Review : Other People’s Money

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By Lucy Kellaway

Other People’s Money, by Justin Cartwright, Bloomsbury

Ever since Shylock demanded his pound of flesh from Antonio, bankers have been presented as loathsome figures in literature. Trollope and Dickens made them greedy, unprincipled villains; Tom Wolfe updated this model for the 1980s, adding sexual incontinence, coke habits and a taste for vulgar interior design.

In the slew of new novels about the financial crisis, the bankers are all of the above but blacker still: two-dimensional sociopaths who blithely destroy the world economy. Though there may be some truth in this, it makes for dull reading, particularly when the lecture is dished up – as it was by Sebastian Faulks in his book A Week in December – with a half-baked explanation of how a derivative works.

The title of Justin Cartwright’s novel leads one to fear more of the same. But Other People’s Money turns out to be nothing of the kind. For a start it is a literary first – a feel-good novel about the financial crisis. Second, it is a comedy of manners, in which bankers are good and bad – as are journalists, failed actors, drop-outs and postmen.

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King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher: review

Lucy Daniel loves King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher.

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In Philip Hensher’s seventh novel the sleepy, picturesque Devon estuary town of Hanmouth, beloved of retired gentlefolk and artsy types, “the perpetrators of macramé”, is the perfect setting for the author’s latest dissection of the pretensions, peccadilloes and petty snobberies of provincial England.

When an eight-year-old girl goes missing from the encroaching housing estates, barely acknowledged as part of the same town by the more affluent Hanmouthites, Hensher brilliantly skewers the bizarrely festive media and public reaction. Neighbourhood Watch installs CCTV on every spare surface, camera phones snap in the faces of the missing girl’s family, and a man watches them leave the police press conference, as if they are celebrities.

What follows is a frequently hilarious, swooping panorama of the townsfolk and their interactions. Hensher stops short of surveying the hierarchies of the town’s cake-makers and batik-printers, “as an anthropologist might go among the Kikuyu”, but there is a prevailing atmosphere of social observation.

“Sam relished these moments of embarrassing social disposition”, we are told of Gay Sam, who runs the cheese shop. Humiliation and embarrassment are also Hensher’s speciality; private disappointments and people “letting themselves down” in public, is the phrase used by Billa, the Brigadier’s wife. One of the chief pleasures of Hensher’s style is his ear for conversation, rather than mere dialogue.

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Great House by Nicole Krauss – review

Nicole Krauss’s new novel is a smart and serious meditation on loss and memory. By Patrick Ness

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It is difficult to find a profile of Nicole Krauss that doesn’t mention 1) her beauty, 2) her youth or 3) her marriage to Jonathan Safran Foer (even younger, slightly less beautiful). There’s an inevitable air of complaint about these facts, however sympathetically presented, the implication being that her ability to get books published has less to do with talent than with a particularly irritating streak of good luck. ‘Twas ever thus, though the internet has upped the ease of sniping. There are, of course, smart and passionate sites out there by booklovers of all stripes, but there’s also that strangely hostile army of folks who seem to wake up every morning with no other aim than to tell you, as loudly as possible, how much they hate everything you’ve ever loved, especially if it’s written by someone who, to take a random example, is young, beautiful and married to a famous novelist.

I’m reminded of EM Forster’s quote about happiness. Do we find it so often that we “turn it off the box when it happens to sit there”? Are good books likewise so common that we can afford to dismiss them if their writers aren’t at least polite enough to be older than we are? If the book is good, so what? Krauss’s last novel, The History of Love, was very good indeed. Great House, its serious, downbeat follow-up, is even better. And that, really, should be the end of the discussion.

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Review : Snowdrops, By AD Miller

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Reviewed by Leyla Sanai

A former Moscow correspondent for The Economist, AD Miller is an expert on the land of contradictions that is post-Communist Russia. His debut novel is an electrifying tour of the dark side of Moscow, and of human nature. Nick is an English lawyer working in Moscow. He meets a bewitching girl, Masha, and is instantly drawn into her world. His project on a major loan to a subsidiary of an energy company continues while, psychologically, he becomes entangled with Masha’s life.

The novel is narrated in the first person as a letter to Nick’s fiancée in England, evoking a story within a story. From Nick’s tone and words there are intimations of a future crash; harbingers of a downfall. A sub-text is the dispassionate way Nick refers to his fiancée versus the overwhelming love he felt for Masha.

This is a Russia gleaming with strip joints, call girls, malevolent overlords, fraudsters, overnight millionaires; but in which the old beg on snowy streets and tramps ring random doorbells seeking shelter from hypothermic death. The overriding theme is corruption and the way that morals can become corroded, but the novel is multi-layered; subtle rather than strident, and imbued with a bruised beauty.

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Past Due

Simon Reynolds’s Retromania looks back at a pop culture that has, for years now, done nothing but look back.

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By Nitsuh Abebe

The problem with talking to adults about music used to be all the reactionary lectures: Music was better back then, they’d say, and the best thing young people could do was study the history. ­London-born critic Simon Reynolds is a family man in his forties, and a read through his new book, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, might leave you with the suspicion that things actually were better “back then”—but only because we’ve taken those lectures too literally. “There has never been a society in human history,” he writes, “so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past.”

He’s hardly the first to worry that pop culture, instead of churning into the future, now just swims around an ocean of ideas from yesterday. It’s been decades since design, fashion, and music started treating history as a closet to be rummaged—savvy artists piecing together styles and references for equally savvy audiences to decode. (Anyone who’s enjoyed a Tarantino film already knows this drill.) And revival culture, as Reynolds shows, stretches back to postwar jazz, if not beyond. Still, the rise of the Internet and file-sharing has helped make the past decade feel particularly flat and static—­especially to a forward-looking critic like Reynolds, who’s still best known for chronicling the U.K.’s relentlessly futurist rave scene.

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How Not To Write a Book Review

What a hatchet job on John Keats teaches us.

By Robert Pinsky

John Keats' Endymion got bad reviews—but were they fair?

Possibly the most famous book review, ever, was written by the young Irish wit and polemicist John Wilson Croker. Croker is still remembered, though obscurely, as a founder of modern political conservatism. What’s more, according to some sources, John Wilson Croker invented the very term “conservative.”

The opening passage of Croker’s review, published in the September 1818 Quarterly Review, displays his formidable and venomous approach. What he writes is smart as well as odious. It is also quite wrong, in more than one sense of the word:

Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticise. On the present occasion we shall anticipate the author’s complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his work. Not that we have been wanting in our duty – far from it – indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it; but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance, we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books of which this Poetic Romance consists. We should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation – namely, that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we have so painfully toiled, than we are with that of the three which we have not looked into.

Few 21^st-century journalists can match the cool snark-power of this passage. Croker’s rhetorical muscle and shrewdness shine through the formal idiom and manners of 200 years ago. This is nastiness at its most effulgent.

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The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst – review

Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel is undoubtedly one of the best this year.

By Theo Tait, guardian.co.uk

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With his balance of surface glitter and steely precision, irony and deep seriousness, Alan Hollinghurst is usually seen as an heir to Henry James. But he must also have had, at some crucial formative moment, a passionate infatuation with Brideshead Revisited (a book that the narrator of his first novel describes as “deplorable”). His characters evince a recurring fixation with nice houses and their glamorous, sexy inhabitants: most notably, in the case of Nick Guest, the vaguely creepy interloper who moves into the home of a Tory MP in his Booker-winning masterpiece The Line of Beauty; but Waugh’s theme and his pastoral imagery echo through all of Hollinghurst’s work. Charles Ryder’s words could apply to most of his protagonists: “. . . I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.”

Of course Hollinghurst’s enchanted garden is quite unlike any other seen in English literature: gay sex pastoral, it might be called, whether the unapologetically explicit action takes place in gated Notting Hill gardens, London clubs or the summery English countryside. His captivating new book – his first since The Line of Beauty seven years ago – is a country house novel that begins in a garden, in the late summer of 1913. In an inversion of the Brideshead theme, the outsider, the stranger’s child, is an aristocrat visiting a middle-class home.

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The Art of the Review II: Ron Charles

By Parul Sehgal –

Clearly, we can’t get enough of Ron Charles. And can you blame us? Even before his alter ego, the zany Totally Hip Book Video Reviewer, peered up at us through strips of raw bacon, the longtime book critic has been charming, disarming, and educating us every week in the pages of the Washington Post. The winner of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award (his acceptance speech ought to be required viewing), he’s beloved for his humility and playful prose, for his reviews that, in Scott McLemee’s words, “display a knack for characterizing the shape and style of a book. Charles writes about craft without turning his reviews into manifestos for a single school of it.”

We–the tragically unhip–catch up with Charles and chat about Peter Carey, pornographers, and the virtues of curbing your enthusiasm.

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Stories From an Irish Master

By FRANCINE PROSE

Colm Toibin

Why does the short story lend itself so naturally to the muted but still shattering sentiments of yearning, nostalgia and regret? How many William Trevor tales focus on the moment when a heart is broken or at least badly chipped? Though Mavis Gallant’s work bristles with barbed wit and trenchant social observation, her most moving stories often pivot on romantic ruptures and repressed attraction.

Obviously, there are exceptions to be found amid the carnage of Isaac Babel and Tim O’Brien, the waking nightmares of Kafka, in Flannery O’Connor’s knock-down, drag-out struggles between God and the Devil. But in its search for the surprising yet inevitable chain of events that will illuminate a character’s — and the reader’s — life, a short story has the power to summon, like a genie from a bottle, the ghost of lost happiness and missed chances. That’s partly why this kind of fiction can affect us as intensely as a novel. Arguably, our final vision of Joyce’s Gabriel Conroy, at the end of “The Dead,” gazing at the snow and feeling his soul swoon slowly over the graveyards of Ireland, packs the emotional wallop of Captain Ahab’s battle with Moby Dick.

As its title suggests, there’s melancholy to spare in Colm Toibin’s new story collection, “The Empty Family.”….read more