How to Be a Man: On the Booker-Winning David Szalay

A few weeks ago, on one of the busy, sticky, spectacularly unpunctual trains for which my country is justly famous, I sat next to a young man around my age. He looked put-together, ambitious, very London; he was wearing a nice, clean polyester suit and had an official-looking work pass dangling round his neck. What impressed me most, though, was the intensity, the care, with which he was reading his book. He kept flicking back and forth, underlining things, taking out his phone to make additional notes.

Freedom in a Box: On Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love

I spent the entire day at the Met and it wasn’t enough. Unsurprisingly, because of the sheer volume of pieces, and beyond that — endlessly more frustrating — because no later than lunch smoke was coming out of my ears. I was exhausted. I had tried to prioritize, to start easy on the second floor, strolling through the European paintings and focusing on the wings I wouldn’t have access to back home. But I got stuck in the drawings before the Europeans even started. I was in front of Matisse’s Jazz series and I couldn’t stop staring at them. Something stopped me dead in my tracks.

The British Spiritual Twilight: On Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings

In Alan Hollinghurst’s lush, symphonic Our Evenings, the arc of history bends toward Brexit. “I have the power. You don’t,” says House Captain Harris, nicknamed “Fash,” as in “Fascist,” one of the many upper-class bullies planted like bridge trolls throughout the life of narrator Dave Win. The political weft of modern history is woven into the coming-of-age story of Hollinghurst’s gay, half-Burmese protagonist. Raised by his white, working-class single mother in an austere market town, Win lives out the arc of a queer British Bildungsroman.

A Novel in the Bardo: On Amie Barrodale’s Trip

I discovered the writing of Amie Barrodale in my college English class while reading an old Los Angeles Review of Books interview with Ottessa Moshfegh, whose short story collection, Homesick for Another World, I’d just read. As my professor lectured to braindead twentysomethings about a medieval Persian poet, I scrolled to the bottom of the page where the interviewer asks Moshfegh if there’s a writer she looks up to, and Moshfegh responds with a recommendation of her friend Amie Barrodale’s story collection, You Are Having a Good Time.

Why Woolf?: On Mark Hussey’s Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel

It’s been a hundred years since Virginia Woolf published her fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway, and devotees of the book have greeted its centenary with the brassiest of fanfare. This past summer, events known as “Dalloway Days” were even better attended than usual. Celebrated annually around the world but anchored in London, they commemorate the June day in 1923 when Mrs Dalloway takes place, and feature cupcake-heavy receptions along with readings, lectures, panels, film screenings, theatrical performances, art exhibits, U.K. walking tours, and online study sessions.

A New Yorker’s New York: On Gay Talese’s A Town Without Time

It’s hard to wrestle with Gay Talese. At 93, he is old but spry, and his sentences are so quietly, consistently effective that you may not realize he has you pinned. Reading a new collection of his New York-themed reportage, A Town Without Time, I wondered if we had been taking Talese for granted, the way we took Gene Hackman for granted, or that one red sauce restaurant with the very good amatriciana that is supposed to never close — until, suddenly, it does. In its wake comes a new Chipotle.

The American Dream-Master: On Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon returns, let us hope not for the last time, to an America finally besieged by its own Gestapo, Ice also being the surname of the tech-lord villain of his last novel, 2013’s Bleeding Edge. Twelve years on, on my own side of the pond, we endure the resistible rise of our own British-grown wannabe fascists, led by an anti-European whose fake French surname is one vowel shift away from “Nigel Farrago,” a Pynchon-ass moniker if ever there was one. Yes, we know where we are. So forth, as the man himself likes to say.

To Hell With the End of the World: On László Krasznahorkai’s Herscht 07769

In a 2018 interview with the Paris Review, László Krasznahorkai, the recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, claimed to have finished writing novels. A peculiar thing, then, coming out of retirement on a long flat note, with a Kenny G-esque stunt performance of windy and pointless proportion. Herscht 07769, written after the end of his novel-writing career, is remarkable in this regard at least: It manages to snuff out the dark, rich atmosphere of his earliest works in garrulous vapor, thus fulfilling with an ironic vacuity their ominous presaging of annihilation.

I Coulda Guessed Half of That: On Harvey Pekar and American Splendor

When I was a young boy, I’d sit in the backseat of my parents’ car as we passed the Limerick city Garda station. In front of this station is an old statue of a robed man clutching his head, which seems to be at once melting and splitting into three other heads. One time as we passed this statue I asked my parents who it was that was being depicted, and my mother answered, That’s what’ll happen to you if you think about that statue too long. After that moment, I was terrified of stumbling on a thought that featured the man in the statue, lest my head melt as well.

Twilight of the Clerks: On David A. Westbrook’s Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party

Julien Benda published his most famous study Les Trahision des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals) in 1927. His use of the derogatory French term clerc (a medieval scribe) to denote a mediocre intellectual careerist and bureaucratic functionary was perhaps Benda’s most memorable contribution to modern thought. Yet most have forgotten the prophetic content of the book itself, and its prediction that Europe was “heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world.

Jewish Lightning: On Jason Diamond’s Kaplan’s Plot

When it’s time for lunch, the old men strut naked to the cold showers for a rinse. Their hot, bony feet, arches flattened by the tonnage of fat knees, are somehow immune to athlete’s foot or whatever virus crawls in the bathy fray. Disease lives on the wood slabs of the sauna, in the cracks of broken shower floors, between the toes of barrel-chested men who somehow can’t contract Giardia. Aging bodies roast silently in gold jewelry they refuse to take off, chest hair singeing under six-pointed stars and Chais, little pinkies burning too. Inside these perspiring men are cold operators, and to be shamelessly naked is the Yiddish art of war.

Love Your Darlings: On Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s Shibboleth

Artists wishing to capture their era face a dilemma. Let too much time pass and run the risk of subject matter losing relevance, especially in today’s hyper-competitive attention economy. Cash in too early, both figuratively and literally, and lose the benefit of hindsight, getting too mired in the trends of the time. I once read that the best World War I literature was published some time after the war ended, that its afflicted generation needed some time to process the tragedy.

Undelivered Glory: On Greg Gerke’s In the Suavity of the Rock

The opening: fraught with menace. A man and his wife and infant daughter are staying in a rented house over the sea in a small Irish town where they are guests for a family wedding. The mood is tense. Wind blows doors shut. The house, the largest in the village, has been commandeered as an informal gathering place for the other guests, who thus intrude on the narrator, a novelist hoping to get some writing done. Eventually, in search of a distraction, the novelist and his wife go for a walk — she with their daughter strapped to her chest.

The Art of Winning (And Losing): On E. Y. Zhao’s Underspin

A few weeks ago, I visited a friend at her family’s house in the Rockaways. The house was painted in the colors of the Sabrett hot dog brand — yellow and blue — and the living room featured a matching bench with a Sabrett umbrella sprouting from the center of the table like a parasitic growth. Children rode their bikes down the street. Mothers walked their little white dogs in synchronized packs. There were about 10 or 11 of us, and we spent the day at the beach reading, drinking, eating. That evening, we gathered on the backyard patio while mosquitoes tore our bare legs to shreds. All conversations eventually funnel into sex or violence or both.

The Gods That Failed: On Jonathan Mahler’s The Gods of New York

In the late 1980s, New York was a city on the brink. Wall Street boomed, and white-collar New York rejoiced; blue-collar New York, after decades of disinvestment, became an inferno, as the Black and Hispanic working class was pitted against white ethnics. Racial strife, embodied by several successive and increasingly high-profile beatings and killings, seized the consciousness of a beleaguered municipality. Tens of thousands slept on the streets every night, many of them poor and mentally ill, while thousands more were ravaged by a mysterious illness. All the while, New York City proved slow and ill-equipped to stop their suffering.