Adam Begley

What to give literati who have everything? Eric Karpeles’ Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (Thames & Hudson, $45). If the reader in question is already hooked on Proust, Mr. Karpeles’ gorgeous book is guaranteed to please; and if he or she has yet to plunge into the seven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu, it may provide the needed push.

The idea is simple and inspired: Every time a specific painting is mentioned in the novel, reproduce the painting, with relevant detail enlarged (the famous “little patch of yellow wall,” for example, in Vermeer’s View of Delft).  read more »

The lucky winner of the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award will be announced this week. The award was established in 1993 by the late Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn) in the quixotic hope that it would dissuade writers from introducing “unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.” Among this year’s finalists are three Americans: Russell Banks (The Reserve), Isabel Fonseca (Attachment) and John Updike (The Widows of Eastwick). Herewith samples—in order of increasing raunchiness.

Mr. Banks’ metaphysical moment:

“[T]hey embraced and with their hands caressed each other’s breasts and backs and arms—her skin smooth and creamy and soft as fine silk, his alabaster white and tautly drawn over muscle and bone—and their separate bodies gradually lost their boundaries and merged into a third body, one that contained all their female and male differences and erased all their anatomical contrasts and inversions.  read more »

If things had gone the other way in the presidential election, who’d be buying a book urging us to take pride in our country? Luckily, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey had the good sense to bet on Obama and a boom in patriotism among bookish folk. Their apple pie anthology, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (Ecco, $29.95), feels just right: Matching 50 writers (most of them young and hip) with 50 states (yes, even the reddest of them) in an attempt to get at the multiplicity of the nation in all its rich peculiarity suddenly seems not only clever but good—a sign of progress, a ray of hope.  read more »

Vintage is celebrating Holly Golightly’s 50th birthday by issuing a special anniversary edition of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Vintage, $12.95). I hate to quibble, but she was actually two months shy of 19 when the novel came out in 1958—so by that count she’s pushing 70. Or if you want to get persnickety about it, when we first meet her, it’s the summer of 1943 (“There’s a war on”), so the bad news is that by now she’s 84 if she’s a day.

Either way, let’s raise a glass to Holly Golightly, who’ll always be “anywhere between sixteen and thirty.” It should be a martini glass, of course, and in it should be a White Angel (“one-half vodka, one-half gin, no vermouth”).  read more »

A Mercy
By Toni Morrison
Alfred A. Knopf, 167 pages, $23.95

We are a nation of orphans. It’s our New World inheritance. White, black, red, we’re fatherless, motherless. The whites orphaned themselves, leaving behind the Old World, its comforts and strictures, for a trackless wilderness. The blacks were stolen from their homes, packed into slave ships and sold into orphanhood. As for the natives, the “savages,” their way of life was gutted by the European invasion—some tribes were decimated on contact, others suffered a gradual, inexorable dispossession: They were orphaned bit by bit. One way or another, our ancestors were foundlings—do we feel it still, a trace memory of thrilling, terrifying isolation? And is that primal loneliness a condition, weirdly, of our freedom?

Toni Morrison’s powerful new novel, A Mercy, takes us back to the moment of our collective unmoored infancy, to a farm scratched out of the deep forest in the American colonies at the very end of the 17th century.  read more »

Just a little less than half the population will be disgruntled come Wednesday morning. What exactly do I mean by that? Will they have lost their gruntle along with the election? Not at all. Attend to the irreplaceable Roy Blount Jr., whose Alphabet Juice (FSG, $25) is both useful and a delight:

“Illogically, given its negational force in most compound words, the prefix dis- is sometimes, as here, regarded as an intensifier. To gruntle, colloquially, was to grumble, or as [the New Oxford American Dictionary] puts it, to “utter little grunts.”

So … if you’re hearing a chorus of little grunts intensified, that’s the sound of the disgruntled minority of the electorate.  read more »

At the Oct. 23 memorial service for David Foster Wallace at N.Y.U., speaker after celebrated speaker (Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, George Saunders) remembered a fellow writer with evident fondness and il-miglior-fabbro humility. Wallace’s sister’s tribute was devastatingly sad; Mark Costello’s was sad and very funny; Donald Antrim’s was deeply personal and not funny in the least. And Jonathan Franzen’s was different from the others, sad and funny and personal, but also contentious. He was grappling in a serious way with Wallace’s absence and the meaning of the work he’d left behind:

“And so now this handsome, brilliant, funny, kind Midwestern man with an amazing spouse and a great local support network and a great career and a great job at a great school with great students has taken his own life, and the rest of us are left behind to ask (to quote Infinite Jest), ‘So yo then, man, what’s your story?’

“One good, simple, modern story would go like this: ‘A lovely, talented personality fell victim to a severe chemical imbalance in his brain.  read more »

All good memoirs involve suffering—how could it be otherwise? Only trauma junkies want to be steeped to their weeping eyes in misery, and yet if there’s no pain at all, just rosy recollection, the phony factor kicks in and you begin to suspect that someone’s fudging it. Three new memoirs, all of them potentially morose to the max, are ranked below from mildly grim to majorly woeful. The trick is to find the right dose: How many grains of hope to balance out a load of grief?

Donald Hall has already tested the limits of memoir despair with The Best Day the Worst Day (2005), an account of the illness and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon.  read more »

This is the week for reading about vice presidents and vice presidential hopefuls. In The New Yorker, there’s “Biden’s Brief” (Oct. 20, $4.50), Ryan Lizza’s long, friendly account of Joe Biden’s journey to the bottom half of the Obama ticket. Mr. Lizza registers a curious Biden tic: During the course of their interview, the senator from Delaware repeated five times some variation of the phrase “presumptuous for me to say.…”

Two terms of that could be a bit much, but consider the alternative.

In the London Review of Books, there’s Jonathan Raban’s “Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill” (www.lrb.co.uk), a long, unfriendly profile of Sarah Palin written with the kind of panicky resolve that’s born of a frankly confessed fear: Mr.  read more »

Knowing something about comics—and something about Art Spiegelman—is a prerequisite to enjoying Breakdowns (Pantheon, $27.50), a reissue of some of the artist’s edgy early work, prefaced by new comics of a simultaneously autobiographical and theoretical nature (“The fetid odor of his self-absorption made me gag”), and capped off with an autobiographical and historical afterword. In short, whether or not you enjoy Breakdowns—which is in roughly equal parts provocative, funny, sad and self-indulgent—you’ll learn a lot about Art Spiegelman.

My own interest in Mr. Spiegelman is mostly limited to Maus (1991), his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book that made the Holocaust new and freshly horrible, and shlepped the horror across the Atlantic to Rego Park, Queens, where Mr.  read more »

Of all the extraordinary items in the selection from Norman Mailer’s correspondence served up in the Oct. 6 issue of The New Yorker, perhaps the most astonishing is the letter Mailer wrote to Don DeLillo in 1988, when Libra (Penguin, $15), Mr. DeLillo’s novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, had just been published. Mailer, who was 65 at the time, and writing to a younger, less famous novelist, is generous, accurate, revealing, insightful, characteristically feisty and very nearly humble, all in 200-odd words:

“What a terrific book. I have to tell you that I read it against the grain. I’ve got an awfully long novel going on the CIA, and of course it overlapped just enough that I kept saying, ‘this son of a bitch is playing my music,’ but I was impressed, damned impressed, which I very rarely am.  read more »

You could spend the next few months reading nothing but new books about Abraham Lincoln. That would be true almost every season, Honest Abe being the closest thing the publishing industry ever comes to a safe bet. But on Feb. 12, he’ll be 200 years old, and in this business, every big birthday is preceded by an avalanche of books.

A small sampling: 

Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander In Chief, by James M. McPherson (The Penguin Press, Oct. 7).

Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, by Eric Foner (Norton, Oct. 13).

Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer,  read more »

It’s time to make room for Raymond Tallis, the playful polymath whose wonderful new book, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head (Yale, $28), will make you see yourself not just in a new light, but from a dozen new angles. If that sounds like more self-scrutiny than you can bear, think of it as an exercise in philosophical anatomy—or if that’s still too scary, take Mr. Tallis’ suggestion and think of it as tourism: a guided trip around a body part that happens to house the sense of self.

A bonus, for those of us who care about how sentences are made: Reading The Kingdom of Infinite Space is an aesthetically pleasing experience.  read more »

Robert Stone, on his way to giving a glowing review in The New York Times Book Review to Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War, nominates Michael Herr’s Dispatches (Vintage, $12.95) as “the most brilliant exposition of the cultural dimension of an American war ever compiled.” He notes, moreover, that Mr. Filkins’ book is “in the tradition of Dispatches.” He’s right, of course—but to give the comparison the weight it deserves, we need to remind ourselves of just how comprehensively brilliant Mr. Herr’s book is. Endlessly quotable (“Airmobility, dig it”), packed with stories and scenes that will stay with you permanently—though you may want to forget some of them—Dispatches, as Mr.  read more »

A dozen years ago, I spent three weeks with David Foster Wallace. Not the guy—not the man who hanged himself, age 46, on Sept.12—but the writer, the novelist who invaded my house with a huge, wonderful, impossible book, Infinite Jest. For 20 days or so I did virtually nothing but read and re-read the 1,079 pages of a novel that thrilled and infuriated me. There were long hours, pinned on the couch under his 3-pound, 5-ounce tome, when I hated him with a pure and righteous rage—my wrist hurt from holding the thing, my brain was weary from the footnotes and the cleverness and the strangeness of the world he’d plunged me into.  read more »

To mark the 40th anniversary of the prestigious Booker prize, The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) asked 40 judges—one judge per year—to tell “the inside story of how the winner was chosen.” Some of the judges obliged with literary tittle-tattle, but more amusing, and much more revealing, was the steady drumbeat of scorn for the whole business of picking a winner. Here are some highlights:

“[T]he absurdity of the process was soon apparent: it is almost impossible to persuade someone else of the quality or poverty of a selected novel (a useful lesson in the limits of literary criticism). In practice, judge A blathers on about his favorite novel for five minutes, and then judge B blathers on about her favorite novel for five minutes, and nothing changes: no one switches sides.  read more »

Indignation
By Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 233 pages, $26

First, an apology: Like many of his fans, I expect a masterpiece every time a new Philip Roth novel is announced, and when it falls short, I carp and quibble and point invidiously to past Roth triumphs. Sorry.

Indignation is flawed, but I promise to ignore the problem as long as I can (it’s a case of ill-considered narrative strategy) and celebrate instead a magnificent display of writerly talent: a lean, powerful novel with bold characters who command attention; scenes of impressive dramatic intensity and comic vitality; language that blasts the reader’s cozy complacency (it’s not called Indignation for nothing); and a theme that swells imperceptibly from a murmur to a satisfying roar.  read more »

Nothing to Be Frightened Of
By Julian Barnes
Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pages, $24.95

I’m borderline obsessed by Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade.” It’s a pitiless meditation on death; a frank confession of fear; a swift rebuke to religion (“That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade”); and a weary recognition that despite the dread moment of personal extinction, life will go on—dawn will come again:

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

I’m particularly hung up on the word “rented.” We live in a rented world—and the landlord, alas, can evict us without any notice whatsoever.

In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his own meandering, book-length meditation on mortality, Julian Barnes calls “Aubade” Larkin’s “great death-poem.  read more »

Devout fans of Marilynne Robinson—those still astonished, nearly three decades later, by the poetry of Housekeeping (1980), and those who made the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead (2004) into an unlikely best seller—will be thrilled by Home (FSG, $25), which is essentially a second serving of Gilead, though a trifle less intense, softened by the gentle presence of a female protagonist. We’re back in Gilead, Iowa, in the mid-1950s, and we’re as drenched as ever in religion; once again there’s a father figure who’s a preacher, and a complex father-son bond—but this time there’s also Glory, a 38-year-old daughter who’s come home to care for her father, and ends up caring for a black-sheep brother who’s drifted home, too.  read more »

Summer’s almost over, but that doesn’t mean we’re ready to go back to school, back to work, back to the shriek and clank of the city.

Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark (Henry Holt, $23) is set in the "great American wilderness"—or anyway Vermont—and strains, late in the game, to strike a cheery note, but it’s basically dark (see the portentous title) and urban in character, a striving, unhappy, crowded book that wants to do more than it does. A pastoral idyll it ain’t.

Mr. Auster has been trying for decades to squeeze emotional zing into his cerebral concoctions—he succeeded best in Leviathan, 16 years ago.  read more »

As Russian tanks rumble through South Ossetia and into Georgia, should we heed the advice of Slavoj Žižek, the hip Slovene theorist, who tells us that "to chastise violence outright, to condemn it as ‘bad,’ is an ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence"? (The idea being that violence is "fundamental" to the capitalist status quo.)

Clever Mr. Žižek has published his new book, Violence (Picador, $14), just in time—not because of the bombs falling in Transcaucasia, but because his treatise is an acrobatic feat of theorizing worthy of the Olympics.

A random sampling:

"Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people: in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture.  read more »

Literary biography has been wandering in curious directions, with fresh perspective the ever-receding goal.

When I talk about books, I preach and practice a superficially naïve gospel that puts characters from literature on equal footing with characters we encounter in real life (Elizabeth Bennet means more to many people than any number of living, breathing relatives), but I nevertheless had difficulty adjusting to Graham Vickers’ Chasing Lolita (Chicago Review Press, $24.95), which is essentially a biography of the first and most famous nymphet, Nabokov’s Dolores Haze. It traces her ancestry and her afterlife (think porn sites), and lists with acrobatic precision the "facts" of her short, unhappy terrestrial existence.  read more »

Every summer house should have on its dusty potluck shelves, in among the Agatha Christie and the John D. MacDonald and the J. K. Rowling, a copy of Paul Collins’ Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World (Picador, $15), an almanac of delusion, failure and heroically misguided enterprise. Isn’t vacation the best vantage from which to contemplate the sheer waste of epic flops?

The eponymous Banvard was a 19th-century American painter who grew rich with a vast moving panorama of the Mississippi—then went bust in a senseless commercial dogfight with P. T. Barnum. Among the other forgotten dreamers and maniacs celebrated by Mr.  read more »

How Fiction Works
By James Wood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 265 pages, $24

James Wood is in relax mode. That doesn’t mean he’s lost his edge, or that he can’t get excited—enthusiasm is still his best party trick: He gushes like Old Faithful. But these days he’s got nothing left to prove, no one to elbow out of the way. He’s the undisputed champ. If the poet laureate had a critic laureate to keep her company, James Wood would be he—why else would Harvard have appointed him professor of the practice of literary criticism? Why else would The New Yorker have poached him last year from The New Republic?

Of course, he still needs an audience—readers willing to read about reading and writing—and perhaps relax mode is Mr.  read more »

The last word on Christopher Hitchens’ ludicrous Vanity Fair waterboarding caper, Leon Wieseltier’s magisterial put-down in The New Republic (www.tnr.com):

"There are many things that might be said about such a stunt—that moral understanding is not arrived at by means of the senses, or by personal acquaintance with evil; that ordinary intelligence and ordinary imagination are quite sufficient to establish the foulness and the folly of such procedures, which is why judges who have not dressed up in Guantánamo drag have been able to rule persuasively against them; that the victims of waterboarding do not commonly towel down and head for the Waverly Inn—but I have no intention of dignifying this high clowning with serious reflection.  read more »

Andrew Delbanco, the distinguished critic and biographer of Melville, gives Barack Obama two thumbs up in The New Republic (www.tnr.com), explicitly allowing his favorable literary judgment on Mr. Obama’s two books to shade into a political endorsement ("this man—to my ear, at least—is the real deal"). It’s a strange, leapfrogging idea, to think that a politician’s prose opens a window into his heart. "It is hard for any writer," says Mr. Delbanco, "no matter how selective his memory or guarded his words, to conceal himself in his writing. I suspect (I’ve never met him) that the weaknesses and strengths of Obama’s writing reflect those of his character—a virtuosity that tempts him to be pleased with himself and impatient with others, but also an awareness of human complexity.  read more »

Self-indulgence, that famous boomer trait, is stamped all over Geoffrey Douglas' The Classmates (Hyperion, $23.95), a brooding memoir of the St. Paul's School class of 1962—the class that brought us John Kerry and therefore, roughly four years ago, began to think of itself as somehow significant: One of their own was very possibly on the verge of being elected president. I'll spare you Mr. Douglas' personal problems, which he writes about in detail, and the travails of other obscure boys from '62—the ones who suddenly had to measure their ordinary selves against a classmate who was "almost president"—and concentrate on the young John Kerry, who was, to put it delicately, not popular with his peers.  read more »

For a subtle, impressively intelligent discussion of a topic that’s on just about everybody’s mind these day, see David Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy (Princeton, $29.95). Mr. Runciman, a lecturer in political theory at Cambridge, begins with the assumption that hypocrisy is inevitable in politics, and eventually argues that it’s also salutary, if only in the limited sense that hypocrisy implies a private sphere where the government can’t, or shouldn’t, reach. (When no one has anything to hide, he warns, "that is where terror lies.") He looks at individual thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to George Orwell, and even individual politicians (including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), but the passage I want to share is a shrewd appraisal of Orwell’s opinion of two fellow writers, P.  read more »

AMERICA AMERICA
By Ethan Canin
Random House, 458 pages, $27

America America. Terrible title, right? Grandiose and sentimental. (And Elia Kazan got there first.) That’s what I thought, too—but it’s grown on me, and now I see that it’s suitably ambitious for a novel about ambition, suitably redundant for a novel that takes as its twinned themes American capitalism and American politics, and suitably ambiguous (is it a boast or a lament?) for a bittersweet success story about an epic failure. Ethan Canin could hardly wish for higher praise than this: His big, carefully crafted novel earns the right to its name.

On a local level, America America is the story of Corey Sifter, a 16-year-old boy who in the spring of 1971 is hired to work on the estate of the vastly rich and powerful Metarey family.  read more »

It's hard to get your book properly reviewed when the critics are only interested in sizing you up as Barack Obama’s running mate. For Jim Webb, who is, as Elizabeth Drew insists in the June 26 New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com), "a serious writer, not a politician who writes books on the side," it must be especially galling.

Or maybe not.

Ms. Drew herself seems much less engaged by the Virginia senator’s new book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America (Broadway, $24.95), than by the man himself (a "warrior-intellectual," she calls him) and his zigzag career. In fact, I think she’s smitten:

   read more »

The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.  read more »

WHEN GORE VIDAL is on a tear, outrage and wit blend to produce a new, delicious and deadly substance, like sulfuric Champagne or a napalm martini. Consider, for example, an especially corrosive—and funny—essay on the twinned destiny of gays and Jews, "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star," originally published in The Nation in 1981 and newly reprinted in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (Doubleday, $27.50). Here’s a sample:  read more »

The word "dazzle" appears often and in many forms in Adam Thirlwell’s boldly self-indulgent The Delighted States (FSG, $30), which turns the history of the novel, from Cervantes to Nabokov, into an enchanted, borderless, timeless playground for the amusement of Mr. Thirlwell and any reader who succumbs to his charms (which I did, mostly). Much of the pleasure in Mr. Thirlwell’s book comes from the writers he quotes from and comments on—among them Laurence Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka, Witold Gombrowicz and Nabokov, who declared that masterpieces are made of "dazzling combinations of drab parts." Combine that dazzling crew in your playground, and you’re unlikely to have a drab time.  read more »

HOW VERY UNGENEROUS of Joan Acocella. In her long New Yorker essay about hangovers, "A Few Too Many" (May 26, $4.50), she cites Kingsley Amis several times, quotes him at length and mentions (without naming them) his three books on drinking but she fails to point out that Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis (Bloomsbury, $19.99) is being published this week. It’s those same three books gathered in a single volume and introduced by Christopher Hitchens (like Amis, a dedicated booze hound), and it’s riotously funny, at least for the first 100 pages.  read more »

Suze Rotolo, the girl on his arm on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, is not a writer, and it's unfair to expect anything more from her memoir, A Freewheelin' Time (Broadway, $22.95), than a peek or two into the life of a very young Dylan on the brink of stardom. Unfortunately, we get a great deal more: flat-footed accounts of Ms. Rotolo's unhappy family life, her banal sociological insights into the '60s, her predictable lefty politics and her (still) undigested thoughts about the role of the muse in the creative life of a great artist.  read more »

The scary YouTube videos of televangelist and McCain ally John Hagee don’t quite do justice to his talent as a preacher, at least according to Matt Taibbi’s vicious, funny, heartbreaking tour of the American scene, The Great Derangement (Spiegel & Grau, $24):

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Oscar Wilde, on his tour of America in 1882, made not one but two pilgrimages to Camden, N.J., to see Walt Whitman—whose poetry he claimed to have known “from the cradle.” Afterward, the Good Grey Poet told a reporter that Wilde was “genuine, honest, and manly.” He added, for emphasis, “He is so frank, and outspoken, and manly.” Wilde, in return, compared Whitman to Goethe and Schiller: “There is something so Greek and sane about his poetry; it is so universal, so comprehensive.”

This comical instance of brazen late-19th-century logrolling comes from Michael Robertson’s Worshipping Walt (Princeton, $27.95), which introduces us to a handful of the “hot little prophets” who made a cult of Whitman, and also reminds us of the religious purpose of his poetry—with Leaves of Grass as gospel.  read more »

Garry Wills, writing in The New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com), compares Barack Obama’s speech on race last month in Philadelphia with the address Abraham Lincoln delivered at the Cooper Union in New York on Feb. 27, 1860. In fact, the two speeches are very different, the glaring distinction being that Lincoln’s knotty, cerebral discourse appeals principally to reason, whereas Mr. Obama’s forthright simplicity appeals principally to the emotions. But Mr. Wills’ first few paragraphs are nonetheless astonishing for the parallels drawn between the 19th- and 21st-century candidates:  read more »

It’s spring at last, and girls are pushing up everywhere like daisies.

PLAYWRIGHT THERESA REBECK showcases a Brooklyn trio in her lively, entertaining and accurately titled first novel, Three Girls and Their Brother (Shaye Areheart, $23.95), a romp through the looking-glass world of fashion shoots and instant celebrity. Amelia (14), Polly (17) and Daria (18), red-haired beauties all, granddaughters of the celebrated literary critic Leo Heller, rocket into the limelight when The New Yorker features them in a photo spread. (Remember that vampy portrait of the Hilton sisters in the “Next Generation” issue back in 1999? )  read more »

Last week The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) canvassed writers living and dead—an eclectic selection including Jonathan Franzen, Zoë Heller, George Bernard Shaw and Gertrude Stein—for their opinion of the semicolon. Perhaps the most vehement response came from the late Kurt Vonnegut: “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”  read more »

In his forthcoming Observer review of The Second Plane, Tom Bissell admires this throwaway Martin Amis line: “I found myself frivolously wondering whether Osama was just the product … of his birth order. Seventeenth out of fifty-seven is a notoriously difficult slot to fill.” Funny, but not entirely accurate—or so I gather from Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens (Penguin Press, $35), an epic history of the vast and vastly rich Saudi Arabian family that spawned W.’s nemesis. Meticulous and compulsively readable, Mr. Coll’s book has a huge cast of characters, swollen by the legion of Osama siblings—the exact number of which is apparently tricky to establish. (One declassified F.B.I. e-mail from 2003 referred to the “millions” of bin Ladens “running around”—and added, reassuringly, that “99.999999% of them are of the non-evil variety.”) Mr. Coll counts 54 children of Mohamed bin Laden, and notes that Mohamed “fathered seven children during the year of Osama’s birth—five sons and two daughters.” His cautious conclusion is that “Osama arrived among the Bin Ladens as somewhere between son number seventeen and son number twenty-one.”  read more »

A Brit writing in a British literary journal has put his finger precisely on the pulse of Barack Obama’s rhetoric. “Those who hear only empty optimism in Obama aren’t listening,” Jonathan Raban proclaims in the London Review of Books (www.lrb.co.uk):

“The light in Obama’s rhetoric—the chants of ‘Yes, we can’ or his woo-woo line, lifted from Maria Shriver’s endorsement speech, ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’—is in direct proportion to the darkness, and he paints a blacker picture of America than any Democratic presidential candidate in living memory has dared to do. He courts his listeners, not as legions of the blissful, but as legions of the alienated, adrift in a country no longer recognizable as their own, and challenges them to emulate slaves in their struggle for emancipation, impoverished European immigrants seeking a new life on a far continent, and soldiers of the ‘greatest generation’ who volunteered to fight Fascism and Nazism.  read more »