As someone who once never had to write down an appointment or a phone number, I take the inevitable weakening of memory that comes with ageing hard. A common response to I forget is Don’t worry,...
The war is over in A Passage North but its impact is still being felt; damaged limbs can be repaired or replaced with prosthetic ones but injuries to the mind persist. His character’s sufferings...
The first true crime craze – the distant antecedent of our own docu-drama craze – proved to be an essentially Elizabethan phenomenon. I would place its high-water mark in the year 1599, when...
One of the last things Gertrude Beasley wrote before her disappearance in 1927 was an article called ‘I Was One of Thirteen Poor White Trash’. It came out in Hearst’s...
In essays and interviews, Jonathan Franzen acknowledged that his over-full sentences and abstruse metaphors were intended to impress graduate students and his father. Money, fame, the imprimatur of Oprah’s...
It’s hard to think of Richard Powers’s Bewilderment as a political novel, since most of its politics will be innocuous to any imagined audience. If you aren’t in favour of killing endangered...
Ernaux hasn’t written about her life in a neat this-then-that sort of way. Reading her is like getting to know a friend, the way they tell you about themselves over long conversations that sometimes...
No one else of his generation can do as much as Cortney Lamar Charleston can with an XXL sentence or a series of puns. He revels in multiplicity, using hip-hop accelerations in one passage and...
In Uwe Johnson’s work, perspective doesn’t come from a bird’s-eye view but from staying at eye level – from looking and never stopping. His characters are suspicious of any claim...
Writing and rewriting the masque seems to have changed Milton’s idea of heaven. His early polemical works set a materialistic, selfish and appetitive clergy against the spiritual and chaste author,...
If one suspects, at times, that one’s eye is being led on a dance, it is at least always a merry one, and Christopher Ricks is a fine enough critic to worry whether he might have crossed the invisible...
Proust hasn’t found a voice here: he is a person writing out family legends and self-analysis rather than a novelist. Still, we do have the beginning of an answer to the astute question: ‘What...
The archaeological quality of Jenny Erpenbeck’s imagination allows her to come at East Germany from unexpected angles. She writes of learning to roller-skate on a street that was free from traffic...
It’s difficult to grasp exactly what all this means or what it’s for. The novel’s 808 pages make a mockery of straitened attention spans, and the book is provocatively underedited. David...
James Baldwin criticised Richard Wright for overlooking the traditions, rituals and family relationships that protect and fortify black communities in even the most appalling conditions. But Wright wasn’t...
What would Beckett sound like in a language he could not speak, but which might be intuited in his use of English? It would be like bringing the work back to a time before it was started. It might make...
The index gave its users formidable power to find and quote adages and examples, narratives and poems, scriptural and patristic texts, whether or not they had actually read the full works they cited....
Gaddis shows an intimate knowledge of fine art, in terms of both aesthetics and techniques, obviously an asset in a novel that deals with the forging of paintings. His blind spot, unfortunately, is literary...