Book Reviews

In July 2000, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky acquired an obscure online gambling brand called Surrey Sports. It was little remarked upon at the time but this deal would change association football forever. Two years later, Surrey Sports had become Sky Bet and, by 2004, people watching football on Sky Sports could bet on the game via their remote. And why not? After all, as the Sky Bet tagline reminded viewers: “It matters more when there’s money on it.” For football fans, nothing was ever quite the same again. “It’s difficult to overstate what the slogan did for the normalization of gambling in football,” writes Darragh McGee in his impressive study of how our national sport, seduced by profit, surrendered to the gambling industry.

When did Republican writers stop being funny? Look around at the landscape of contemporary American literature – and, for that matter, TV and film – and you’d be hard pressed to find a genuinely funny literary voice who doesn’t lean liberal, or at least purport to. This isn’t to say that individual right-wing writers aren’t amusing. Often found in these pages, Rod Liddle, for one, is very funny, though I suggest he’d balk at being called a conservative. And Donald Trump is hilarious on Truth Social – his posts may have the subtlety of a bullhorn, but they usually land with a satisfying thunk. During his 2016 campaign and well into his first term, Trump succeeded in part because he understood that politics and entertainment run in parallel.

Since his debut novel Bright Lights, Big City appeared in 1984, Jay McInerney has been one of the best-known writers whose work is mostly grounded on the long, skinny, granite-bedrocked river isle the Lenape called Manahatta, “island of hills.” He has lived in town for most of the past four decades too, and currently divides his time between a Village penthouse apartment and Water Mill in the Hamptons. McInerney walks into the lobby of the Marlton Hotel on West 8th Street, just paces from Washington Square, and heads turn. Young lovelies on their laptops with Mission Control Center-sized cans over their ears and chic hairstyles look up and blink, appealingly. Waiters slide swiftly to his side.

David Keenan’s seventh novel is quite the ride, but its plot is not always easy to disentangle. The author has said that its title is his favorite word, and the book’s clearest narrative thread concerns the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground in 1979. The boy’s older brother, Aaron, is subsequently guided by an angel called the Precious Gift. Aaron meets the guardian angel during a run for charity in 1986, on the last day of his boyhood, or so he thought, because he could never imagine doing a sponsored run again after that, because he got into literature and smoking pot straight afterwards.

Though she may well have been “one of the world’s most celebrated, beloved and iconic performers,” who’d have wanted Judy Garland as a mother? When not remaining in bed “for days at a time, heavily drugged and in a deep state of depression,” she was, according to her daughter Liza Minnelli, slashing her neck with a razor blade because “she loved playing the victim… Hospitals are a way of life for her.” Judy died of a (possibly accidental) drugs overdose in 1969, aged 47. At the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the Upper East Side, her corpse was prepared for public view by the very same make-up expert who’d worked years previously on The Wizard of Oz. Twenty thousand people filed past the open coffin – more than had come to gawp at Valentino.

About a decade ago, with my writing career going nowhere fast, I received some savvy advice from my then-literary agent. “Write about the royal family,” he said. “There’s an endless appetite for books about them. They combine history, social commentary and gossip with old-fashioned fascination with the rich and powerful. You can’t go wrong.” I listened to his advice and wrote a trilogy of books about the Windsors: The Crown in Crisis, The Windsors at War and Power and Glory. The first two sold very well, and the third was barely noticed, but I was glad that I took my agent’s counsel, even if we had to part ways because he had practiced what he preached, and diversified from historical biography into his own career writing about the royals.

Did you know that a secretive thing called private equity owns almost 10 percent of the UK economy? Did you know that it controls the jobs of several million people and may well own your local hospital, water supply, children’s school or even your home? No? Here is a book that aims to straighten you out on all that. Private equity is one of those things that you either know about or don’t. If you are in the finance business you know, because it is the story of the past quarter century. If you are not in that world, if leveraged buyouts and limited partners and debt pushdowns are all just business-page noise, then you are in the majority. And it turns out that means you may not know who is really running your life.

On a winter’s morning, outside the Three Lives bookstore in New York’s West Village, Karl Ove Knausgård has just finished signing copies of his latest novel, The School of Night. His features are familiar from the dustjackets – the gray-blue eyes, the grizzled beard – but he is surprisingly tall and his signature silver mane is now cropped short around the ears. Gone, too, are the cigarettes, traded for a vape. The School of Night is the fourth novel in Knausgård’s “Morning Star” series. It takes its name from a secret society of Elizabethan poets and scientists, which included the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh and the play-wright Christopher Marlowe.

Colm Tóibín is a master of understatement, his work characterized by great emotional intelligence coupled with redoubtable restraint. This is his third anthology of stories, following Mothers and Sons (2006) and The Empty Family (2010). Within a few pages, he fills the gaps between words – the things he doesn’t say – with as much meaning as the prose. Familiar themes emerge. There is the Irish diaspora in the US (as in Brooklyn and Long Island); the Catalan Pyrenees (the setting for “The Long Winter” in Mothers and Sons); and Argentina (as in the novel The Story of the Night). Feelings of exile and being an outsider are aroused, while Catholicism still taps on the shoulders of those long lapsed.