This week: new Stephen King, the hatred of poetry, and the definitive Diane Arbus biography.
Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece ‘The Sun Also Rises’
In this revealing new study, Blume shows that a series of competing internal and external pressures helped birth Hemingway’s now-legendary debut roman à clef, The Sun Also Rises. Blume begins by tracing Hemingway’s dogged path to becoming a published writer. By the time Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, arrived in Paris in 1921, he was considered one of the most promising young American authors, though he had published only a few short stories. The particulars of the Hemingways’ epic trip to Pamplona, Spain, with five friends in the summer of 1925—and the romantic entanglements that followed—shed light not only on Hemingway’s early career but also on other stories of the lost generation. After Hemingway refashioned their trip into a novel, he focused on a publishing contract for what he firmly believed would be a blockbuster sensation. In the subsequent negotiations and editing process, Blume reveals, F. Scott Fitzgerald played a surprisingly large role. Blume has carved a mountain of original research into a riveting tale of Hemingway’s literary, romantic, and publishing travails.
Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces
New Yorker contributor Frazier (Travels in Siberia) presents a selection of varied, compelling articles dating from 2000 onward. Known for his keen wit (which does appear, to great effect), Frazier also grapples seriously with societal issues: homelessness and the shelter system in New York City, the opioid addiction epidemic, and the environmental effect of invasive species such as Asian carp and the titular feral hogs. He also charts the landscape of the city, surveying both its marvels (the Croton reservoir system, harbor seals) and its plagues (a danger-filled bus route in Brooklyn, Hurricane Sandy’s toll). Several pieces, such as one about an apparent meteorite that fell into a bathroom in a New Jersey home, defy easy classification but display Frazier’s trademark curiosity about the world and the people who inhabit it. Frazier gives a human dimension to his research with probing, evocative profiles of the people he meets, whether the subject is the care and preservation of a horseshoe crab population or a start-up that is making substitutes for plastic out of mushrooms.
When Friendship Followed Me Home
After growing up in foster care, 12-year-old Ben Coffin is just happy to have a home and a loving mother; living in Coney Island is icing on the cake. Ben adores the beach, the boardwalk, and the local librarian, Mrs. Lorentz. When he meets her daughter, Halley, there is an instant connection, fueled in part by Flip, a dog Ben rescues from the street. Soon Ben and Halley are best friends, collaborating on a fantasy story and hanging out all the time, even as she undergoes chemotherapy. But Ben has learned that good things don’t tend to last, and when his mother dies, and Halley’s treatments begin to fail, he has to dig deep to find faith in people, the world, and himself. As in his young adult books, Griffin (Adrift) handles hard topics with penetrating insight and honesty, while balancing painful moments (and there are many) with levity, such as Flip’s need to lick everyone on the mouth. Ben wrestles with big questions in relatable, realistic ways, and his huge heart and optimism will win over even the most hardened skeptics.
Homegoing
Gyasi’s amazing debut offers an unforgettable, page-turning look at the histories of Ghana and America, as the author traces a single bloodline across seven generations, beginning with Ghanaian half-sisters Effia, who is married off to a British colonizer in the 1760s, and Esi, who is captured into the British slave-trading system around the same time. These women never meet, never know of each other’s existence, yet in alternating narratives we see their respective families swell through the eyes of slaves, wanderers, union leaders, teachers, heroin addicts, and more—these often feel like linked short stories, with each descendent receiving his or her own chapter. Esi’s descendants find themselves on the other side of the Atlantic, toiling on plantations in the American South before escaping to the North for freedom, while Effia’s offspring become intertwined in the Gold Coast slave trade, until her grandson breaks away and disappears to live a simple existence with his true love. In both America and Ghana, prosperity rises and falls from parent to child, love comes and goes, and the characters’ trust of white men wavers. These story elements purposely echo like ghosts—as history often repeats itself—yet Gyasi writes each narrative with remarkable freshness and subtlety. A marvelous novel.
End of Watch
After two straightforward crime thrillers, MWA Grand Master King (Finders Keepers) torques this third and final novel featuring retired detective Bill Hodges into his trademark terror territory. Hodges has long suspected that Brady Hartsfield, the brain-damaged mass murderer captured at the end of Mr. Mercedes, has been faking his catatonia, and his suspicions are reinforced by rumors circulating in Brady’s hospital ward (in what may be a Midwestern state) that he can move objects telekinetically. The truth is actually worse: with the help of secretly administered experimental drugs and skillfully hacked computer technology, Brady has found a way to project his personality into others and commandeer them as his “organic wheelchairs.” The stage is set for Brady to compel mass suicide among users of a handheld gaming device whose interface he’s hijacked, and to draw out Hodges to settle a personal score. King has dealt before with this novel’s different themes—endowment with dangerous supernatural powers, the zombifying effect of modern consumer electronics—but he finds fresh approaches to them and inventive ways to introduce them in the lives of his recurring cast of sympathetic characters, whose pains and triumphs the reader feels. King’s legion of fans will find this splice of mystery and horror a fitting finale to his Bill Hodges trilogy.
The Hatred of Poetry
In lucid and luminous prose, poet and novelist Lerner (10:04) explores why many people share his aversion to poetry, which he attributes, paradoxically, to the deeply held belief that poetry ought to have tremendous cultural value. The “bitterness of poetic logic,” Lerner claims, is that its transcendent ideal—universal, trans- historical, divinely inspired—always falls short in the actual expression. He explains that when readers read with, in Marianne Moore’s words, “perfect contempt”—skeptically and critically—they find that poetry clears a space for the genuine, even if the “planet-like music” of the spheres cannot be adequately captured by human language. Ably moving from Plato and Caedmon to John Keats and Emily Dickinson and then to Amiri Baraka and Claudia Rankine, Lerner offers a concise primer on how to read a poem, along with a humorous, faintly regretful look at how individual poems fail to live up to the ideals readers have for them. Lerner’s brief, elegant treatise on what poetry might do and why readers might need it is the perfect length for a commute or a classroom assignment, clearing a space for both private contemplation and lively discussion.
Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer
With 12 years of scrupulous research and a critic’s eye, Lubow turned a routine magazine assignment for the New York Times into the defining biography of photographer Diane Arbus, whose portraits of twins, circus freaks, and transvestites, among many others, established her as one of the leading artists of the 20th century. With few exceptions, Arbus’s preferred subjects were “the obscure over the celebrated, victims of power over its agents.” Lubow follows her life from her birth into an upper-class Jewish family in N.Y.C. in 1923; through her early marriage and subsequent fashion photography partnership with her husband, Allan; to the birth of their two daughters and their later divorce; and finally to her solo career with its monographs and museum exhibitions. The book explores how Arbus’s lifelong depression, an incestuous relationship with her poet brother, other damaging love affairs, and ongoing financial distress may have led to her suicide at age 48. Relying primarily on interviews with friends, lovers, and colleagues, as well as Arbus’s previously unavailable correspondence, Lubow provides not only a comprehensive assessment of her groundbreaking work but, perhaps more significantly, a revealing documentary of Arbus’s often-tortured life. As Arbus frequently acknowledged, “The subject... is always more important than the picture.”
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
Porter’s first novel is a heartbreaking and life-affirming meditation on the dislocating power of grief. Events are presented from the viewpoint of three characters: a recently widowed dad, his two young boys, and a talking crow who, like Poe’s raven, roosts in their house as a tangible symbol of the family’s need to come to terms with their loss. The husband has been recently contracted to write a study of Ted Hughes’s Crow (written after the death of Sylvia Plath, who is also referenced here), and like the Hughes’s trickster Crow, this Crow shifts shape and personality to address the changing needs of the different family members. Porter’s characters express their feelings through observations that are profound and simply phrased. The dad recalls the harmonious feeling of lives shared early in his marriage, “when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.” The boys, dismayed at how protectively adults coddle them against the reality of their mother’s death, wonder, “Where are the fire engines? Where is the noise and clamour of an event like this?” The powerful emotions evoked in this novel will resonate with anyone who has experienced love, loss, and mourning.
Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
With compassion and dark humor, Roach (Gulp) delves into the world of military scientists and their drive to make combat more survivable for soldiers. Her interest in military matters wasn’t piqued by the usual aspects of warfare—armaments, tactics, honor—but the more “esoteric” ones: “exhaustion, shock, bacteria, panic, ducks.” Roach goes into great detail about the historical conditions that spawned particular areas of research, and she often describes seemingly absurd tests and experiments. Military scientists are so committed to bringing soldiers home alive that they examine nearly every facet of life and death, researching such topics as diarrhea among Navy SEALs, body odors under stress, using maggots to heal wounds, and the “injuries collectively known as urotrauma.” Roach also corrects some popular misconceptions while offering odd bits of trivia. Sharks aren’t particularly attracted to human blood, she finds, though it was discovered that bears love the taste of used tampons. And in the case of reconstructive surgery, her elaborate explanation of penile transplants brings home the true horror of war. Roach’s book is not for the squeamish or those who envision war as a glorious enterprise; it is a captivating look at the lengths scientists go to in order to reduce the horrors of war.
Marrow Island
Smith’s excellent sophomore effort (after Glaciers) follows struggling journalist Lucie Bowen who, after being deeded ownership of the island cottage of her childhood, returns there to live and regroup. It’s been 20 years since she and her mother fled Orwell Island on Washington’s San Juan archipelago, after a devastating 7.9-magnitude earthquake rattled the land, blew up a refinery, and took her father’s life. But a letter from her childhood friend Katie has beckoned her back. Katie has joined an environmentalist commune on previously abandoned nearby Marrow Island, and she touts that her farm collective’s efforts have revitalized the land and invites Lucie to visit and see the changes for herself. Their reunion and the looming sense of menace ratchet up the novel’s suspense; the dread is clear from the outset due to Lucie’s journalistic skepticism. As the two women—along with forest ranger Carey McCoy and colony leader Sister J.—interact over a weekend on the island, it becomes disturbingly clear that Marrow Island may be having a sinister effect on the dedicated, religious citizen farmers living off the primitive land.
The Good Lieutenant
Terrell’s audacious new novel begins with a literal bang as a U.S. Army patrol in Iraq goes terribly wrong for Lt. Emma Fowler, who is present as her secret lover, Lt. Dixon Pulowski, is critically wounded in an explosion while attempting to recover the corpse of a kidnapped sergeant. The narrative moves in reverse chronological order from there, to show the events before the botched operation, depicting the previous op that got the sergeant abducted at Muthanna intersection, an IED explosion at the same intersection that cost the lives of two soldiers earlier, a bad call made by the colonel who declared the intersection safe, and Fowler’s stateside training, where she begins her love affair with Pulowski. Although this backward conceit has been used before, as in the Christopher Nolan film Memento and the Harold Pinter play Betrayal, it works particularly well in this story, which employs the structure to critique the follies of the Iraq War and the adamantine nature of the military mind-set.
American Girls
Tired of being the “leftover” of her parents’ divorce and eager to disappear after a prank goes too far, 15-year-old Anna uses her stepmother’s credit card to buy a ticket to Los Angeles, where her sister Delia, a struggling actress, lives. Surrounded by Hollywood’s beautiful and morally corrupt, Anna navigates interactions with Delia’s ex-boyfriend, Roger, who is shooting a movie about L.A. murders, and her sister’s current love interest, a writer on a kids’ show, as well as her own blossoming romance with a teen actor. Forced to pay back the money she stole for her flight, Anna takes a job researching the Manson girls for Roger. Her immersion into the Manson murders leads to paranoia when it appears that Delia is being stalked. Debut author Umminger’s humor is biting (“My family was clearly the place where optimism went to die”), yet it reveals richly complicated relationships among mothers, daughters, and sisters. Umminger crafts a Los Angeles both glittering and soulless, leading to Anna’s realization that she may have more in common with the Manson girls than she thought, but it’s the choices she makes that set her apart.
