26 Books

Race, music, education, institutions and the birth of hip hop are just some of the topics for which Jonathan Lethem finds room in this novel. The first half follows young Dylan Ebdus as he deals with growing up as one of the few white kids on his block in 1970s Brooklyn.

The Fortress of Solitude

Jonathan Lethem
Faber and Faber 2005, Paperback, 160 pages, £8.99

After his mother leaves, Dylan is raised by his father, a reclusive artist who spends his days in the attic painting a film frame by frame. Helping Dylan through his isolation and the frequent bullying he faces is Mingus Rude, another boy being raised by a reclusive father – in this case, Barrett Rude Jr., a soul singer who has retired and is sinking slowly into drug addiction.

I admire Don DeLillo’s work greatly, and Underworld remains one of my favourite novels in the English language. But since that masterpiece was published, DeLillo has been in uncertain form, the four novels he’s produced since then being slight, both physically and in substance. But a slight book from DeLillo is worth a great deal and, even though Point Omega is another mild disappointment, it still contains things to like.

Point Omega

Don DeLillo
Picador 2010, Hardcover, 224 pages, £14.99

Those looking for a fundamental change in DeLillo’s basic style of what can seem to be the occasional portentous and meaning-free sentence surrounded with gnomic, stilted dialogue will find nothing to like. But, if you’re looking for realism, DeLillo isn’t the place to start. His style can be monotonous (nowhere more so than in The Body Artist), but it can also be profoundly beautiful, often hauntingly so. Somewhere at the centre of his writing is a deep-seated angst, a fear about the business of being human, a fear about our future, and a profound sense of loneliness. It’s perhaps not surprising that this doesn’t appeal to everyone.

Eight years passed between Gold’s debut, Carter Beats the Devil, and this, his second novel. Carter Beats the Devil is a fictionalised story about Charles Carter, an American magician who was successful in the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s a very good book.

Sunnyside

Glen David Gold
Sceptre 2010, Paperback, 576 pages, £7.99

Sunnyside is more ambitious but, because it doesn’t quite reach its target, it’s ultimately less successful. It tells the story of the birth of celebrity, the rise of Hollywood and the earliest stirrings of American empire. At its centre is Charlie Chaplin but numerous other real life figures appear on its pages.

It’s probably no surprise that having just read a book about crime fiction I should turn next to one of the classics of the genre. Trent’s Last Case is significant because it was one of the first novels to subvert the conventions of the genre – and it did so in 1913, before the genre even reached its so-called golden age.

Trent’s Last Case

E. C. Bentley
House of Stratus Ltd 2008, Paperback, 240 pages, £10.14

Philip Trent is a gentleman detective who works mostly for newspapers. When the story opens he has already earned a degree of fame for solving several high profile cases. He is called in to investigate the death of Sigsbee Manderson, an American businessman who has been found dead at his country home. Manderson was unpopular with most people who knew him so there is no shortage of suspects but what’s baffling is how he came to be shot dead in his garden without any sound being heard.

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.

James Joyce is most famous for his epic masterpiece, Ulysses, but his early work is probably just as highly regarded by critics. Dubliners – his first substantial work of fiction – is a set of fifteen short stories of varying length, the longest and last of which, The Dead, is one of the great masterpieces of the genre.

Joyce’s writing here is much less densely packed than it is in Ulysses, and is consequently a much easier read. But below the surface is a rich range of allusion, and a pervasive sense of melancholy hangs over the entire collection.

Dubliners (Penguin Modern Classics)

Joyce James
Penguin Classics 2000, Paperback, 368 pages, £7.99

Joyce’s heroes here are flawed, working or lower-middle class people, living real, scarred lives in a Dublin overshadowed by the Catholic Church and the British Empire. As with much of Joyce’s work, Parnell’s downfall is an ever-present cloud on political life.

Somewhere in the recesses of my brain there is a memory of reading that only Jesus Christ and Richard Wagner can compete with Napoleon for the amount written about them. Both Wagner and Napoleon shared a relentless myth-making about their own lives with a good portion of an eye on the judgement of history, to the extent that there’s a question as to whether either was able to act without considering posterity first. As a result, both are repugnantly egotistical. But, whereas Wagner’s reputation is saved from his own personality by the transcendent quality of the art he left behind, Napoleon has a much more questionable set of accomplishments to defend.

Napoleon

F.J. McLynn
Pimlico 1998, Paperback, 749 pages, £16.99

McLynn is a rather leaden writer, and it is hard to stay with him through 700 odd pages without lapsing into boredom. His style is extremely repetitive, especially when writing about people in Napoleon’s circle for whom he has an obvious enmity. Chief among these are Talleyrand, Murat and the Emperor’s sister, Pauline. McLynn has a habit of using the same pejorative adjective every time he mentions one of these personalities (for Talleyrand, for example, it is invariable ‘venal’, for Pauline, ‘nymphomaniac’).