Nicholson Baker’s smokes and mirrors
In Travelling Sprinkler, Nicholson Baker revisits floundering poet Paul Chowder, the protagonist of 2009’s The Anthologist, and finds him abidingly disengaged. Pining for ex-girlfriend Roz, he seeks solace in protest songs, political hand-wringing, garden implements and other passing distractions, including a desire to be taken seriously as a cigar aficionado. Through it all, he has...
George Saunders: ‘My Flamboyant Grandson’
Sometimes, when I’m walking down the street, I think about the grandfather in ‘My Flamboyant Grandson.’ George Saunders’ story is set in a semi-absurd dystopia where every citizen is required to wear Everly Strips on their shoes, bar-coded soles that summon customised ads to ubiquitous public screens, phantom voices beckoning to you as you amble...
Home
For a long time, whenever someone asked me where my home was, I never knew how to answer. I know where my house is, in the heart of the American Midwest where I’ve lived for the past seven years. I know where I was born, which is Delaware. And I know all the places I...
Rereadability unbound
I’d like to think there’s something more essential about the short story than just its being, well, short. Are short stories inherently tidier, messier, more dramatic, voicier, paradoxically slower, better with beer and pretzels than neighboring forms? We could adjectival-phrase away for days on this, following up with maybe yesses and maybe nos, but I...
Hot coffee and no haiku
Mona Simpson is lauded as a sharp and infectious chronicler of American family life. Her latest novel, Casebook, is a coming-of-age story about two boys who unearth powerful secrets that threaten a family’s health and sanity. She invites us into her home and gives an insight into her literary habits. Where are you now? At...
Yaddo, Yaddo
Even to me, it seems unlikely. A 50-year-old woman – with no writing history, no MFA, no closet of stories, no folder of poems – pens a novel that becomes a lead title for Simon & Schuster. I’ve been over it a few times in my head – the parts that were amazing, the parts...
Lawyers that thrill
Not too many years ago, an influential editor told me that the legal thriller was dead. Readers were bored. They wanted to read about ‘real people’, not a bunch of lawyers. Well, since then, readers have proven that editor wrong. They have fallen in love with Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller, watching the defense attorney struggle...
Akhil Sharma: Let it bleed
Akhil Sharma’s long-awaited second novel Family Life tells the story of an Indian immigrant family’s arrival in America – a mother, father and two sons: 8-year-old Ajay and the older Birju – and the terrible tragedy that befalls them when Birju hits his head on the bottom of a swimming pool, where he lies unconscious...
The global thermostat
For the globe as a whole, the ocean is the great regulator, the great stabiliser of temperatures. It has been described as “a savings bank for solar energy, receiving deposits in seasons of excessive insolation and paying them back in seasons of want.” Without the ocean, our world would be visited by unthinkably harsh extremes...
Business
You’re standing outside the bar on 104th Street and Broadway, the rain beating down like it means you harm at first, then dissipates so all it does is leave the street slick and smooth as a sheet of marble. You inhale that smell of wet pavement you’ve known forever, and the city shines back at...
My wilderness year
Having three novels published over a space of about eight months is an invigorating, magnificent and mystifying experience. The New York Times name-checks your Annihilation on their front page as an example of “binge reading” and after the glow fades (and the confusion: please don’t skim) you realize it’s also binge publicity, which means binge...
Another side of Borges
We would begin our stroll down the Avenida Belgrano, a wide, busy, modern thoroughfare, trying to speak over the roar and fumes of the traffic. The ubiquitous snub-nosed buses crawled along in step with us, throbbing and belching their murderous black exhaust in our faces. Borges never seemed to notice. He was too busy discussing...
