Good evening! And Happy Easter.
This will be a bumper edition newsletter because I missed last week’s. I was interviewing Julia Armfield at West Kirby Books for the paperback release of her wonderful novel Our Wives Under the Sea. I probably could have written it but I got pretty drunk afterwards so…
In other news, I also had a short story published by the good people of The London Magazine. It is in their April/May print edition, or you can read it online here.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
In my last newsletter I said that I had started Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, but I ended up shelving it again because I needed something a bit lighter. I read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938), which was actually my first Waugh. I have a copy of Vile Bodies but have never gotten to it, but I’ll definitely pick it up soon. I really enjoyed this, and thought it was genuinely very funny -- I actually laughed out loud on a couple of occasions. It’s about a man called Boot who writes a nature column for a leading London paper, who barely leaves his aristocratic country estate. Another writer called Boot asks his well-connected friend to get him a newspaper correspondence job in a fictional African country because he is getting bored, and due to a case of mistaken identity, the nature writer is sent in his place.
Boot is quite an endearing figure, in that posh-but-not-very-worldly way. He provides a good viewpoint through which to look at the ridiculousness of international reporting, because he doesn’t understand the customs and norms. Waugh shows us how newspaper reporting -- and careerist journalists -- can embellish conflict, and therefore misrepresent it. The correspondents that Boot comes across are hungry for stories, and it becomes apparent that the ‘war’ they are meant to be reporting on has largely been over exaggerated, and now its small capital is oversaturated with Europeans who can’t get used to the climate. It’s a good commentary on colonial legacies, although it does end with some silly stuff about Marxism.
This was a good novel to read after Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin, because it's another satire about journalism and war. It’s actually named on the back cover by a critic as a similar text, and I found it entirely by accident in the second-hand bookshop Reids here in Liverpool.
Next I read Nicole Flattery’s Show Them a Good Time (2023), which I haven’t stopped going on about since. On the surface, this is about a 17 year old girl called Mae who drops out of school to work as a typist in Andy Warhol’s studio. This is written *so* well -- there are so many individual sentences and paragraphs that are just so expertly formed. This kind of seems like a banal thing to say, but when writing is done well and no words are wasted, it sets the entire text apart. Flattery has clearly done a lot of research into Warhol, but the story isn’t saturated with details. Instead, the tone captures the setting because it’s so assured. (Interestingly, this is something I always tell my students -- if you read a lot around a subject, you don’t need to shove every single reference into an essay about it, because you can always tell. Good research comes across through an assured tone and details where you actually need them).
There are a few scenes in department stores that I loved, especially on the escalators. I think what is captured so well is how we are sold things, and how this marketing contributes to a lifestyle that isn’t attainable, because you always need to buy something else to get it. This is an idea that is carried over to Mae’s time in the studio, where she feels like an imposter because she hasn’t arrived at the scene in a way that she feels is authentic, and she isn’t integrated into it because there is a difference in her. The novel is great at showing how whole movements that we think of as very defined are actually full of people who feel like this, like they are just on the edge of it, but who actually physically produce its material culture through their work and/or actions.
After Show Them A Good Time, I read Sophie Mackintosh’s Cursed Bread (2023). I absolutely loved Mackintosh’s debut The Water Cure (2018), and I think she’s a brilliant writer. I really liked Cursed Bread, based on a mass poisoning event in a small village in France in the ‘50s. It’s told from the perspective of the wife of a baker in the town, largely after the event. She becomes fascinated with a wealthy couple who have moved to the town, and sees their lifestyle as a break from the mundanity of being in a loveless marriage. It’s very close and claustrophobic, which Mackintosh does extremely well.
Much of it reminded me of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Phantom Thread (2017), because of the format of the storytelling, and because of some of the central images and themes -- a lot of seaside cafes, a focus on food, a recognition that we need people to depend on us to feel loved. I found the novel satisfying in how it doesn’t seek to be satisfying at all -- there are a lot of loose ends and scenes that we’re left to make our own minds up about. I crave that kind of thing, because I feel as though not a lot of texts (whether that be novels, or film, or TV) don’t assume intelligence in their audience. Both Show Them a Good Time and Cursed Bread do in a lot of ways, which I think is a nice departure from the norm.
Books on my radar
Literally too many!!!!!! There are too many books!!!!!