26 Books

Reading Angela Carter’s lovely descriptions of south London earlier this year had made me realise how little I read about contemporary London, and this really fitted the bill nicely.

Shop Girl Diaries (Salt Modern Lives)

Emily Benet
Salt Publishing 2009, Paperback, 256 pages, £9.99

Hurray for Twitter: I found out about this book, set in a shop close to where I live, through the @Se1 account. Even though it’s square-shaped. For some reason this really grinds my gears. I like books to be book-shaped, otherwise I feel like I’m reading an accordion or a copy of Meg and Mog. Also, I worry about dropping it in the bath.

Like John Scaggs’ Crime Fiction, which I read last year, this is an academic overview of the crime fiction genre. While I was disappointed with Scaggs’ book – I felt I had already read too widely to appreciate it – I enjoyed this one a little more, mostly because each chapter is given over to a different specialist.

The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Martin Priestman (Editor)
Cambridge University Press 2003, Paperback, 308 pages, £19.99

I found the first two chapters, dealing with early crime fiction, particularly interesting. Ian A Bell’s chapter on 18th Century crime writing explains how early works didn’t seek to provide reassurance to the reader and largely omit any kind of detective figure. That’s followed by a chapter on sensationalist fiction by Lyn Pickett, who offers some good insights into the relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature during this formative period.

One of the most important of the Oulipian writers, Georges Perec is best known for Life: A User’s Manual – a collection of interlinked stories about the inhabitants of an apartment block – and A Void – a novel most famous for having been composed without the use of the letter e. The translation, which repeats the feat, is well worth reading.

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (Penguin Classics)

Georges Perec
Penguin Classics 2008, Paperback, 320 pages, £10.99

This volume collects Perec’s non-fiction work, though ‘non-fiction’ is perhaps not the best term for such a parade of flights of fancy, odd word games and barely-contained lunacy. There’s also a clever Borgesian short story, ‘Le Voyage d’hiver’, in which an academic searches for the provenance of a mysterious book.

This ridiculously named book is not, as you would be forgiven for thinking, a thriller but a “fly’s eye” account of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Inevitably, Obama comes out of the book as much more of a conventional politician than his campaign, or indeed Wolffe himself would like.

Codename – Renegade

Richard Wolffe
Virgin Books 2010, Paperback, 368 pages, £8.99

Obama is a storyteller, and storytellers are liars. Storytelling is a tremendously powerful way of communicating political ideas, but the facile stories that politicians tell, from McCain’s ‘Joe the Plumber’ (who was neither a plumber nor named Joe) to David Cameron’s mythical ‘black man’, are in fact ways of concealing the truth rather than exposing it.

Now that the United States has a president who has a respect for and understanding of the republic’s “founding documents”, my interest in the early years of the country is at an all time high. Here, Joseph J. Ellis gives us six vignettes from the the lives of seven of the US’s most prominent early politicians.

Founding Brothers

Joseph J. Ellis
Vintage Books USA 2002, Paperback, 304 pages, £9.95

Having passed my fortieth birthday, I’m fully entitled to get my grouchy on, and nothing is likely to make that happen than the facile notion that history needs to be narrated as though it were a drama sketched out in advance. Ellis takes this approach for his opening chapter, which concerns the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that resulted in the former’s death and the latter’s disgrace.

I’m not naive – at least not about this – I know that this is what publishers think readers want, but it’s painful to have to be told a familiar story as though it were a thriller, and this approach does a disservice to Ellis’s frequently telling insights. The same plague affects his telling of the Jefferson/Adams friendship, feud and reconciliation, with its improbable and all-American ending. It’s the written equivalent of TV documentaries that dramatise events in case our imaginations are too sluggish to be able to grasp the nature of the events.

The rest of the book is much better, in particular the chapter in which Ellis considers the long term impact of Washington’s Farewell Address. Similarly interesting is his discussion of the political manoeuvring around the selection of the location for the nation’s capital. As with so many issues of the time, the result was a compromise that smoothed over differences on the slavery issue that would lead directly to the Civil War. Despite his other great accomplishments, Jefferson comes out of this episode badly, as he does whenever his role vis-a-vis slavery, and even more especially when his double-dealing as John Adams’s vice-president come up.

It’s a short book, and it can’t, doesn’t seek to, match the depth of investigation that a longer book could achieve. Despite its sometimes clumsy dramatisation of events, it contains many fascinating details and much useful analysis.

Oh, how I wish I could put this book in the fiction category. It chronicles in sometimes mind-numbing detail how some of the world’s largest financial institutions brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse and how the US government narrowly averted this disaster with an almost unimaginably large bailout.

Too Big to Fail

Andrew Ross Sorkin
Allen Lane 2009, Paperback, 640 pages, £14.99

What’s most breathtaking about this book – and there are many such things – is the speed with which embattled CEOs go from being free market zealots to morally outraged supplicants with an expectation that they should be bailed out on the best possible terms by the taxpayer. Of course it’s no surprise that such morally compromised men should be hypocrites; that goes hand-in-hand with what they do. But that they would be prepared to argue for a doctrine that so opposes the logic of their entire working lives is pretty stunning.

This very funny book is hard to categorise. Is it fiction or non-fiction? Is it a biography or a book about not writing a biography? Having read it, I still don’t know the answer but I’m tempted to say that’s it’s all of those things.

Out of Sheer Rage

Geoff Dyer
Abacus 2003, Paperback, 242 pages, £8.99

Geoff Dyer, or a fictionalised version of him, wants to write a book about DH Lawrence. However, he alternates between being paralysed by procrastination and restless to the point that he can barely stay in one country. He’s in Paris when the book begins but believes he can’t write there and gives up his apartment with the intention of moving to Rome. Having given up his apartment, he becomes convinced that he can’t write anywhere else but Paris but it’s too late.

Jeannette Walls’ memoir is the story of a childhood spent moving from town to town and hovel to hovel, propelled along an increasingly unhinged adventure by her father and hero, Rex.

Dreamer, drinker, and erstwhile architect of the titular house of sand, Rex Walls has charisma to burn. That he does so, to the ground, is written in the stars from the outset. Just how he does it and who he takes down with him are what make this memoir so readable.

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls
Scribner Book Compan 2006, Paperback, 288 pages, £10.71

Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera bookends his memoir on life growing up in Wolverhampton with a letter he’s battling to write to his protective, ultra-traditional Punjabi mother. We don’t know what this letter contains, beyond the fact that it’s going to break her heart and it’s got Sanghera swigging neat vodka while he tries to write it. Good start.

The Boy with the Topknot

Sathnam Sanghera
Penguin 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, £9.99

What starts out as a memoir of growing up as a beloved younger son in a Punjabi family and then building a media life with white London friends as an adult soon zig-zags into family investigation. This isn’t a neatly arced story: we stumble across new developments with no real notice. Far from being an all-knowing observer dropped hints by Sanghera’s narration in some kind of Christmas Carol guided travel through his life, we come across things at the same time as he does, making it a far more accurate depiction of how surprises happen in real life. Bang! Surprise one. Bang! Surprise two. We flit from time to time (all held together easily, you don’t lose track) but you feel engaged rather than distanced. No Joanna Trolloping here.

Although Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovtiz were famously romantically involved towards the end of the former’s life, the essays in this collection were written before the pair met, which leaves the fascinating question of how intimacy with one of the world’s most famous practitioners of the art modulated Sontag’s views, if at all.

On Photography (Penguin Modern Classics)

Susan Sontag
Penguin Classics 2008, Paperback, 224 pages, £9.99

As they are, Sontag veers between the wilfully obfuscated prose that academics love and the statement of complete banalities presented as riveting insight.