New york

Thursday

Alex Clark

On the waterfront | 12 October 2017

Much has been made of the American novelist Jennifer Egan’s mutation, in her latest novel, from purveyor of metafiction and fragmentary, experimental narratives to creator of a solid piece of traditional realism. Manhattan Beach tells the story of a father and daughter in New York in the years in and around the second world war: Eddie is a mobster’s bagman, who disappears without apparent trace early on; Anna is left distraught, but is also a resilient striver, growing up to become the only female diver in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard. Betwixt and between them stands Dexter Styles, a nightclub owner and instrument of the mafia, swishing between cold malfeasance and a

Thursday

Tim Martin

Madness in Manhattan

Life has far more imagination than we do, says the epigraph from Truffaut that opens Salman Rushdie’s 12th novel — as though, these days, anyone needed reminding. Set in New York and running between the start of the Obama administration and the rise of Trump, this book about gangsterism, art, dynastic ambition, secret identities and the tragedy of plan-making charts the descent of America into satire-killing oddity and social danger as it follows the lives of the Goldens, a family of larger-than-life Indian squillionaires who come to live in Manhattan in the wake of the 2008 Bombay terror attacks. The Goldens are Nero, a Gatsbyish businessman whose past and business

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The listening project

As Classic FM celebrated its quarter-century on Wednesday with not a recording but a live broadcast of a concert from Dumfries House in Scotland — Bach, Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt, and the première of a specially commissioned work by the Welsh composer Paul Mealor — Radio 3 has upped the ante by announcing an autumn schedule that promises to be ‘an antidote to today’s often frenzied world’. Its new programming ranges from a special opera season and a series of organ and choral music to ‘an immersive audio impression’ of what it feels like to hang vertically on the side of a mountain, wind whistling through the ears, feet teetering

Thursday

Ian Sansom

A choice of first novels | 3 August 2017

Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your generation? (If you’ve forgotten the voice of your generation, the brilliant Christopher Fowler’s forthcoming The Book of Forgotten Authors will provide you with the necessary reminder. The voice of my generation, as far as I’m able to recall, was a poet called Attila the Stockbroker, who we used to go and see perform in Harlow, and who did an excellent Peel session. Whatever the hell happened to Attila the Stockbroker?) Three new debut novels might all properly be acclaimed as representing the voice of their generation — though who knows,

Thursday

Ian Sansom

… trailing strands in all directions

Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of course already have copies of the books from which these often fiery essays have been selected. There’s a broad range of work represented here, from personal essays through to Ozick’s often rather profound philosophical enquiries into the meaning of art and religion — though the inclusion of no fewer than five essays on Henry James, two on Kafka, two on Virginia Woolf and two on Saul Bellow might make one wish for a little more breathing room, a little more room to roam. But this is a quibble. This is

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Salt-beef delirium

Katz’s Delicatessen, established 1888, is a theme park of Jewish-American food, with tribute gift shop, on the lower east side of Manhattan. There is nowhere more Jewish than Katz’s except Haredi Brooklyn, but if you go there you don’t come back. Katz’s offers a gentler Jewish experience, if you can conceive of such a thing, or it at least attempts it; it offers a kind of Judaism you can enjoy over lunch, which I find amazing because I have never managed it. (No one, for instance, talks about the Holocaust in Katz’s, not because they don’t want to but because they can’t. Try saying Treblinka with a dumpling in your

Thursday

Martin Gayford

American quartet

Politics and art can make for an awkward mix. Much more than with religious subjects it seems to matter whether the viewer shares the artist’s beliefs. But whatever you think of Richard M. Nixon, it would be hard not to enjoy Philip Guston’s satirical drawings of him and his cronies at Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row. These were the most exuberant, scatological, obsessive and imaginative such works since 1937 when Picasso produced an extraordinary strip-cartoon vilification and lampoon entitled ‘The Dream and Lie of Franco’. Indeed, the two series have a good deal in common. Picasso portrayed the Generalissimo as a sort of obscene, moustachioed set of bagpipes. Similarly, Guston

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Building block | 8 June 2017

Liverpool is the New York of Europe. The business district looks like old Wall Street: a miniature Lower Manhattan on the Mersey. It’s a city of scale, drama, melodrama, tragedy and comedy. Not to mention rich and poor. And often all these effects are simultaneous. No other British city has a similarly contrary architectural character: superb, shabby, romantic, melancholy, proud and mean. You cannot be in Liverpool and not be affected by its buildings. I grew up there and long before I knew what ‘design’ meant, Liverpool had taught me to see — as well as to feel the deadly weight of history. It’s an architectural education. But Liverpool has

Taki

High life | 8 June 2017

New York   Main Street is a place, but it’s mostly an idea. It’s where locally owned shops sell stuff to hard-working townies, as we used to call the locals back when I was at boarding school. The townies had dependable blue-collar jobs in auto plants and coalmines. Their sons played American football hard, cut their hair short, and married their high-school sweethearts. I went back to my old school recently with my old buddy Tony Maltese, a wrestler who never lost a match. We had a nostalgic lunch with the wrestling coach and talked about old times. The feeling was one of community and of having control over your

Kate Chisholm

Diary stories

By chance on Saturday morning, I tuned into Radio 4 and heard Professor Clare Brant talking on Saturday Live about Dear Diary, a new exhibition at Somerset House in London that celebrates the art of writing a daily journal. It caught my ear because diaries are such a crucial tool for the biographer yet whenever I’ve attempted to write my own it’s always turned out dreadfully narcissistic and infinitely boring. What, asked Richard Coles, makes diaries so fascinating? It’s all in the detail, said Brant. The way reading a diary can take us into another person’s world, not the outward gloss and grandeur but right inside the way the diarist

Stephen Bayley

The bridge of size

Before Brooklyn exceeded it in cool, Manhattanites spoke dismissively of BNTs. These were the Bridge ‘n’ Tunnel folk, the out-of-towners who needed civil engineering to help them reach social nirvana. The ambitious critic Norman Podhoretz, a master of self-invention, was one such. His notorious Making It (1967) begins: ‘One of the longest journeys in the world is… from Brooklyn to Manhattan.’ But since 1883 the journey over the East River has only been 5,989 feet, although physical distance was not the measure that pained Podhoretz. That’s the total length of Washington Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge, the first connection between the outer boroughs and the elite ‘New York’. It was, and remains,

Thursday

Rod Liddle

PWR BTTM: Pageant

How about some queercore garage punk? PWR BTTM — the name means something empowering to do with buggery — are a young, gay, two-piece band from New York State who live apparently hectic lives. Their new album, Pageant, was released last week and a couple of days later they were kicked off their record label and current tour after allegations of sexual predation were made against the pantomimely camp singer, Ben Hopkins. The greatest surprise was that the complaints came from a woman. Their career is now in limbo. Hopkins denies the allegations, of course, claiming that he is a consensual and democratic kind of chap. But it’s all rather

Peter Bradshaw

Moments of absurdity

The bestselling humourist and New Yorker essayist David Sedaris is renowned for an almost hypnotic deadpan drollery and maybe especially for The Santaland Diaries, his uproarious account of earning part-time cash as a department store Christmas elf. Now he is bringing out an edited version of his personal diaries. It’s the first volume of two, taking us from his days as a broke student, stoner and young gay man in North Carolina and Chicago, through to the years of literary fame and success in New York and Paris as the new century dawns — a distinction worn lightly. Fans, semi-fans and non-fans (I am midway between the first two categories)

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Roving eye

Photography has many genres, even more than painting, and most photographers achieve fame by focusing on one of them. There are technical reasons for this. Armed only with a bunch of brushes and a palette of colours, a painter can achieve a variety of effects — close-up, distance, soft or sharp focus, motion — for which a photographer needs a battery of cameras and associated paraphernalia in the form of lenses, films, lights and filters, and the technical know-how to get the best out of each. There is also professional snobbery. Jobbing photographers who work across genres for magazine assignments are less likely to be taken seriously as artists. The

Thursday

Taki

High life | 11 May 2017

Much like the poor, the charity ball has always been with us, but lately it’s turned into a freak. Something is rotten in the state of New York, and the name of it is the Met Gala. Once upon a time, the Metropolitan Museum’s gala ball was fun. Serious social-climbing multimillionaires competed openly for the best tables and for proximity to blue-blooded socialites such as C.Z. Guest and her ilk. Pat Buckley, wife of William F., ran the show with military precision, allotting the best seats to those who had paid a fortune for them, but also to those who were young and handsome and whose pockets were not as

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Blondie: Pollinator

Ah, Blondie. Those happy days of glorious power pop, chilly disco and rich, fruity vocals — Debbie Harry yearning away like a very bad alleycat on heat. ‘X Offender’, ‘In the Flesh’, ‘Picture This’ and that one where she’s in the phone booth, apparently gagging for it. People knock it, but the late 1970s wasn’t a bad time to be a teenager. And while Blondie may have been a rather calculating act, cleverly positioned on the fringe of punk and the fringe of pop and the fringe of disco and later even rap, they were at least likeable and the tunes were, largely, effortlessly and simplistically terrific. And then there

Thursday

Taki

High life | 27 April 2017

Twenty-five years ago this week, Los Angeles was burning because of Rodney King’s beating at the hands of the fuzz, and I had my shoulder sliced open by a doctor in order to repair torn ligaments. My shoulder hurt more than Rodney’s ribs. I know that because I saw him, on TV, get up and gesticulate freely after having been whacked rather hard by four cops. I didn’t lift my arm for months. Lesson to be learned: it’s better to be beaten by four police officers than to run into an ice wall at high speed while skiing with snow blindness. Forty years ago last week, there was better news:

Thursday

Laura Freeman

A choice of first novels | 20 April 2017

If you go down to the woods today… That is the starting point for Idaho by Emily Ruskovich, who grew up on Hoodoo mountain in the Idaho panhandle. A family — mother Jenny, father Wade, daughters May and June — leave their little house in the big woods and drive a pick-up truck to a clearing where they chop birch wood, squabble and drink lemonade that attracts the flies. You want them to find something wonderful there. A teddy bears’ picnic. A magic faraway tree. A Piglet. But this is Idaho, not our friendly day-tripping woods. Nature is vast and hostile. In winter the house is cut off for months

Wednesday

Taki

High life | 12 April 2017

Things that I once loved — Fifth Avenue & 57th Street, brownstone terraces on hot summer afternoons, cold beer and fried eggs at 5 a.m. after a night of carousing, the Sherry-Netherland — and now miss have grown ever more monumental upon reflection. I suppose that it’s normal to miss things you loved when young, yet I still can’t get over how the people have changed — for the worse, needless to say. The city is at its best very early in the morning, the asphalt glistening after the rain or the water trucks that occasionally wash the avenues, the streets empty and still as a movie set. In the

Thursday

Mick Brown

Beautiful thoughts for all occasions

Kahlil Gibran was 40 years old, a short — he was just 5’3” — dapper man with doleful eyes and a Charlie Chaplin moustache, and in the first throes of the alcoholism that would result in his early death, when in 1923 he published The Prophet. A collection of 26 prose-poems, written in quasi-Biblical language, the book takes the form of sermons by a fictional sage named Al Mustapha, on the big questions of life: family, friendship, love, work and death. These range from the profound to the banal. ‘Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love