The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags

For her first essay collection in more than 15 years, noted literary and cultural critic Merkin (Dreaming of Hitler: Passions and Provocations) assembles a diverse array of work, most of it previously published. Included are profiles of Richard Burton, Bruno Bettelheim, Mike Tyson, and Cate Blanchett, as well as essays on Anne Carson’s “unclassifiable” poetry, the books of W.G. Sebald, and the resiliency of Jean Rhys (who “speaks to the inner bag lady in all of us”). The keenly perceptive Merkin adroitly tackles high and low culture—the troubled trajectory of the women’s movement and the meaning of lip gloss, the fabled Bloomsbury Circle and the “current prima-donna status” of pets. Drawn to “fragile sorts” because she “understood the desolation that drove them,” her critiques and profiles pinpoint her subjects’ foibles while remaining deeply empathetic. Sensitive to how hard it is to keep one’s bearings in our unmoored, consumerist society, she is refreshingly candid about her anxieties, writing of her family’s “pathological discretion” on the subject of its wealth, her ambivalence about her Orthodox Jewish upbringing, and her quest for the perfect handbag. No matter what topic, readers will be treated to mesmerizing prose, lively wit, and penetrating analysis; the collection is a joy to read. Agent: Markus Hoffmann, Regal Literary. (Sept.)