Raymond Chandler had ambitions for the detective novel. “Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic,” he wrote in 1940 in “The Simple Art of Murder,” and Chandler, who died in 1959, thought his genre stood as good a chance as any of getting reality right. Later in that manifesto, he compares its Read More
Todd A. Kessler was the boy genius of the Sopranos writers’ room. In 1999, he wrote a teleplay, “D-Girl,” about a gangster who writes a screenplay (You Bark, I Bite) that was so good, it changed the rules of dark comedy on television. He was 26. It was the first Sopranos episode he’d done. By 2000, his standing at the show had risen to the point that rumor named him as the successor-in-waiting to David Chase, the Sopranos creator. The two became friends. That summer, when an episode they co-wrote was nominated for an Emmy, Mr. Kessler was elated. Still, he can’t have been much surprised. The episode, “Funhouse,” the last of the second season, is a brilliant piece of writing. The surprise came 10 minutes after the nomination was announced, when Mr. Chase phoned up Mr. Kessler and fired him. He was stunned. “The timing isn’t great,” Mr. Chase admitted during the call. Mr. Kessler wept, and although he obtained a reprieve, it didn’t last.
Had he been fired for being too good? The next act of Mr. Kessler’s career suggested that this possibility hadn’t escaped him. In 2007, he created Damages, an Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning drama about a litigator who brutalizes her protégé. It was “based,” Brett Martin writes in his new book, Difficult Men, “in no small part on [Mr. Kessler’s] experiences working on The Sopranos.” Nor was its creator the only Sopranos alumnus whose later success involved getting even. Mr. Chase had a talent for inflicting the kind of trauma that results in a trip to the podium. Read More
Colum McCann writes better from female points of view than male ones. Among living male novelists I know of, this problem is unique. So the white Irishman is a brilliant ventriloquist of hookers and housewives who writes feelingly about African-American femininity. Yet with his white Irish male characters, for whom he writes in something like his own voice, the echo comes back dead. It is only one of the ways in which Mr. McCann, a self-described “international mongrel” (the term is Michael Ondaatje’s), evades identity lines. His style is assimilative, self-effacing, globalized and alienation-free. He might be the first European to have novelized America unironically. He has a superb imagistic eye—once you have read that, for example, a long-billed bird is like “a scissors moving across the sky,” the simile cannot be unseen—yet he seems to be more interested in empathy than observation. Gentleness excites him, as does trauma on a large scale, and all his books have at least one landmark calamity: the Troubles, the subway sandhogs, the persecution of the Roma, AIDS. He writes new takes on well-known disasters, propelled by a spirit of ultra-modern sensitivity. Read More
Zack Busner, the naïve neurologist in Will Self’s new novel, Umbrella (Grove Press, 448 pp., $25), thinks he can use the drug L-Dopa to cure a disease called Encephalitis lethargica. It last broke out during World War I, and its sufferers have been catatonic for 50 years, but Busner predicts “miraculous” results. “In the upper storeys of these rundown minds,” he thinks, “true sentience remains.” This hunch is vindicated when the “enkies” wake up to the ’70s and start displaying Edwardian attitudes. Audrey Death, the liveliest enkie, calls her Kenyan nurse “the blackie.” Unfamiliarity induces raptures as well as racism—another woman spends whole days being amazed by a light switch. A novelist might envy the enkies’ responsiveness to life, like a Martian’s or an infant’s in its rawness. Yet there’s a witty scene in which Busner corrals “his guinea pigs” for an outing to a church. As cultural tourists, they fall into the usual clichés of curiosity, unconsciously parodying their awe at the new world by faking it for the old one: “they stop to marvel at the enormous organ, with its three-storey-high pipes.”
Umbrella is a novel that ceaselessly contrasts real wonder with sham versions. Even encephalitis is like this, a travesty of regard for the basic propositions of being human. A risen enkie recalls his catatonic inner life as a run-on sentence of hysterical repetitiveness: “a dreadful copybook sort of arithmetic … I am what I am what I am.” Umbrella spans a century but repeats its themes. When Stanley Death, a soldier, sends telegrams to his sister Audrey from the Battle of the Somme, all that they say is “I am.” Read More
Saul Steinberg was the best-loved nonwriter in the history of The New Yorker. He did cartoons, fake maps, trick diplomas and tinkered-with postcards, a sketchbook from behind the Iron Curtain and another on the road with the Milwaukee Braves. Often he just did the doodles (the “spots,” as editors called them) adorning the columns of spotless prose. He even drew some of the advertisements that appeared in the magazine’s margins, until he got so rich he stopped needing the work. The Romanian-born Steinberg did his first New Yorker drawing for Harold Ross in 1941 and his last for David Remnick in 1999, the year of his death. Along the way, he did 90 covers, a number that continues, posthumously, to rise; Steinberg’s ghost most recently had the cover last week. His masterpiece appeared 36 years earlier, on March 29th, 1976: “View of the World From 9th Avenue,” his emblem of New York self-centeredness, in which the expanses of Ninth and 10th Avenues give way to a fat strip of the Hudson, the foreshortened flyover states and the tapered specks of far-off Asia. Read More
Last June, officials at a software expo in Tehran announced that production had begun on a new computer game—“The Stressful Life of Salman Rushdie and the Implementation of his Verdict.” “We felt we should find a way,” said a spokesperson, Mohammad-Taqi Fakhrian, “to introduce our third and fourth generation to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and its importance.” Being cast as the bad guy in an educational first-person-shooter wasn’t the first of Mr. Rushdie’s tribulations in the entertainment business. In a well-known episode of Seinfeld, Mr. Rushdie’s life in hiding is the subject of a joke, and in a less well-known movie, International Gorillay, three flying Korans burn the villain, “Salman Rushdie,” with lightning bolts. There were weirder indignities. Bono based a “haunting ballad” on one of his books, then pursued him into a parked car to make Mr. Rushdie listen to it on repeat. Warren Beatty once hit on Mr. Rushdie’s girlfriend while the author watched from the other end of the table, and during the filming of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Hugh Grant kissed him on the mouth. Of his cameo in that movie—he surfaces at a book party to point Renée Zellweger to the toilet—Mr. Rushdie writes in his new memoir, Joseph Anton (Random House, 656 pp., $30), “It was harder than he expected to play a character called Salman Rushdie.” Read More
In 2010, the English novelist and critic John Lanchester published a book about the credit crisis of 2008. It’s called I.O.U. Presented as a guidebook to the dark side of fiscal complexity, I.O.U. also covers simpler terrain. Half of its usefulness lies in the author’s talent for unraveling the deviousness of modern finance, but the other half lies in his willingness to explain, and then punctually re-explain, the basics of how money works. The pyrotechnic frauds and cutting-edge ruses that impelled the credit crunch are exposed—and sometime before that there’s a set of instructions about how to draw up a balance sheet. This was a winning formula; I.O.U. became a bestseller. It can’t have hurt that Mr. Lanchester is a witty and likeable writer, and that his conclusions are so passionately fair-minded. After three decades of the rough-and-tumble of laissez-faire boom and bust, Mr. Lanchester proposed we smarten up and just shrink: “We in the West can do something that no people in history have done: we can show the world that we know when we have enough.” Read More
Near the end of Canada (Ecco, 432 pp., $27.99), the new novel by Richard Ford, the narrator suggests a few literary parallels to the story he’s just finished telling. It’s quite a crib note:
[These books] to me seem secretly about my young life—The Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, The Sheltering Sky, The Nick Adams Stories, The Mayor of Casterbridge. A mission into the void. Abandonment. A figure, possibly mysterious, but finally not… Read More
In 2005, Bill Clegg, the handsome, gay cofounder of a thriving Manhattan literary agency, went on a two-month crack spree that destroyed his life. He was 33. It was, as he put it in his first memoir, 2010’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, his “Jesus year.” That book is a stylish record of his swan dive to rock bottom. It’s very readable, in the sense that you’d have to be a Martian to find it boring. It’s short, there’s lots of sex, and whenever a worried friend pops up or remorse sets in there’s always a “thick cloud of crack smoke” to put things in perspective. Mr. Clegg spends much of the book half-naked in hotel rooms, getting high and drinking vodka with “my towel cinched low on my hips.” Usually he has a “partner in crime,” and when he doesn’t he turns to porn. Crack makes him paranoid: he sees DEA agents everywhere, hears footsteps, infers conspiracies. He believes the cabdrivers of Manhattan are malevolently leagued against him. “Lose nothing or lose everything,” he thinks, but ultimately he just loses a lot. As well as $40,000 in savings, he loses his friends, his clients, his business, his reputation, his libido, his boyfriend and 40 pounds. The debauchery is punctuated by bathetic episodes in which he tries to get new holes pierced in his belt; his pants don’t fit him anymore. Read More
Hell is other people, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre; and this may grant perspective on the news that solitude is in vogue in the United States. “Today, more than 50 percent of American adults are single,” writes Eric Klinenberg in Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (Penguin Press HC, 288 pages, $27.95) “and 31 million—roughly one out of every seven adults—live alone.” Why so lonesome, Americans? A professor of sociology at New York University, Mr. Klinenberg spent years on the trail of typical specimens of contemporary singleness, from rake to recluse to divorcée. Now he has written a book, which reveals that most Americans live alone not because they must but because they would rather. Incidentally, it also suggests that the selfless gene may be recessive. As one interviewee puts it, “I just like that I don’t have to worry about anybody else’s anything.” That attitude is ahead of the curve—but only by a hair. “Our species has about 200,000 years of experience with collective living,” Mr. Klinenberg writes, “[but] only about fifty or sixty years with our experiment in going solo on a massive scale.” We live in the dawn of the first millennium of me time. Read More
