Author: sarahwp

BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES by Tom Wolfe


This is a famous novel of 1980s New York.

It’s main character is Sherman McCoy, a fabulously wealthy bond trader with a fashionable wife and a younger mistress. It’s all feels very apropos our current obsession with filthy bankers. There’s lots of shouting and making huge amounts of money for not too damn much in the way of actual work. However, they occasionally break off from this mythic money making to use a pay phone, or to send a fax, which gives the whole thing a sweetly quaint air.

One day, Sherman picks his mistress up at the airport in his Mercedes sportscar, and they get lost in the Bronx. They hit a young black man and leave the scene. The story follows the collapse of Sherman’s life as this incident is investigated and prosecuted.

It’s an immensely cynical novel. There is not a single character in it who is no driven by ulterior motives: the criminal case is twisted by all sorts of people (journalists, ministers, judges) for their own personal gain. This dark view of the city and the era is so insistent, and so powerfully stated, and re-stated, and stated again just in case we missed it, that I kept expecting Sherman to finally change, to grow, to provide some kind of climax or rebuke to this world, if only because it seemed artistically necessary, after 713 pages of gloom. Not so: Sherman is crushed by events, no doubt just as he deserves.

There are women in this book, and they come in two varieties: no, not the usual madonna or whore, but pretty or ugly. That’s pretty much it for the women. All the men, no matter how differently their characters are drawn, share the same view of women. That is, they like to view them, but only if they are under 25. All married men are by definition unhappy apparently. I think I can guarantee that Tom Wolfe is unmarried, or if he is married, that the lady is a good bit younger than he is.

VICTORIANA ALERT! Apparently Wolfe was inspired to write this book in part by Thackeray’s VANITY FAIR. He wanted to write a great novel of the city, of New York, and was inspired by the older novel’s presentation of London. This gives us an interesting perspective on the title. Extra points for naming main female character in Vanity Fair. NO GOOGLING.

TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller

Apparently this one was banned on publication for being too sexually explicit. I think it should have been banned for being so incredibly boring.

I can’t really tell you what it is about, as I had to stop about twenty pages in. There is some guy. He is an aspiring novelist, he is poor, he is Paris. So far, so DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. And yet, from the same source material as Orwell, this guy has managed to write a load of rubbish.

Basically, the main character likes to have sex with prostitutes. One of these prostitutes (and we are not talking wealthy call girls, but starving women on the street) “loves her work.” Apparently, she is all body, and only exists in sensation. She does a lot of panting in her torn hose. What immensely craptacular nonsense. Her labia are referred to repeatedly as her rosebush. I’m sorry, that’s when I had to give up.

A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME by Anthony Powell


Now this is a book I really wanted to like. Sometimes you come across a book in a perfect kind of way, and with the weird symmetry that life can sometimes have, it becomes the perfect book for you right then. I found this book randomly in a Goodwill in LA. I had just had my mind boggled by what books cost in a real bookshop (a place I never go): US$16! So the price was right: US$1.99. Also, it was the only thing worth reading in the whole place. I was giving up, because all the rest was sad 80s chick lit, or self help (Dream Yourself Thin, etc), when suddenly I found “the major achievement in post-war English fiction” (Guardian); “one of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War” (New Yorker) and “more realistic than A La Recherche du Temps Perdu” (Evelyn Waugh). And I’d never heard of it! The Waugh really sold me. As we know, I love me some Proust in a serious, and seriously embarrasing, way. I love big fat novels that you can live in for months, and I love dry old English lit.

And it certainly is dry. Very dry. It’s told in the first person, by one Nick Jenkins, beginning in his last few years at public school, sometime in the 1930s. The work is made up of 12 novels, and the three I have in this volume are A QUESTION OF UPBRINGING, A BUYER’S MARKET, and THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD. The first covers his school years, the next his first years out of school, and I can’t tell you about the third one because I have given up on it.

I really want to like it, but I just can’t. There are some interesting elements. It’s quite involving to see how the First World War affected those just slightly too young to fight in it, and to see what daily life was like in that period. Occasionally, the author makes observations about human life and behaviour that are insightful and compelling. And yet, somehow, I just can’t go on. For one thing, we know virtually nothing about the inner life of the first person narrator. I’ve never come across anything like that, and it’s just bizarre. It gives the whole novel a kind of empty, unengaging feel. What we mostly learn about are his acquaintances (not even really his best friends) who he runs into an improbable number of times in his life. We learn a lot about people he doesn’t have much strong feeling for and doesn’t care about. Apparently, this is a major theme of the book: how people and issues recur across a lifetime, making patterns, and over the course of the remaining nine books, which will take us to the 1970s and his old age, it will all become clear, and presumably engaging. Sorry Mr Powell, I just can’t make it.

Also, isn’t the cover dire?

GoFugYourself.Com: GQ Photoshoot on Glee




This blog is supposed to be about everything I read in 2010. I have tried to be honest, even when the truth is embarrassing (eg. Carole Matthews). Even so, as I mainly cover books, a lot is left out: newspapers – magazines – internet crap. Ah, internet crap. Specifically, gofugyourself.com, which I read everyday. And I just had to promote their latest post, which I totally, totally agree with, about GQ’s photoshoot on Glee.

In this photoshoot, actors famous for playing teens were photographed in embarrassingly sexualised ways. Look it up: it is totally unnecessary and exceptionally gross. What makes me especially mad is the fact that the boy gets to wear all his bloody clothes. You actually can’t believe they are serious. Male gaze, much? Did feminism totally pass them by? Try looking up OBJECTIFICATION in the dictionary, bitches. Admittedly, all the actors are legal, but that is SO not what the shoot is about.

The photographer has had some complaints previously about his manipulation of young models. Perhaps a picture of him is worth a thousand words on this subject.

The New York Times is very interesting on this also.

It makes me totally mad.

A MILLION LITTLE PIECES by James Frey


Everyone seems to love this book. Meanwhile, it’s a bit crap.

It’s all about James Frey’s attempt to recover from drug and alcohol addiction. He wakes up on an airplane, with a huge hole in his cheek and missing teeth, and slowly realises he is being flown to his parents, who will put him in rehab. The book tracks his recovery, and his romance with a fellow patient. The cover is full of quotes from reviewers, apparently seriously misled. (Utterly compulsive” “heartbreaking memoir” etc. Maybe they are on crack too). It was also a bestseller.

True is not always interesting. I am sure recovering from drug addiction really sucks, and mostly you think “I hate my life” and “I want drugs” basically all day. As the subject of an entire book however these two thoughts get dull very quickly. Blah blah blah I need crack blah blah blah I have ruined my life blah blah blah I need vodka. You get the picture. It’s only got one colour.

The best part was when he tells us all about how he had two root canals without anaesthetic or painkiller. He couldn’t have drugs because of his addiction, so he just had two tennis balls to hold. He held them so hard he split his fingernails.

Hilariously, your friend and mine Wikipedia tells me that it has emerged that some of the book was invented. Frey apologized for fabricating portions of his book and for having made himself seem “tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was, or I am.” He added, “People cope with adversity in many different ways, ways that are deeply personal. . . . My mistake . . . is writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.” This does not surprise me. One very irritating aspect of the book is that he is constantly telling us how tough he is, and how he cows lesser men with his giant penis, (okay I exagerrate) etc etc. His publisher admitted that despite marketing the book as a memoir, and describing it as ‘brutally honest’ she had never had any section of it fact checked. Nice.

IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote


Capote was inspired to write this book by a 300 word article in the New York Times, which began: “Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI) — A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged … There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut.” (Thanks Salon)

He went down to Holcomb, with his childhood friend (bizarrely: Harper Lee) to interview people, and spent the next six years working on a detailed account of the crime. It is widely credited as the first non-fiction novel, and as more or less inventing the true crime genre. This genre is disgustingly large and healthy now, of course, so the book seems a good deal less radical and remarkable now than it did then.

It’s still however a gripping little story, with well drawn and compelling characters. What most appealed to me was the long sections of direct quotes. It was fascinating to see how ordinary people spoke in 1959. It’s sort of insanely quaint. They all sound like they’re in an Arthur Miller play all the time.

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE by Dodie Smith


This is such a wonderful book, I don’t even know what to do with myself. I began it on the train home from Bath in the evening, and suffice to say I finished it all before bed time. You know how it is when you look at the clock and it’s 00:05, and then, ten minutes later it’s 01:20? At that point, you’re sleep schedules all fucked anyway, so you may as well just keep reading! Hurray! It was a total binge.
Though now, as with all the best binges, I’m sorry for it. Because now I have no more I CAPTURE THE CASTLE to read. The cover says: “I know of few novels – except Pride and Prejudice – that inspire as much fierce lifelong affection in their readers as I Capture the Castle.” (Joanna Trollope) And I believe it. The first person I told about having read it practically chewed my arm off in delight, as she loves it too, and she told me it was recommended to her initially in an equally crazed fashion. I looked it up on Amazon, and it has a vast majority of 5 stars. Though three morons who need to smoke less crack gave it 1 star.

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE is written in journal format; and that that is successful is a major feat I think. It’s a hard thing to do. That ghost story I read a few books ago was in that format, and it was sadly creaky: the hardy young explorer was bizarrely literary, and kept saying “I write this journal because xyz” in a not very believable way. I CAPTURE THE CASTLE is very successful in this respect. It’s allegedly written by a seventeen year old girl, and not only is the voice itself charming, but, amazingly, it remains believable as she changes and grows over the course of the journal.

The girl, called Cassie, lives in a delipidated old castle with her sister and brother, her stepmother, and her father, who is struggling with his second decade of writers’ block. As their father is not writing, they have almost no income, and while very middle class, are so poor as often to be underfed. The owner of the nearby manor home dies, and his estate passes into the hands of his American nephew Simon. Simon and his cousin Neil arrive, and the former falls wildly in love with Cassie’s sister Rose. Rose is swept up in preparations for the wedding, and only slowly discovers that she does not in fact love her new fiance. In a quite unexpected twist, Cassie falls in love with him too, and this causes much upset. The book captures very well the sort of achingly painful love that is so common in adolesence and, thank god, not so very common afterwards.

There is much that is beautiful in the writing of this book: there’s one bit, about a nightime swim in a moat, that is just gorgeous. There’s a lovely capturing of English countryside too, and a real love of a certain English way of life. It makes me sad blogging about it because I’ve already read it, and there’s no more left.

HANGOVER SQUARE by Patrick Hamilton


This is a fantastic little book. It’s subtitled ‘A story of darkest Earl’s Court,’ and is very much about the misery and anonymity of the big city. It’s certainly not a book to read when you are feeling sick of London, as I am.

Sample: At one point, our protagonist is trying to warm up on a cold day in front of a miserable gas fire. Comments the author, in probably my favourite line of the entire book: “To those whom God has forsaken, is given a gas-fire in Earl’s Court” You said it, baby.

HANGOVER SQUARE tells the story of one Harvey Bone, who is a sweet and slightly simple young man living in Earl’s Court. The year is very specifically 1939, and the war hangs over the entire book. Bone is very lonely, and conceives an obsessive love for one Netta Langdon. She is thoroughly nasty to him, but he hangs onto the edge of her hard drinking social group. Occasionally, Bone hears what is described as a click in his head, and suddenly the world becomes a bit silent and vacant, and he moves as if in a dream. During these periods, he plans to kill Netta. When his head clicks back, he cannot remember these ‘dead’ periods at all. Bone is a thoroughly symmpathetic character, and the book reels you in by continually keeping you in hope that he will come right. He keeps trying to give up drinking, and planning to move out of the city to the countryside, both of which, it is suggested, might yet save him. Eventually, in a particularly bad period, he does kill Netta, and on her friends, and then covers the apartment in lengths of thread, so the crime scene will not be touched by the police. Shortly afterwards, he kills himself. He had been looking after a stray cat, and his suicide note is mostly about making sure the cat is looked after. It is sad.

Hamilton is a bit naughty, as he really makes you hate Netta. I have to admit its a tiny bit mysoginist. Apparently ‘her thoughts resembled those of a fish – something seen floating in a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid . . . she had been born, apparently, without any natural predilection towards thought or action . . .’ You get the picture. You seriously totally don’t care when she gets drowned in her bath.

JB Priestly in the introduction makes the excellent point that Hamilton is one of the first writers to really deal with the way one can be homeless in a big city – homeless in the sense of anonymous, and without any kind of community – just floating. Let me just quote you one other little bit! Speaking of a young man: “For he was alone in London for the fist time, and at an age when the external world generally bears a totally differnet aspect from the one it bears to its more battered and jaundiced inhabitants – at an age, indeed, where even the scenery of SW7 might be associated with the beginning of life rather than the end of all hope, and its streets and people charged with a remarkable mystery and romance of their own.”

Fantastic.

DARK MATTER by Michelle Paver

I needed to read this for a job I have. It is a ghost story, and a pretty successful one, judging by the fact that I had to sleep with the lights on for three days after. Either it’s pretty good or I’m a pretty big wuss. It’s about an expedition in the 1930s to the Arctic. Once the sun disappears entirely for the winter, they start seeing a man who walks the shore near their cabin. Nothing much more than that happens, there’s not much gore, but it’s still impressively scary.