Conspicuous Consumption

  Becky Cooper has worked at The New Yorker  and has written a good many articles for them (mostly about food and restaurants) including the four-parter that she would expand (and expand and expand) into this book. One of the great things about The New Yorker is their willingness to go long, whether that means devoting a significant chunk of one issue to an in depth exploration, or spreading that exploration over a few issues. Their commitment to long-form journalism is what keeps many of us reading it. There's such a thing, though, as giving a story that needs space too much space, and that is the problem with Becky Cooper's We Keep the Dead Close . In sharing with us seemingly every detail of her amateur quest to figure out who murdered a Harvard graduate student named Jane Britton, and throwing in the plight of women in academia over the last half-century, #MeToo, our propensity to tell stories and make myths about inexplicable events, and even her own relationship with a ...

  With the possible exception of László Krasznahorkai , there is no writer of recent times who is as ambitious, as original, as brilliant as W.G Sebald. I knew this when I read the first of his books to be translated into English, The Emigrants , and moving through the rest of his oeuvre only convinces me further that this is the case. The Rings of Saturn  is a travel book: Sebald/not Sebald takes a long walk through Sussex. Unlike lesser examples of the genre, though, there are no "hilarious" encounters with locals or with other travelers. Instead we get reflections on history, on literature, and on landscape, rendered in such a way that they are at once somber, dreamlike, allusive, horrifying (and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny). The walker, in the course of his English stroll, calls up Thomas Browne ("Hydriotaphia, urn burial; with an account of some urns found at Brampton in Norfolk") and Edward FitzGerald (translator of Omar Khayyam), and visits his friend M...

 This is the first published of Lee Child's Jack Reacher series. I read it a long time ago, but had mostly forgotten it. What I hadn't forgotten is the character, Jack Reacher. In giving us a man who moves through the world free of all the burdens that our societies and cultures place upon us, and also unbothered by having to forego the wonderful things that our societies and cultures make available to us, Lee Child gives us an attractive fantasy. Imagine being entirely unburdened and free. But of course things can't be that simple. Reacher inevitably gets involved in something. In this case his brother, with whom, like everyone else who has passed through his life, he has been out of touch, is murdered, and his murder turns out to be one small piece of a large pile of crime and corruption. Reacher ends up having to put things right.   With admirable competence and cool—this, too, is part of the fantasy—Reacher does put things right. Having done so, he leaves town, realiz...

     Like most Americans of my generation, I read a couple of novels by John Steinbeck in the course of my education. In my case—maybe in everybody's case—one of them was Of Mice and Men , but I also read  The Pearl . I remember enjoying them, but somehow, as I matured as a reader, I never wanted to continue through Steinbeck's oeuvre. I'm glad that some friends invited me to join in a group read of East of Eden , because, though I probably wouldn't have picked it up on my own, I enjoyed it tremendously.      I tend to dislike books overburdened with "philosophy" and "messages." East of Eden is rich in both, but somehow they don't capsize the ship. Using the story of Cain and Abel as his source, Steinbeck is able to reflect on family, on what he would have called "blood" but  we now prefer to think of as DNA, and most effectively on good and evil.  To say that everyone has some bad, some evil, some of the devil in them is banal. Wh...

 This is a boy's-own-adventure. It was published in 1936, and offers everything that boy's-own-adventures from that period offer. Boys, and children in general, were not assumed to be stupid at that time. The vocabulary is much richer than one would find in books intended for young people in our time.  The hero, Doctor Syn, is not any sort of role model. He's filled with hatred for the man for whom his wife, of her own free will, left him. The whole novel is about Syn, driven by his hatred, tracking that man. He has lots of adventures in the course of pursuing his vendetta, and they are satisfyingly adventurous.  The things that boys'-own-adventures from the good old days offer include also things that are much less attractive. It is assumed, for example, that readers will chuckle along with, or even worse, learn from, the denigration of people of African descent. A black man captains a pirate ship. He and his crew kill, pillage, and rape—you know, pirate stuff—but the ...

 André Gide kept a journal while writing The Counterfeiters . In it, he quotes from a newspaper clipping about the trial of a gang of counterfeiters: When the judge asked Fréchaut if he had been a member of the Luxembourg "gang":      "Let's call it 'the coterie,' your honor," he replied warmly. "It was a gathering where we dealt in counterfeit money, I don't deny that; but we were principally concerned with questions of politics and literature." It is clear that Gide had Fréchaut's description in mind when he composed his novel. It is, indeed, about counterfeiting ("I don't deny that") but it is about many other things as well.  The novel is usually classed as "modernist." The primary reasons for that would seem to be the many plots and stories, some of which remain unresolved, that crisscross through its pages (including a novel within the The Counterfeiters called, of course, "The Counterfeiters," a...

This is a slight collection in every way. The Faber and Faber edition that I read clocks in at 89 pages. Each of the nine stories is short, and the tone is always light. I picked it up because I had enjoyed the parts of the Alexandria Quartet , especially in Mountolive , that deal with diplomacy, which is the subject of these tales, too: the "Corps" in question is the diplomatic corps. The stories didn't exactly scratch the itch for more Mountolivian diplomacy, because the tone of these slight sketches is entirely different from anything in the novels. One imagines that at least some of these tales were written at the same time that Durrell was working on the Quartet , and it's hard not to guess that they were what Durrell, having poured himself a drink, turned to after a full day of Justine, Nessim, Balthazar, and all the rest. Much of the humor is built around national stereotypes and as such, can seem dated. A lot of it, though, still works. Take, for example, this...