Following years of stagnating productivity, successive British governments have tried and failed to kick-start growth. Perhaps we could teach the Chancellor a thing or two. The 15 contributions on this year’s list represent growth of 66.67% on last year’s total of nine. This is also a rise of 56.25% on our yearly average of 9.6. [read full essay]
Her use for the novel, it seems, is its formal compatibility with the human relationships which, for Rooney, seem to be the only reason for living. In one particularly dark moment, Peter considers ‘[t]he final permanent nothing that is the only truth.’ Against the vastness and totality of this void, the task remains — for life and literature — the same: to seek out, cling to, and create meaning enough to go on living and to go on being moral. The everydayness of both love and the novel might seem unworthy of such high stakes — both seem, in Peter’s words, to be ‘experiment[s] bound almost certainly for one kind of failure or another.’ But Rooney is, as ever, interested also in how small daily miracles make this life seem more bearable than is proportionate. [read full essay]
Unknowability is perhaps the great theme of Greenwell’s novels so far: ‘we can never be sure of what we want,’ as the narrator puts it in Cleanness (2020). If there is a single writerly technique that defines all three books, it’s locating with surgical precision the moments where a person reveals some new part of themselves. This motif appears most strikingly in What Belongs To You (2016), when the narrator rejects his lover, Mitko, who responds with the threat of danger: ‘he wore a face I hadn’t seen before. . . I wondered whether it was a face he had just discovered or one he had hidden all along.’ But it’s in sickness that this inscrutability, this division, finds its truest form. [read full essay]
Almost the sole focus of writing about psychotropic intoxicants in the present generation is the therapeutic uses to which they might be put: to alleviate anxiety, depression, the more severe symptoms of Parkinson's disease, post-traumatic stress, addictive behaviours, Tourette's, just about anything. Microdosing LSD has evidently brought a sense of human perspective to the android labour in Silicon Valley. We would all be better off, it seems, if we were a degree or two further along the spectrum from the zero point of cold, raw sobriety. We wouldn't need to drink as much. Other people would seem nicer. [read full essay]
Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson is, before anything else, a personal text. That is a difficult distinction, generally, especially when addressing Emerson, and even more so when discussing a biography about him. ‘All history becomes subjective,’ he writes in ‘History,’ ‘in other words there is properly no history, only biography.’ What has passed before our time remains a dead text without translation. It is only at the point of contact — at the moment of subjectivity — that history can be said to exist at all. When Emerson says biography he of course means the life we have now, as it grows and will be read in another present. [read full essay]
All this tonal detachment can seem aloof, and these days people have plenty to say — often imprecisely — about the aloofness of novels narrated and written by women. It‘s true that much contemporary fiction adopts a distant, drifting first-person perspective, the kind of stance which has often suited the short story in various traditions, but now proliferates in the novel. Precarity makes young adults like Erin and Magee’s Sean into outsiders, but the drifting perspective might also have technological roots. We live most of the time in two places, in the world and on our phones; phones have shaped for us the default mode of knee-jerk, superficial interpretation of other people. [read full essay]
The books of the year list can only ever be a provisional stock-taking: lags in publication preclude a complete picture. This year’s selections are a case in point: a narrow majority first appeared before 2023. Three of these are new translations. Another, Michael Winkler’s outlandish cult favourite Grimmish, finally reached the UK after an extraordinary two-year trajectory: self-published in his native Australia after universal rejection, the book became an improbable award and word-of-mouth success. Among the 2023 bona fides, there is significant range — including Saskia Hamilton’s posthumous poetry collection, the (possibly) final instalment of Adam Mars-Jones’s John Cromer series and Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, a sensation that attracted a considerable hive. [read full essay]
Lynne Tillman’s latest book, Mothercare, is a call to examine the deep complexities that caring in all its forms — medical, social, private, domiciliary, familial — involves. It is a plea to look directly at the suffering of all who are part of this cared-for-carer relationship: the ill or disabled individual, the family, the precariously placed private caregivers and companions, the doctors and nurses, the surrounding friends. And it is an honest exposition and exploration of how racialised, gendered and classed the labour of care-work is and continues to be. [read full essay]
A second kind of nature writing has sprung up more recently. The premise is simple: write to dislodge a pain, and nature might help too. It’s well-suited to the conditions — solitude, slowness, introspection — of rest, recovery, and growth. But nature here is rarely a priority, more often a balm to relieve the author’s distress. It is still sold and marketed as natural history but it might as well be shelved under grief memoirs, recovery memoirs, books of consolation and reflection, of losing and finding oneself. All of a sudden the genre of nature writing has been flooded with a new kind of book, interested in nature only partially, distractedly. [read full essay]
For at the heart of the Grenfell Tower fire itself lay neglect on a colossal scale, plain and simple. Plenty of people in a position to do something about it knew that the tower’s cladding was a flammable nightmare just waiting to happen, and yet nothing was done; the neglect persisted. But Sullivan, of course, didn’t design the cladding; she wasn’t on the estates council; there was no possibility of her being an active agent on this stage beforehand. Her problem is how to reconcile living a life so far removed from something she couldn’t possibly have done anything about with the fact of being geographically proximal to and more broadly complicit in it regardless. [read full essay]