Jay McInerney is best known for his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), which winningly combined sophistication and naivety. In The Juice (Bloomsbury, £14.99), his third collection of wine columns (most of them for House & Garden and the Wall Street Journal), he exhibits a similar mix of qualities, contriving to be both jaded
After Brock is a slightly eccentric rite-of-passage novel rooted firmly in the Marches. In September 2009, we are told, an 18-year-old boy called Nat Kempsey disappeared for five days into the Berwyn mountains, on the Welsh side of the border. Paul Binding is at all times specific about time, place and names; the story has
He’s the Housewives’ Favourite, the Voice of Middle England on Radio 2, one moment discussing the perils of your other half leaving the gas on, the next slipping on an Elvis Costello track to liven up your lunch. Bit of a cheeky chappie, affable, engaging, amusing, doesn’t appear to take himself too seriously. We like
I like books which have their own linguistic microclimate. Fictional first-person narratives are where you tend to find these. The moment you step inside a good one, you enter a distinctive country as encountered by the narrator, using his or her limited vocabulary. It’s the very constrictedness of the vocabulary that makes the story gripping:
Doctor Livingstone is said to have found the swamps of Elephant Marsh impenetrable. Ellis Hock has no such trouble. A long flight, hired car and motorcycle taxi carry the kindly American across the Malawian hinterland, where the Shire river feeds the Zambezi at its border with Mozambique. Lured by the ‘green glow’ of memory, Hock
Port Antonio, in Jamaica, radiates a torrid, hothouse air. At night the inshore breeze smells faintly of bananas. Port Antonio was once Jamaica’s chief banana port, shipping out an average of three million bunches of ‘green gold’ a year. Harry Belafonte’s greatest hit, ‘The Banana Boat Song’, was sung by Port Antonio dock workers at
One night a few years ago in Washington DC, Katherine Boo tripped over an ‘unabridged dictionary’, broke three ribs, punctured a lung and, as she lay on the floor unable to reach a telephone, ‘arrived at a certain clarity’ about her future. With most people — certainly those like Boo with a history of wretched health
There is a joke about a retired colonel whose aberrant behaviour had him referred to a psychoanalyst. He emerged from the session fuming. ‘Damn fool says I’m in love with my umbrella. Bloody nonsense.’ Long pause, then: ‘I’m fond of it of course.’ Quite so, and likewise while people may not actually fall in love
When the modern reader thinks of Lillian Hellman, if he or she thinks of her at all, the image that presents itself is likely to be of a wizened old doll marooned in a gigantic mink coat, a still bigger hairdo — and wreathed in the smoke emanating not only from a cigarette but from
