Usa

It is impossible (as I prove in this sentence) to review Philip Roth without mentioning the surge of creativity that began when the author was around 60 and which now sees him publishing a novel every year (his next one, Nemesis, is already finished). However, I would argue that it is only recently that we have seen Roth’s genuine late style. In three of his last four books — Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008) and this one, The Humbling — there has been a shift towards winter in his writing. Those are short works, lacking the manic humour that energised Roth’s earlier fiction. Gone is the narrative scope of books such

With Blood’s a Rover James Ellroy finally finishes his ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. With Blood’s a Rover James Ellroy finally finishes his ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. It’s been eight years since the second volume, The Cold Six Thousand, written in a staccato shorthand prose that seemed always about to veer out of control, marked the apotheosis of Ellroy’s feverish and frenetic style. Something had to give, and at first it was Ellroy himself, who suffered a breakdown and eventually quit Middle America to return to his spiritual home of Los Angeles. Reviewing The Cold Six Thousand back in 2001 I called Ellroy either our greatest obsessive writer or our most obsessive great

Whether the refusal to allow the Confederate states the right to self-determination, flying as it did in the face of the Declaration of Independence, was the first overt act of American imperialism is a question that goes largely undiscussed. John Keegan does not raise it. For him, unlike World War I, which was ‘cruel and unnecessary’, the American Civil War was cruel and necessary. (What constitutes an uncruel war is not explained.) Necessary both sides deemed it. At the outset volunteers came forward in such numbers that equipping them and finding capable officers to lead them proved nearly beyond both the Union and the Confederacy. Cruel it certainly was, one

Richard Nixon had met Henry Kissinger only once before he asked him, on his landslide victory in 1968, to be his National Security Adviser, saying to an aide, ‘I don’t trust Henry but I can use him.’ Richard Nixon had met Henry Kissinger only once before he asked him, on his landslide victory in 1968, to be his National Security Adviser, saying to an aide, ‘I don’t trust Henry but I can use him.’ Kissinger, then at Harvard, had strongly supported Nixon’s rival for the Republican nomination, Nelson Rockefeller, openly deriding Nixon and calling him at one point ‘a hollow man … evil.’ Their subsequent longstanding and successful partnership, surviving

Free association underpins the comedy of Lorrie Moore’s writing — or perhaps the verb should be ‘unpins’, since her prose spins off in tangential, apparently affectless riffs. Free association underpins the comedy of Lorrie Moore’s writing — or perhaps the verb should be ‘unpins’, since her prose spins off in tangential, apparently affectless riffs. Even the title of A Gate at the Stairs tugs in different directions. It is a baby-gate; since this novel starts as a comedy — of sorts — about adoption. (But, as the adopting mother says, while mashing flower bulbs into a poisonous puree, the French ‘have jokes that end “And then the baby fell down

Julie Powell wrote Julie and Julia, a book (and now a film) in which she described her attempts to cook a huge number of recipes by the cookery writer Julia Child. I haven’t read that book, but I get the impression that Powell, 30-ish and married to her childhood sweetheart, was going nuts, and used the cooking as a sort of therapy. Well, here she’s going nuts again, and it’s pretty serious. This time, she decides to become a butcher. At the start of the book, we find her slicing up a piece of liver and getting blood on her face. She tells us her troubles, which amount to the

Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín Colm Tóibín’s Brook- lyn is a simple and utterly exquisite novel. The writing is so transparent, so apparently guileless, that I kept wondering what trickery Tóibín had used to keep me so involved, so attached, so unaccountably warmed. The tale’s simplicity is, in a sense, like life’s: an Irish girl called Eilis can’t find good work in her home town of Enniscorthy, so she goes along with a well-intended family conspiracy to send her to a decent job in Brooklyn. It is the early 1950s. Her father is dead. In Brooklyn, she finds her feet and falls in love. But when her older sister dies, she

Ask Alice combines two narratives, one beginning in 1904 in the emptiness of the American Midwest, the other in the muffled stasis of Edwardian rural England. The first follows the swift trajectory of Alice, a pretty orphan from Kansas who thinks ‘it must be fun to go places’. Alice, on the train shuttling between one set of backwoods relations and another, is waylaid by a predatory travelling salesman named Drouett; before long she really is ‘going places’. Alice is an adventuress, a red-haired opportunist, a Becky Sharp without the wit. Her heart is set on the stage; the endless prairies of Dakota don’t augur well for such ambitions, so when

In The Frenzy of Renown, Leo Braudy’s magisterial study of fame and its history, he identifies the principal allure of being a celebrity: ‘In the heart of the fan and the famous alike, fame is a quiet place where one is free to be what one really is, one’s true, unchanging essence.’ The belief that you can only become fully realised in the glare of the media spotlight is, of course, an illusion. In fact, the opposite is true. Far from enhancing the personality, fame corrodes it. Responsible adults are reduced to an infantile state in which the sole purpose of others is to satisfy their needs. As John Updike

Journals: 1952-2000, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger Before sitting down with this hefty doorstopper of a diary, first ask yourself whether you agree — or can imagine yourself agreeing — with the entry Arthur Schlesinger, Jr made on 27 March 1950: ‘I adore sitting around hotel rooms with politicians and newspapermen exchanging gossip over drinks.’ If you do, or can, then you will enjoy this book, for it largely consists of a half-century’s worth of gossip, most of it obtained by sitting around hotel rooms with politicians and newspapermen over drinks. I had my doubts about it, however, and in fact nearly gave up

At least one very startling claim emerges in this study: according to her own account, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, never consummated her first two marriages. Indeed, she never allowed any man (before the Duke of Windsor, presumably) to touch her ‘below the Mason-Dixon line’. If this is true, it makes a nonsense of the Abdication, since an unconsummated marriage, within Christian canon law, is automatically grounds for annulment. This would mean that the lady was not — or did not need to be — a divorcee, and thus her pairing with Edward, Prince of Wales, should have raised no objection whatsoever. Wallis certainly did represent a kind of American triumph

Much great American writing is regional in a way that British or French writing never has been. Most of the best writing coming from the States inhabits a place which apparently feels no pressure from the great metropolitan centres — Annie Proulx on the Texas panhandle, Cormac McCarthy on the Mexican border territories, Jane Smiley on the Midwest. Even when a great city is in the vicinity, as in Anne Tyler’s or David Simon’s very different considerations of Baltimore, we feel a specific regional flavour emerging; John Cheever’s fictions of elegant suburban life have a distinctly north-eastern flavour which evidently still weighs heavily with writers of that particular region. It