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Margo Jefferson’s “Negroland: A Memoir”

Negroland: A Memoir Margo Jefferson Pantheon Books, 2015; 256pp If an authentic life is what you seek, you’re basically doomed to phoniness: this is the paradox that makes “authenticity” one of those words that should only ever appear flanked by inverted commas. The desire to be “authentic” necessitates the sort of reflection that destabilizes both subject and object; neurosis, perhaps despair, that way lies. This is the inciting conundrum in Margo Jefferson’s excellent Negroland, a memoir in name but a project vastly more complex and ambitious in execution. Jefferson was raised in a well-to-do Chicago family in the 1950s and ’60s, the second daughter of a physician and a social worker-turned-socialite. She learned the piano, she took ballet lessons, she read Little Women and sang Gilbert & Sullivan. In the late ’60s and ’70s, she discovered Black Power and feminism. She became a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, writing for the New York Times, Newsweek, Vogue. She’s had a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches at Columbia, she’s widely revered. Her short book On Michael Jackson, published before the singer’s death, is a luminous, empathetic re-reading of the man and his work. Yet Jefferson’s also been troubled by doubt, self-hatred, and suicidal thoughts. She’s spent terrible minutes with her head in the oven pledging one day […]

We’ll Always Have Paris

Bettyville: A Memoir George Hodgman Penguin Publishing Group, 2015; 288pp In the sub-genre of literature about the poisoned relationships between mothers and their gay sons, George Hodgman‘s Bettyville is an instant classic. Constantly funny, occasionally pointed, it is distinguished particularly by its warmth and its author’s uncommon empathy. At its heart, Bettyville is a carefully calibrated understanding of (rather than attack on) how other people live. George Hodgman was an editor at Simon & Schuster and Vanity Fair before he upped sticks from his New York City life and moved back to Paris, Missouri, to look after his ninety-year-old mother. Betty Hodgman had lived for many years in Paris in almost total ignorance of her son’s life, relationships, and struggles. Returning to Missouri unlocks all kinds of memories for George, which he sprinkles into accounts of his new daily life with his mother. Betty, despite retaining a sharp, reprimanding tongue, has begun to exhibit signs of dementia and becomes increasingly though reluctantly dependent on him (“Clearly I am, in her mind, the Joan Crawford of elder care”). Around the edges of this picture live the folks back home — Hodgman relations, high-school friends and foes, the congregation at Betty’s church — and a stray dog that George toys […]

I Want To Believe

True Believers Kurt Andersen Random House, 2012; 464pp “My publishers signed me up a year ago to write a book, but not this book,” writes Karen Hollander at the start of Kurt Andersen‘s gripping True Believers. “Let me cut to the chase,” she goes on: “I once set out to commit a spectacular murder, and people died.” This “secret episode of 1960s berserkery and lost innocence” is the ostensible subject of Andersen’s novel and what gives it its compulsively thrillerish readability. Hollander, a famous lawyer and one-time Supreme Court shoo-in, was party to an act of radical violence in 1968 that has somehow remained a secret in the forty-six years since; as she reaches the end of her career, she feels compelled “to disinter the truth”, to let the sunshine in. But this is where Andersen’s secondary subject, which gives the book its philosophical heft, comes in: how structures of fantasy, the doubtfulness of memory, and the irreducible subjectivity of experience challenge, even efface, any stable notion of truth. Part satire, part social history, True Believers asks some big questions — what does it mean to be American? what role might utilitarianism play in political violence? — and reminds us that mania, however well motivated, is still madness. Karen is a […]

The Lusitania’s Last Voyage

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania Erik Larson Crown Publishing, 2015; 448pp In six heart-stopping pages in the middle of Dead Wake, Erik Larson appears to suspend time in order to watch the deadly torpedo launched from German submarine U-20 shoot through the sea toward the doomed ocean liner Lusitania. In fact, the torpedo was only moving at about five miles per hour (reader, I can run faster), and its slow approach gave many of the ship’s passengers time to register both its vicious beauty and its coming intersection with their own fates. Initially, Larson tells us, “A number of officers raised binoculars and speculated that the object might indeed be a buoy, or a porpoise, or a fragment of drifting debris. No one expressed concern.” As it moved closer, though, its true nature became apparent and many panicked. Not Connecticut salesman James Brooks: He saw the body of the torpedo moving well ahead of the wake, through water he described as being “a beautiful green.” The torpedo “was covered with a silvery phosphorescence, you might term it, which was caused by the air escaping from the motors.” He said, “It was a beautiful sight.” In these six pages, we see the glint […]

A Game of Thrones

Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped Garry Kasparov PublicAffairs, 2015; 320pp “Garry Kasparov, Russian human rights activist and former world chess champion” is how the author of this new and ferocious critique of the Putin regime would like to be introduced. Certainly not “Garry Kasparov, former Russian presidential candidate”, because, as he points out, cuttingly, a few pages later, “You can’t have real candidates without real democracy.” Since his retirement from chess in 2005, Kasparov has become one of the best-known critics of and protesters against the rise and rise of Vladimir Putin. Putin’s Russia, in his view, “is clearly the biggest and most dangerous threat facing the world today”. In Winter Is Coming, with its seriocomic titular reference to Game of Thrones, Kasparov has produced both a devastating account of missed opportunities in the rise of a dictator and a rhetorically powerful case for how and why he must be stopped. Winter Is Coming is an act of clear polemical thinking. Kasparov’s central thesis is that foreign-policy failures in the West — “appeasement by many other names” — have enabled the fall of nascent democracy and the ascent of new tyranny […]

A Decent Read

A Decent Ride Irvine Welsh Doubleday, 2016; 368pp “Drivin a taxi is the best joab ah’ve hud in ma puff,” remarks “Juice” Terry Lawson early on in Irvine Welsh‘s new novel, A Decent Ride. But this is not an ode to honest labor: “It’s best in August,” he continues, “wi aw the snobby tourist rides in the toon, but this time’s barry n aw, cause the festive period’s roond the corner n fanny are stoatin aboot rat-arsed.” Yes, after a darkly racy stopover in Miami for his last book, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, Welsh is back in the familiarly grimy Edinburgh streets of his best-known work, including Trainspotting and Glue, the 2001 novel which first introduced the world to the charming Terry. Welsh’s characters, here as elsewhere, are rogues, braggarts, scofflaws and villains; their lives are fuelled by booze, drugs, casual sex, and crime. But despite the ubiquitous indecency, Welsh’s work has always been driven by a fierce social conscience and a compassion for this particular world that’s absent in most other contemporary media. A Decent Ride, which refers both to Terry’s job as a taxi driver and his enthusiasm for sex, is in the end a rather more decent book than it first appears. There’s […]

Arab-American Nights

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights Salman Rushdie Random House, 2015; 304pp Salman Rushdie‘s twelfth novel is a New Yorker’s Arabian Nights, a wryly witty, promiscuously intertextual work that offers delirious pleasures and fantastical beings in equal measure. Our world — New York in the present day — has been beset by “strangenesses”. A gardener who hovers an inch or so above the ground, an abandoned baby who identifies moral corruption in her presence by inflicting disfiguring sores on its source, lightning strikes, wormholes. Much as midnight’s children, in the novel of that name, derived their telepathic powers from an accident of birth, so the people on whom these strangenesses center share a common (supernatural) origin, a jinnia named Dunia who fell in love with the twelfth-century philosopher Ibn Rushd and bore him enough children to guarantee a healthy global distribution of descendants eight hundred years later. As we move between happenings in our world and Fairyland, we learn that, in order to save the world, a showdown between humankind and the four Grand Ifrits, the dark jinn, must be provoked — and won. Two Years‘ overarching narrative concerns an alleged philosophical disharmony between faith and reason. Ibn Rushd, when we meet him in […]

Best of 2015: A Personal Take

“Best books” lists are a perennial inducer of anxiety. So this isn’t quite that; rather, a short tour of impressions from a year of reading — haphazard, sometimes misguided, always pleasurable. Starting with fiction, I’m perhaps ashamed to discover, while tallying, that I read mostly the Great White Males. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by the firestorm now typical of the publication of a new Jonathan Franzen novel — for better or worse, Franzen has become the locus for a debate over all the inequities of the publishing industry, while his work is autopsied by those hoping to prove he’s the misogynist they, strangely, seem to want him to be. The actual book (Purity, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won me over with the vomitously tense novella at its center — the Tom Aberant section, if you’ve read it — in which our hero’s masochistic relationship with a neurotic feminist heiress is played out in gruelling detail. It’s an abject, despairing piece of writing — and no doubt at least partly a playful provocation of the author’s critics. I also enjoyed Peter Buwalda’s rather nasty Bonita Avenue (Hogarth; review), and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (Knopf Doubleday), a “corporate anthropology” romp packed with failed parachutes and data-anxiety. Tom Cooper’s debut novel, The Marauders (Crown; review), a thriller set in the swamps […]

Paradise Lost

Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawai’i Susanna Moore Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 320pp “There is no little irony in recognizing that the speed with which [the near-annihilation of the Hawaiian people] occurred,” writes Susanna Moore in her engrossing new book, “serves as testimony to the generosity of spirit, patience, and adaptability of the Hawaiians themselves. In their grace lay their defeat.” Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawai’i, which was a worthy nominee for this year’s National Book Award for Nonfiction, surveys the 120-year period between Captain Cook’s arrival on the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 and their annexation by the United States in 1898. In little more than a century, an entire civilization was stopped in its tracks, its ontological outlook completely overthrown. A native population estimated to be as large as 800,000 when Cook arrived was, by 2013, smaller than 90,000. A culture condemned as heathen by the missionaries who arrived in 1820 was, within decades, literate and largely Christian. Sailors, whalers, merchants and tradesmen radically altered the ethnic makeup of the archipelago. In the end, it was the grandson of one of the first missionaries who successfully petitioned the US Congress to annex the Islands. Moore is careful to position her history […]

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