Conspicuous Consumption

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...

 As Christopher Hitchens famously argued, "religion poisons everything." This may or may not be true (I'm going with "true"), but in the case of Richard Price's Lazarus Man , it's hard not to believe that religion or something like it has made him a worse writer than he was when he was composing novels like Clockers and writing screenplays for The Wire .   Clockers  was entirely successful because of its gritty realism, a realism that left no place for sentimentality, let alone quasi-religious self-help messages.  The Wire , inspired in part by Clockers , and among the best narrative art of our time, was likewise clear-eyed and hard-hitting. The "Lazarus" of the title, Anthony, whose life is a mess, is apparently buried for three days in a Harlem building collapse. The unlikelihood of his resurrection makes him a minor celebrity, and, on the basis of his experience, he becomes a popular speaker. He tells an audience, at one point,  I never bee...

 With Transit of Venus , The Bay of Noon , and The Great Fire , Shirley Hazzard has written some of the great novels of our time. Everyone has to start somewhere, though. The Evening of the Holiday , Hazzard's first novel, is where she started. It is, as is partly true of all her books, a love story. In this case a half-Italian half-English woman becomes involved with an Italian in Italy. As always, Hazzard writes about the affair meticulously. No sentence is less than perfect, but the book, as short as it is, was a bit of a slog. It didn't, for me, come to life until the last page or two. It is there that we see the writer Hazzard was to become. The affair, as both parties knew it would have to, has come to an end. The protagonist is on a train, the first leg of her trip back to England. There are soldiers on the train, among them a bugler who tries to play whenever the train stops:  The wistful music filled the train and floated out on the cold dark station of every town we ...

 It was brave of Virginia Woolf, in the wake of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse , to try something completely different in her next novel, Orlando . Nothing like what had come before, it is a historical fantasia, and it is hard to imagine that Woolf didn't have fun writing it. Alas, however, it's not as much fun for the reader as it must have been for the author. There is humor and sparkling prose. It's Virginia Woolf we're talking about, after all. But the humor isn't always as humorous as it should be, and the prose, at times, doesn't sparkle brightly enough to hold one's interest. That's my take, but what do I know? It was extremely popular in its day, so much so that it made Virginia, Leonard, and the struggling Hogarth Press financially solvent for the first time. The novel is groundbreaking in its treatment of gender, but in terms of style, it seems less interesting than the narrative experiments Woolf had pulled off successfully in her previou...

         David Farrah opens his collection, “Chotto,” with a paragraph discussing the flexibility of that Japanese word: “It means a little of something,” but it has, in addition, “chameleon-like qualities” that allow it to “tactfully hedge or suggest or politely request.” It can also “color itself passive aggressive and deferentially resist.”       This small word is brimming with meaning, and thus can be seen as emblematic of the poems in this book. They too are little things: the longest is twenty-one lines, and many are much shorter. The few lines that make up the poems are short, too: There are a couple of seven-syllable lines because the form of those poems, haiku, demands them, and the odd six-syllable line, but the poems are mostly composed of lines of five syllables or fewer. Like chotto , though, these little poems do a lot.       See, for example, how in “Event Horizon,” th...