Adam Mars-Jones is a professor of creative writing at Goldsmiths. His novels include Box Hill and Batlava Lake, which are quite brief, and Pilcrow and Cedilla, which are intended to be part of a million-word sequence. An early version of some of Kid Gloves: A Voyage round My Father appeared in the LRB. His new novel, Caret, was published in 2023. Box Hill is being adapted for cinema as Pillion.
The appetite for an authoritative portrait of the new South Africa was both catered to and resisted by J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning Disgrace, in which a narrative of disintegration and one of reconstruction were superimposed on each other, leaving it to the reader to decide which was the lower layer. (The last page might clinch it.) Twenty years later, Damon Galgut’s The...
The reader’s experience of The Recognitions (this reader’s) is of being alternately abandoned and spoon-fed. How many times does a child from downstairs need to ask party guests to supply sleeping tablets for her mother for the reader to understand these are irresponsible people? In The Recognitions it happens four times.
At first glance the title of Sarah Schulman’s remarkable history of the Aids pressure group ACT UP in New York has a cool authority at odds with the turbulent energy of the group itself, although justified by the meticulousness of her scholarship. Let the Record Show was also the title of a 1987 agitprop artwork devised by a collective that later called itself Gran Fury, and...
Light Perpetual starts with a description of a V2 about to explode on a Saturday in 1944. The tone is one of uneasy technological rapture: ‘a thread-wide front of change propagating outward from the electric detonator, through the heavy mass of amatol’. Francis Spufford has written about rockets before, in his non-fiction, engaging imaginatively with the Russian space race in
Charles Howard Hinton was a Victorian mathematician and theorist of the fourth dimension, the scandal of whose conviction for bigamy led him to lose his job as a schoolmaster and to exile himself with his family, travelling first to Japan and then to America. Mark Blacklock’s novel shrewdly and even slyly manages to reflect Hinton’s theories without staking the success of the...
Adam Mars-Jones reads his review of J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy.
Adam Mars-Jones describes his relationship with his writing, and the origins of Kid Gloves, his acclaimed memoir of his father.
In 1948, Tennessee Williams published a short story (and collection of the same title) called ‘One Arm’. It is about Oliver Winemiller, a magnificent young navy boxer who lost an arm...
Seventy-four years ago a viral pandemic began in America, most likely on a pig farm in Iowa. Fifteen months later it had killed over eighteen million people, 1 per cent of the world’s...
It sounds like it’s something to do with helping, but that is very far from its meaning. I can’t remember when we first started hearing it; no more than five or six years ago, surely....
William Trevor is bewitched by childhoods and by second childhoods: the ‘grown-up’ bit in between is for him a dullish swamp of lies, commerce, lust and things like that. For Trevor,...
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