediocrity, qualities she herself seemed to have in such short supply. The climactic sequence, of snow falling into shadows, and a boy falling too – a presage to a tragedy, and the boy a genius – is heartstopping.
If Sandra Newman's
The Men (2022) lacks the dazzling surefootedness of her exquisitely sad time-travel novel,
The Heavens, it still gets its claws into you. It's a strange, challenging book that engages with, investigates and is occasionally hobbled by contemporary identity politics. Though its peripheral stories are oddly uninteresting, its central one, unfurling slowly, is immersing and utterly haunting. Incidentally: belying the slew of idiotic one-star reviews on Goodreads that greeted the announcement of the book's premise, Newman makes her trans characters specific and deeply human, while engagingly directly with the cruelty of their identity being compromised by the premise.
My continued explorations into the work of Edith Wharton yielded one more elegiac masterwork and a relative failure.
The House of Mirth (1905) is a haunting Wharton tragedy that's universal in its portrait of human impulses, while typically alive to the miniscule nuances of 19th century New York society. It centres on the witty, decorative Lily Bart, who precipitates her own downfall by transgressing the unspoken, irrational codes of her milieu, then clings to an obscure sense of honour that prevents her from halting her slide. Most prosaically, Wharton's writing is perfectly balanced between related but competing elements: plot and character, dialogue and description, humour and emotional gut-punches. And whatever she does, she does superbly: as the world of society first palls on Lily, in the shadow of a joyless future married to a dull book collector, Wharton suddenly turns on her other characters, assassinating each in turn through a succession of short, laser-guided putdowns. The sublime virtue here, though, is the author's understanding of human frailties, and our moments of small greatness, and how they are warped, magnified or covered over by a society obsessed with appearances. By contrast,
The Custom of the Country (1913) is a long-winded, largely one-note satire about monstrous social climber Undine Spragg, and the human wreckage she leaves in her wake. It’s audacious, and at first exciting, but becomes monotonous in its second half, without the clever shading that blesses Wharton’s most effective tours of this sparkling but superficial world. When Undine’s son tries to piece together his life from news clippings, you realise that what’s been missing for the past hundred pages is anything resembling complex human feeling, though the climactic twist – conceived and executed with Wharton’s characteristic, clear-eyed mercilessness, and in retrospect inevitable – is undeniably and blackly hilarious. Her handling of perspective, asking us to sympathise alternately with Undine and with her deluded husband Ralph, a gentle and troubled aesthete, is as cleverly handled as ever, it’s just that at times the characters seem to have been cut out of cardboard.
In the old-favourites-having-trouble corner, we also have J. L. Carr, Howard Spring and Elizabeth Taylor. Last year, I was deeply moved, thoroughly transported and possibly transformed by Carr's
A Month in the Country, but subsequent forays into his work haven't been so fulfilling.
The Battle of Pollocks Crossing (1985) is, like his signature novel, a time-limited period piece:
A Year in Dakota, if you will, based on the author's own time there as a teacher during the Depression. It doesn't feel successful as a whole, lurching forwards, grinding to a halt, the approach not revolutionary (though early passages seem to nudge towards an ingenious fragmented structure a la
Lincoln in the Bardo) but merely piecemeal. If anything its story is too unconventional and perverse, its narrator struggling to penetrate the psyche of his environs, and so keeping us out too. Carr, though, can dazzle in the moment like few authors in history, at times from nowhere. The dialogue he finds in the mouth of James Ardvaak has the rhythm and the ring of the real. And ultimately his is a book about American violence – about a foreign land with a common tongue – and in it you find his peculiar politics, which prize a vivid individuality born of communal spirit, resulting in a left-wing modern Western, elegiac and frustrating, unsatisfying yet essential.
Spring's
My Son, My Son (1938) is basically
We Need to Talk About Oliver, the spoilt son of the selfish, self-made narrator. This was Spring's breakthrough book but now looks more like a dry-run for his masterly 1940 novel,
Fame Is the Spur, another sprawling saga in which his sad-eyed chronicler accrues wisdom as he mellows. Except here it's money and Irish Republicanism in place of renown and labour history, and the characterisation is too daft and cartoonish to properly engage. It isn't just Oliver, whose sole attributes are a physical beauty and a spiralling sociopathy, but the preposterous supporting characters like Irish rabble-rouser Michael Flynn (sample quote: "the peasants haven't so much as a rotten potato to eat") and a mad sea captain who thinks he's Judas Iscariot, comfortably two of the worst creations I've encountered in recent years. The book does pay off, though, building momentum through an aggregation of incident (and an investment of the reader's time) so vast that you can't help but be affected by it. And if it relies too much on coincidences that it mistakes for fate, its final chapters are certainly its best, as Spring's miserable thesis closes out with a succession of punches to the gut.
Elizabeth Taylor is one of the great English writers of the 20th century, but her final novel,
Blaming (1976), written as she was dying from cancer and published posthumously, inevitably suffers from those impossible conditions. The bitter final breath of a truly singular career, it finds her spare style at long last failing, with no real substance behind its extended Kids Say the Funniest Things comedy, and little real meaning beneath the chilly and unfocused misanthropy. We never really get to know these characters, insufficiently introduced and barely expanded, and while some of that may be intentional – since they never really get to know one another – it doesn't make for great fiction. In contrast to
Angel or
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, we only see things happening, we don’t feel them. It is, simply, a bleak book, apparently about old age and death, but undermined by those very things. There are moments when the light breaks through – the last scene before the tragedy; the donation of a photograph and later a painting – where Taylor’s bleak wit and reluctant compassion flash into view, but like Muriel Spark’s swansong (
The Finishing School),
Blaming seems both baggy and strangely slight, with a jaundiced worldview that’s rarely other than wearying.
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (2015), a collection of short stories by the scintillating (and sadly late) Hilary Mantel is perhaps more valuable as a portrait of a changing writer than for the works themselves. The earliest ('Harley Street', 1993; 'How Shall I Know You?', 2000) are overwritten and overly-direct; by the time you get to the final two, written especially for this collection, Mantel's language is spare and strange, and her points often made elliptically through allusion and supposed diversion. In any event, 'The School of English', about the prelude to a rape, is so unpleasant as to be almost unreadable. The world Mantel conjures throughout the anthology is chilly, violent and foul (or, in the case of the opening story, mundane to the point of tedium), lit by only fleeting flashes of compassion. Often she seems either despairing about mankind, or else revelling in putting such nastiness on the page (a case in point: the end of 'Winter Break'). But her work is most effective when not keeping its humanity at bay: after all, unstinting malevolence is no more complex than unstinting mawkishness would be. The best of the stories, 'The Heart Fails Without Warning' (2009), concerns the relationship between two sisters: one gripped by anorexia; the other narrating the decline with a mixture of cruelty, mockery and empathy, her prose showered with fragments of haunting, almost beautiful imagery. Its story is the most familiar of the set, but amid much muted middle-class noir, its balance of style and tone simply seems more satisfying – and interesting. I've never met anyone, or read any reviewer, who wasn't ultimately underwhelmed by the title story (after all, it cuts out before you see anything good), and consoled themselves with the incidental detail. I liked it a lot, though they're right that it's the detail. Best of all is a paragraph in which the narrator crystallises the English condition, and how it informs the nation's response to everything from social injustice to climate change: "in Berkshire and the Home Counties, all causes are the same, all ideas for which a person might care to die: they are nuisances, a breach of the peace, and likely to hold up the traffic or delay the trains."
I got to know some other authors for the first time. Patricia Highsmith's
Deep Water (1957) was an effectively horrible novel about an aloof, eerily avuncular cuckold and his appalling wife. Amid the social staples and status symbols of mid-‘50s America, the author spins a story of sociopathy, satirising middle-class mores while revelling in the chance to be quite spectacularly nasty. Whether its elements of repetition and monotony are a reflection of its instinctively passive protagonist or simply flaws in the writing, I’m not sure. But it’s certainly memorable: evocative, sometimes suspenseful, wickedly funny in places, and dripping with unease and dread.
Notably less gripping was Len Deighton's debut novel,
The Ipcress File (1962), a book that takes a bit of getting used to: not the purposefully convoluted plot or the relentless smartarse asides, but the writer's mildly tortured phrasemaking. He writes uniquely, sure, but hardly clearly, the self-conscious style acting like a barrier between the action and your brain. The genre is Cold War-era spy fiction, saturated with paranoia. It's a book lit by neat touches, but with no underlying authenticity, perhaps unsurprising when you consider that's it's a first-time work by a full-time illustrator with no real knowledge of espionage. It is diverting and distinctive, mildly irritating, and seriously anti-climactic. Soon afterwards, of course, IPCRESS became a film, and its nameless hero turned from a lanky, languid son of Burnley into Michael Caine. I doubt I'll be revisiting Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series following the first entry,
Case Histories (2004): a well-plotted mystery novel with an extensive vocabulary, a mannered structure and a vaguely unpleasant after-taste.
More here.
Having become vaguely acquainted with Ancient Rome via the frustrating
SPQR (see below), I fancied plunging into a more immersive if fanciful version. Robert Graves'
I, Claudius (1934) is certainly that, though it's also deceptively shallow. Our guide is the stammering, 'crippled' historian of the title, an overlooked and widely derided figure prior to his improbable ascension to the throne. Claudius gives us an overview of the three imperial eras (those of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula) that led to his own, but while the book convincing and atmospheric, it's also remote, poorly-paced and massively overlong. Something in the novel's conception is simply off: the idea of Claudius as a historian strips away any immediacy from the bulk of the action, as he writes from a viewpoint that renders his stories as distant anecdotes, frequently happening long ago or far away. And while the court intrigue is often gripping, if often too abruptly dispensed with, a chapter on a military mutiny is frankly interminable. Most philistinic complaint of the year: there are just too many characters for a reader to keep track of.
As a man who only recently found out that you could read your Kindle on your iPhone, I had taken to carrying Penguin's pocket-sized Black Classics to gigs with me, to read in the time between acts. Yes I am a cool yet normal guy, thank you for noticing. By far my favourite was Henry James's
The Figure in the Carpet (1896), a glorious literary mystery, almost gleeful in its malevolence, about a critic who searches for the 'string the pearls were strung on': the unifying secret to a legendary author's work. For much of its length, it's amusing and intriguing, an insider work with faintly laborious plotting; then James swerves into the eternal. Robert Louis Stevenson's
Olalla (1885) has its moments, though, as a Scottish soldier recovering from his injuries decamps to a Spanish mansion whose inbred owners are hiding a few secrets. This Gothic novella is a story of intrigue, obsession and bestial pseudo-vampirism, a little long-winded in its language, but told with such lush and overwrought conviction that you can’t help but be swept along.
Bleaker still was Dostoyevsky's
The Meek One (1876), a profoundly disquieting short story about a pawnbroker, haunted by past disgrace, who directs an obscure, long-term mind game against his child bride. But is his narration sincere or self-serving? It's certainly one of the more horrifying things I've read in recent years. The only disappointing Black Classic was
Femme Fatale (1811), a quartet of stories from the dubious Guy de Maupassant: one about penises, another about lesbianism, a third concerning a mistress passed down from father to son, and the fourth dealing with a female pick-up artist who uses a cemetery as a stalking ground. They're really all just about women though, the author exhibiting some serious incel energy as he's alternately fascinated and repelled by these beguiling, capricious and awful creatures. I found the stories diverting but shallow, and the translation oddly tortuous.
Children's
I loved Grace Easton's picture book,
Cannonball Coralie and the Lion (2018), a story of about friendship, self-worth and roaring. The illustrations are just beautiful. And yeah, alright, I read
Spy School at Sea (2021),
but it wasn't very good.
NON-FICTION
History/politics
Shall we, for once, work our way upwards? That means that we start with Leo Damore's atrocious
Chappaquiddick: Power, Privilege, and the Ted Kennedy Cover-Up (2018), which is both well-researched and almost completely incomprehensible. The author digs up new revelations about his subject's fall from grace (the most notable from Kennedy's cousin, Joe Gargan, a trade-off that apparently requires painting Gargan in the most flattering light imaginable), but the story is so confusingly rendered, and its innumerable characters' motivations so poorly explained, that it's impossible to get a proper handle on either the tragedy or the cover-up. An injustice was clearly done, but the nature and the scale of it remains maddeningly out of focus.
I also very much did not enjoy
I'll Be Gone in the Dark (2018), not just a poor piece of writing but a truly horrible thing to read, as Michelle McNamara recounts a succession of rapes and murders that took place in San Francisco in the '70s and '80s. The details of the attacks made me so anxious and sad that I couldn't sleep, which I'm attributing less to the power of her prose than my lack of compatibility with the true crime genre. The story naturally had a far greater effect on McNamara, whose friends say that her all-consuming interest in this cold case was what caused her to neglect her health, leading to the overdose of prescription drugs that killed her before she could finish the book. While her obsession may have been born of humanity and a sympathy with the victims, the resulting work feels simply ghoulish, with pretensions as inappropriate as its prurience, the author using the ruins of people's lives as springboards for flights of the most appalling writing.
More here.
At least
Golden Boy: Kim Hughes and the bad old days of Australian cricket (2009) was merely disappointing. Often cited as the best book ever written about cricket, it fails to work on almost every level. Critically, its tantalisingly sad thesis – ‘sensitive lad is drummed out of the national captaincy and then the game he loves by macho pricks’ – isn’t borne out by the details. Yes, Hughes is bounced and sometimes bullied by contemporaries Lillee and Marsh, but he himself is a part of the apparently ruinous drinking culture, he urinates on a debutant in the shower for banter, and he ends up leading a rebel tour to Apartheid-era South Africa (!). The book is occasionally gripping and moving, but much more often it's repetitive and difficult to follow, weaving around haphazardly in its chronology and written in strangulated prose that aims for stylisation but is merely confusing and abrupt.
Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind (2007) was a book I'd wanted to read for an age, and to be honest it didn't deliver. It's an erratic overview of perhaps the 20th century’s most celebrated cause de célèbre: that of two Italian anarchists sentenced to death for an armed hold-up in Braintee, Massachusetts. It’s a remarkable story, rather functionally told, with some big but not always convincing thoughts on the wider context, a vivid evocation of the trial and various hearings that sadly fumbles key parts of the evidence, and an agreeably even-handed treatment of its subjects that is then repeatedly undermined by purple prose, clunky similes and tortured segues. The latter weakness may be down to the writer’s preoccupations and personal tics (he seems to strains for an epic profundity in his conclusions to chapters; his habit of introducing a character first by biography and then by name is conspicuously clunky) but it also suggests a certain bittiness in the research: the need to pad the prose by incorporating each piece of information, no matter how tenuous or even irrelevant. I learned a lot, yet left feeling frustrated, particularly by the lack of clarity. It's fine to be unsure about Sacco and Vanzetti's guilt, but here the reader's own faculties are at times clouded by the marshalling of evidence. Take the notorious ‘third bullet’: there’s a wealth of information here – a gallery of fascinating characters issuing charges and counter-charges. But it's only in a brief picture credit, and during the epilogue, that the defence case comes properly into view, and even then it feels incomplete.
Another one that somewhat fizzled was from my regular stomping ground of sporting scandals.
Eight Men Out (1963), by Eliot Asinof, is the definitive chronicle of the ‘Black Sox’ scandal, in which underpaid Chicago baseball players colluded with gangsters to fix the 1919 World Series. It’s an impressive feat of newsgathering – good on the what, why and how – but disappointingly lacking in emotion. Interestingly, it exonerates one of the eight – shortstop Buck Weaver – but indicts “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, the near-mythic figure memorialised in
Field of Dreams whose supposed innocence has become (like Sacco and Vanzetti's) a cause célèbre.
Conspiracy: A History of Boll*cks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them (2022), by Jonn Elledge and Tom Phillips, does exactly what it says on the tin filled with absolute fucking loons. If it isn't as elegantly written as Elledge's brilliant shorter-form journalism, it is both eye-opening and packed with amusing detail. The passages about the Lincoln assassination and the Illuminati (please note: these are
not connected) are particularly memorable. Favourite conspiracy theory: people who don't believe that a large chunk of the Middle Ages ever happened.
Mary Beard's
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) was the first time I've really dipped my toe into the classical world, and probably not the best book with which to do so. It feels like the revisionist notes to a more entertaining if fanciful history that is being enjoyed nearby. Beard’s approach is notably modern: interested in how we know, as much as what we know. But while that is initially invigorating, it ultimately makes the book disjointed and piecemeal, preventing it from generating any momentum. The overall effect is of having attended 12 fitfully fascinating lectures, full of cumbersome equivocations, rather than been swept away by an immersive story with a propulsive narrative. Her vast love of her subject makes me want to explore it more, while the limitations of
SPQR’s approach make me want to do so with someone else.
SPQR took me more than a month to finish, I think
Scoundrel (2022) took me two days. Subtitled, '
How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free', it's a pageturner about the charming psychopath who hoodwinked Conservative tastemaker William F. Buckley into campaigning for his release – and then, when he got out, tried to kill again. The treasure trove of letters sent between Buckley, the psychopath (Edgar Smith) and the lovelorn literary editor drawn into their circle (Sophie Wilkins) is so irresistible to Weinman that at times she surrenders the narrative entirely to them, an issue that makes the book’s mid-section feel paper-thin. The wider significance of the story is also overstated, not least by the book’s blurb. But the tale at the book’s centre is darkly and abidingly fascinating, showing what happens when an almost-great man of vast qualities and deep flaws – a dazzlingly witty, furiously loyal and outstandingly kind bigot, dazzlingly clever in a rather shallow way – comes into contact with a master manipulator whose only interest is in himself, and at whose centre is nothing but an untamed misogynistic rage. Smith is a fairly simple character (if a persuasive and deceptive one) but Buckley is anything but, and the book shows him at his best and his worse: he is trusting, dogged and decisive, willing to pause his principles in the name of basic humanity, and yet famously unwilling to do the same for non-male, non-white people, and unable to ever quite accept or acknowledge his own mistakes or their effect, either psychically or in print. In truth, Weinman doesn't dig into those issues enough, but she does lay out the information that makes it possible for us to do so.
Robert Caro wrote my favourite non-fiction books of
2019,
2020 and
2021.
Working (2019) is a welcome stopgap while we wait for his
fifth epic volume on the years of Lyndon B. Johnson. In theory, it’s about Caro’s process. In practice, it’s a series of lively snippets taking us behind the scenes of the two greatest biographies I’ve ever read. Why now? And why a piecemeal approach when he also intends to write a memoir? Because our time here is short, Caro says, and he wants to get some of this down just in case. In the earlier essays (dealing mostly with New York power broker Robert Moses), he’s often repeating things we know – admittedly interspersed with piercing insights – but the book becomes increasingly illuminating as he delves into the life of LBJ, and listens as ‘Tommy the Cork’ shrugs off a political scandal, Alice Glass’s relatives arrive to defend her honour, and Lady Bird Johnson discusses her husband’s mistress. The climactic chapter here, a sidebar about the two songs that defined LBJ, is absolutely exquisite. If only, like
The Power Broker, this book were also 1,300 pages long. Now back to the main project, Robert. Chop chop, time's a wasting.
Jeffrey Toobin's
The People V. O.J. Simpson (2016), meanwhile, was a simply scintillating account of that notorious case, focusing on the investigation and the criminal trial, and explaining just how O.J. got away with it. Toobin's telling is masterly (if rather bracingly of-its-time), full of deft character sketches, colourful detail and illuminating legal analysis. A shame, then, that the author will always be the man who got sacked from the New Yorker for wanking on a Zoom call.
As you may have heard,
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) is something special: a brilliant book on the dizzying saga of the Sacklers, who got a nation hooked on opioids, and used the proceeds to plaster their own name across the great museums of the Western world. It’s a jawdropping exposé: a portrait of capitalism at its most obscene, heartless and unhinged, starring modern-day robber-barons simply allergic to decency, steamrollering societal safeguards as they warp and erode the very tenets of democracy. After a couple of fairly dry early chapters (inevitable, I think, due to a dearth of sources), it is just revelation after revelation. About a third of the way through, I thought that Keefe must surely be running out of bombshells. That’s when it really escalates. If
Empire of Pain becomes a little disjointed towards the end, with almost self-contained portraits of minor Sacklers and the introduction of artist Nan Godlin, it never loses either its clear-eyed anger or its sense of panache. It is chilling, infuriating and spectacularly entertaining, like
Succession set against the backdrop of
Winter’s Bone.
My favourite non-fiction book of 2022, though, was definitely David M. Oshinsky's
A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (1983). Robert Caro’s series on LBJ has certainly done a number on me: most contemporary political history now looks barely-researched and fatally lacking in pizzazz. Not David Oshinsky’s magnificently-titled biography of Tail-Gunner Joe. It's a wry, perceptive and quite astonishingly authoritative study of McCarthy’s peak years, with the author junking the received wisdom and going instead for the truth, both in the detail and his overarching narrative. McCarthy was a true believer not a con man, argues Oshinsky; a skillful communicator not a thicko; a bullying braggart who never did quite find a spy – but who perhaps deserves a modicum of credit for identifying genuine failings in his nation’s security. Could it ever truly have been worth it, though? Along the way, McCarthy trashed reputations and ruined lives – at least one of his victims killed himself. And how did he get away with it all for so long? That’s in Oshinsky’s purview too: he’s only slightly interested in his subject’s childhood – regarding it mostly as a chance to stick the boot into rival biographers – but devotes entire, zippy chapters to Eisenhower, the Senate establishment and the fourth estate, revealing how their complaisance, fear or sympathy for McCarthy’s crusade aided his rise to prominence. This is an outrageously entertaining book, peppered with choice excerpts from congressional transcripts, colourful details, and the author’s deadpan witticisms, and breaking off whenever it matters to dig out a crucial document and finally set the record straight. Perhaps my obsession with the communist witchhunt in Hollywood can now be expanded to communist witchhunts in America more generally. I'll keep you posted.
Film
My film book of the year was
Shepperton Babylon (2006), in which Matthew Sweet essays British cinema from the silent days to the late ‘70s, waging war on received wisdom (and, for that matter, Norman Wisdom). At its heart it’s an oral history, the author touring Britain in the early noughties so as to bother the wrinkled remnants of our cinema’s glory days before their stories are lost forever. As a guide, Dr Sweet is superb: deeply knowledgeable, effortlessly witty, and with a loyalty only to his theses – not his subjects – meaning that though he’ll turn up with flowers on the doorstep of some forgotten former ingenue, he’ll be brutally frank about their career when it comes to the writing. He’s also a glutton for gossip; I’d naively imagined that the book’s title (riffing amusingly on Kenneth Anger’s scurrilous
Hollywood Babylon) was a joke about our film industry’s fundamental innocence, but absolutely not – this book is as rich in scandal as Anger’s, if rather better sourced. Across 10 roughly chronological chapters, focusing on phenomena like Gainsborough pictures’ heroines, Michael Balcon, and Rank’s decade of dominance, Sweet’s passion is for rescuing figures from wrongful obscurity (a hello to weird, profligate ‘30s impresario Basil Dean), and correcting myths about our homegrown cinema, some redressed since it was published in 2004, but others enduring. He repeatedly assails the idea that British film is dull, staid or disposable, instead celebrating the sheer strangeness of our cinema – born equally of artistic cravings and commercial expediency – and realising that genre films invariably tell us much more about our times than so-called ‘prestige’ pictures. His mini-essays on Dickie Attenborough (celebrated as our screen’s finest monster and most unbearable hypocrite), George Formby (a blackface comic without the make-up) and Kenneth More (his cockiness only bearable when it is crumbling) are just about definitive, and if I don’t quite buy the summations of Dirk Bogarde and Johnny Mills’ careers, they are at least agreeably provocative. In fact, the only time he lost me was with some scattershot barbs elsewhere about bulimia and scoliosis. This is the most I’ve learnt from a film book in a long time, and the most I’ve laughed along with one too, though the final chapter proper – dealing with British sex comedies, and narrated in part by a pimp – is suitably but quite remarkably unpleasant.
It was an absolute joy, and a really proud moment, to write the essay for the
UK Blu-ray release of my favourite film, Remember the Night. As part of my research, I had a lovely time reading
Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges: The Power and the Glory, Easy Living, Remember the Night (1998), which is full of Sturges' sparkling, delicately sentimental dialogue, allied to a sense of fun that at times is just there to amuse himself. "We TRUCK ALONG after [the main characters]," begins one note to the eventual director of his depressing 1933 spec script,
The Power and the Glory, "which will enhance the charm of the scene besides being excellent exercise for the director and camera man." The accompanying introductions in this edition are a little dry, but Sturges would just have a Mitteleuropean waiter prescribe alka seltzer and have done with it. James Curtis's
Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges (1992) was also absolutely invaluable. It's a fine, fast-paced biography of the singular Hollywood humourist (and director, restaurateur, engineer, inventor, perfume wholesaler), which gets to the bottom of how it went so right – and then so wrong. It rarely hits as hard emotionally as it might – only when Sturges breaks with regular cast member Bill Demarest, or goes into a decline-fuelled trance-like mope-state on his boat – but its mixture of script analysis, oral interviews and breezy detail is both easy-to-take and of lasting value.
I got a huge amount out of Alan K. Rode's
Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film (2017), which details the life of the great Warner Bros director, who made
Casablanca, made stars of Doris Day and Errol Flynn, and made his underlings cry. Curtiz's work was his life, and so beyond a fair stab at essaying his early years (typically difficult to document), his innumerable conquests (ditto) and his property purchases (tedious), Rode focuses on the films, chatting to everyone who's still around, digging out interviews with everyone else, and raiding the paper archives to reconstruct the production of his subject's numerous classic movies (as well as the not-so-good ones). If Hal Wallis and Jack Warner's innumerable missives can generally just be condensed to the words, "Please stop spending our money", there are countless irresistible nuggets. Curtiz the director emerges as an artist, a company man and an on-set tyrant, with Rode an unusually clear-eyed chronicler, particularly good on studio-era context, and at teasing out the truth about contested stories. Did Curtiz really drown three extras during the making of
Noah's Ark? Did he murder hundreds of horses while filming
The Change of the Light Brigade? And did he shit on the ground in front of his cinematographer to prove a point? The answers, incidentally, are 'Yes, quite possibly', 'no', and 'yes, but he might have had dementia'. Curtiz also tried to cast Shirley Temple as a femme fatale, one of the great cinematic 'what-if's.
Not purely about film, but crucial to understanding it, is Isaac Butler's
The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (2022), a vivid biography of the Method, a theory of acting that was birthed in Russia some time after 1897. migrated to the US, reached its maturity at the radical Group Theatre during the Depression, and then found fame in Hollywood, being partially discredited before its death in the 1980s. Butler is a witty, lively but unfailingly sincere guide, whose belief in the value and power of performance sweeps you along. Simply put, it's a book that has changed the way I think about, engage with and appraise acting. Its middle section, in which the Method takes Broadway and then Hollywood by storm, is probably its most exciting, but it is full of vivid detail and fresh perspectives, and the author's ability to distil the art and career of an artist like Clifford Odets or John Garfield in a single paragraph is extraordinary. He can also cut to the heart of the infighting between the various proponents of the system, explaining that ultimately there is no 'one true method', and that De Niro's famous physical transformation in
Raging Bull has something in common with the approach of Stella Adler, but little of Stanislavski and none of Strasberg.
Glenn Frankel's
High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic (2017) is an excellent addition to that bulging shelf of books about the blacklist, retelling the story from the perspective of screenwriter Carl Foreman, who wrote the seminal Western – and HUAC allegory –
High Noon, only to be sacked by his (posturing, liberal) production partners during filming. They could back a film about the importance of standing up for a principle, it seems, they just couldn’t stand up for a principle themselves. The first third of the book, setting the political scene and offering overlapping pen-portraits of the likes of actor Gary Cooper, director Fred Zinnemann and producer Stanley Kramer is undeniably deft but will also be over-familiar to anyone immersed in this era. Thereafter, though, there’s plenty that’s new, with Frankel playing judge and jury over competing claims about the making of
High Noon (most notably debunking cutter Elmo Williams’ oft-repeated tale that he single-handedly ‘saved’ the film in his editing suite), and unearthing the transcript of Foreman’s appearance before HUAC, never published before. It's a valuable and highly readable book on its own terms, but also works amazingly well as a sequel to Thomas Doherty’s
Show Trial, since Doherty saw 1947-8 as the most interesting period of the witchhunt story – the later hearings consisting merely of rehashes and echoes – whereas Frankel is concerned primarily with 1951-2, which cast the net wider, bringing hundreds more artists under suspicion, each one dealing with the threat to their reputation and livelihood in a slightly different way.
I am, as I have said before, obsessed with HUAC in Hollywood, so I didn't stop there.
Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist (1996) by Walter Bernstein is an honest and intimate first-person account of the era from blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein, tracing his journey from Young Communist League activist to wartime news reporter and finally fully-fledged party member, as the vultures begin to circle. You might look at Bernstein’s credits and think, “Who the hell was this guy anyway? He didn’t write much of note” and then you remember that he’d just been hired by Robert Rossen to adapt
All the King’s Men when he was blacklisted for eight years. Which is rather the point. Bernstein writes in a spare, staccato style, influenced like so many of his contemporaries by Hemingway’s short sentences and simple language. Chapter breaks are rare, but new chapters start with vivid, cinematic images born of his teleplay experience. His segues between topics can be clumsy or even incoherent, and there’s little hierarchy of information: John Garfield’s death, the unmasking of Soviet Russia, a Bette Davis name-drop and sketch – all get much the same treatment. But the book is truly exceptional on the psychology of blacklisting: why Bernstein abhorred some stool pigeons and almost excused others; the way HUAC inspired the communal living that the reds had previously only imagined; the way it put them on the defensive, preventing them from questioning their own beliefs. By 1996, aged 77, he is, for the most part, a remarkably clear-eyed chronicler (the exception is the question of loyalty to the Soviet Union, raised as an issue, then rather mangled), candid about his own errors of judgement or analysis, ruthless about others’ failure of integrity. There are moving cameos from Zero Mostel, Abe Polonsky and Philip Loeb, all victims of the blacklist who Bernstein semi-fictionalised for his 1976 script,
The Front. A child of the screen, he sees everything through the prism of cinema: events from real life are merely mirrors of things he’s glimpsed in the movies. And man does he love the movies. He writes wonderfully about them too: sentimental but perceptive, celebrating art and genre schlock alike, simultaneously seduced and revolted by the “lunatic pretension” of Mankiewicz’s
Barefoot Contessa (which he watches in the company of sailors who believe that the male hero has “got no dick”). If you’re here purely for the witchhunt material, you’ll find it in embedded in context of variable interest – Bernstein’s wartime exploits include scoring the first international interview with Tito, training, and just sort of sitting around quite a bit – but at its best it offers a perspective on the period that no other blacklist book does.
There’s plenty of pretension and even more padding in
Last Night at the Viper Room (2013), Gavin Edwards' biography of the extraordinary and deeply troubled actor River Phoenix, yet it gets close to at least some version of its complex and contradictory central figure. Edwards’ approach is to offer a mosaic of Phoenix’s life and world in more than 70 short chapters, some of them straightforwardly biographical but others impressionistic or irrelevant, as the book leaps between present-tense flights of pseudo-poetry and baldly factual chunks of text dealing with Phoenix’s contemporaries (an ancient Johnny Depp interview is mined far beyond its worth, not least because Depp, away from the screen, seems such a shallow, charmless bore). Phoenix was probably the single most gifted actor of his generation; his work – particularly in
My Own Private Idaho,
Running on Empty,
Dogfight,
Stand by Me and
The Mosquito Coast - remains deep and strange and quite remarkably raw. But while the temptation always seems to be to paint him as either a saint – too good for this world – who made one tragic diversion into hedonism, or as a selfish, barely-talented smack addict with great cheekbones, Edwards sensibly finds a centre ground, seeing his subject as an unworldly, essentially decent guy tormented by the trauma of childhood sexual abuse, who after a blistering start to his career saw his talent increasingly subsumed by addiction. The author’s sense of compassion for Phoenix is clearer in his tweets, and in the book’s Acknowledgements, than in the book proper, but when he sticks to his central subject – and puts aside the amateur psychology, distractions and eerie but cartoonish foreshadowing – it’s a fairly enlightening, effective and affecting biography. Martha Plimpton’s angry, empathetic response to her friend’s death is still so clear-eyed, honest and sad: “He was just a boy," she said, "a very good-hearted boy, who was very fucked-up and had no idea how to implement his good intentions.”
Silent Star (1968) is a lively if rather over-familiar* memoir from, well, silent star Colleen Moore. You can tick off the cliches as we come to them: a night at Chaplin's; a trip to San Simeon; the scandals of the '20s and '30s (Arbuckle, William Desmond Taylor, Paul Bern); the matter of John Gilbert's voice. As ever, key figures are idealised (Tom Mix, Mervyn LeRoy) while others are traduced (William S. Hart), as the subject finds professional success but personal disappointment, while taking credit for various discoveries (boosting Gary Cooper, renaming Loretta Young). It can be hard to take this sort of book entirely seriously once you've read
Me, Cheeta. Moore's proximity to Hollywood lore is a draw, though – she double-dated with Taylor's mistress, was Errol Flynn's landlady, and can debunk misinformation about Harlow from being at her wedding reception – and there are enough diverting if hardly uproarious after-dinner stories to you keep you engaged. I wouldn't have minded a bit more about her own movies, though. She lists
The Power and the Glory as her favourite film, and
So Big! as her best performance, but doesn't even mention the classic
Why Be Good?, while her comic masterclass in
Ella Cinders is only deemed worthy of a photo and caption. One interesting side-note: when F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch," he wasn't referring to himself! He was inscribing a miniature of his book, This Side of Paradise, and writing the sentence from the book's perspective. That's obvious in the text ("My author's name is F. Scott Fitzgerald," his inscription concludes), but misconstrued by whoever wrote the jacket copy, and misrepresented ever since.
*in the sense that we have read all this before, not that she is being overly familiar with us
But man alive that book looked like
Slaughterhouse-Five next to the next one, during which I almost died of boredom. The fact that James T. Fisher's
On the Irish Waterfront (2009) was published by the Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America should perhaps have given me the clue that it'd be a rather dry PhD thesis of a book, rather than a piece of popular history or a behind-the-scenes pageturner. Fisher is interested primarily in union wrangling on the docks, and in the life, politics and theology of Pete Corridan, the 'waterfront priest' who inspired Karl Malden's character in Kazan's immortal apologia for informing,
On the Waterfront. The author's provocative view, in fact, is that the film wasn't Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg's celluloid defence of their decision to name names to HUAC, since Schulberg had already written a draft of the script beforehand. But that argument doesn't really make sense: the question of naming names had been in the air in Hollywood since 1947, Schulberg added the scenes of Terry Malloy on the witness stand two years after his own testimony, and Kazan explicitly acknowledged the link in his own autobiography (Fisher suggests that the direction simply found it too "irresistible" a reading to pass up). There is some valuable material in here – it's certainly a useful reference work if you're studying the film – but taken as a whole the book is rather poorly-ordered, repetitive and, well, extremely tedious.
Art, music, love, letters and operations
Yes, that famous way of classifying books, coming in handy again.
I really liked Janet Malcolm's
Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (2013): more piercing insights, precisely elucidated, in this collection from one of the great non-fiction stylists. Malcolm is unconquerable in the realm of the profile (there are three such works here, all superb, though her epic on the characters swirling around the magazine Artform is simply a masterpiece), and if her essays are more earthly, they're always provocative and interesting, with piping hot takes on the likes of the Bloomsbury Group, Edith Wharton, and photographer Irving Penn. While wolfing down great quantities of her work does begin to reveal repeated ideas (the 'figure in the carpet' she borrows from Henry James) and terms ('demotic' is a favourite), the final line of her obituary of Joseph Mitchell brings home with devastating clarity just what an unusual and original a writer she truly was.
Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy by John Armstrong (2003) is a slim, deceptively weighty book about the nature of love: what it is, how it feels, how we keep it. Sometimes a polemic, at others a gentle rumination, Armstrong spikes his philosophy with evolutionary biology, and draws in narratives from Tolstoy, Lampedusa and the life of Goethe to make his points. It's incomplete, inevitably, but it isn't intended as a book of instructions, more a starting point, encouraging you through his compassionate writing to think deeply.
The book of Kurt Vonnegut's
Letters (2014) is a revealing if not always obviously edifying anthology that exhibits both the public Vonnegut – that is, Vonnegut as he wished to be and often was: compassionate; warm; funny in a way that no-one else ever quite has been – and the more difficult private creature: spiky and even spiteful when wounded; at times tediously money-minded; slogging away at work that always seemed effortless. There’s gossip here if that’s what you’re after (and most journalists covering its publication were) – about the true origins of Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut’s 1965 affair, or his second wife’s subsequent betrayal – but the real delight is in his use of the language: the echoes of his signature phrases and themes, the genesis of others, the way he caps each letter with the perfect sign-off, the matching of theme and style. His letter to a baseball team seeking sponsorship is wonderful, and his evisceration of literary critic Anatole Broyard utterly devastating, but it’s the emotionally complex letters to his daughter Nanny that form the centre of this book. She felt abandoned when her dad left the family unit (a decision he starkly outlines in a confession to a friend that at a stroke cuts a gash into his reputation as America’s grandfather), and their complex relationship results in letters from Vonnegut that can be wise, reconciliatory or desperately unhappy and splenetic, but are beneath those things utterly loving. It is not an unstintintingly insightful or entertaining collection but if you care about Kurt – and can embrace his flaws and complexities as much as you can the projected, accepted image – then it is essential.
I wrote a lot (perhaps too much?) about Bob Dylan's mad, maddening and unwittingly insightful
Philosophy of Modern Song (2022) right here, if that seems like the sort of thing you might like.
And I had another operation. Well, two actually. And while recuperating I was reading a biography of Preston Sturges that mentioned how much of an influence Irvin S. Cobb's 35-page comic essay,
Speaking of Operations (1915) had had on his work. So I read it. Cobb's piece is inevitably dated (not just the author puffing a cigar in the hospital ward, but his knowing references to medical conventions long since forgotten), but amid that, and a periodically offputting smugness, are some fantastic gags, especially towards the end. His thoughts on the ultimate value of vivisection are a definite highlight.
***
Thanks for reading. Part 2 of the review will about the other best thing in the world, movies.
