A new issue of the newsletter…
Be not too bold
In his forthcoming memoir And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? (August, FSG), Lawrence Weschler quotes a psychoanalyst who remembers an occasion when his friend Oliver Sacks just went for it:
One day, I hesitate to mention this, but, ah well, he drank some blood. He kept staring at it and then, “Oh, the hell with it,” he exclaimed, and drank it down, chasing it with milk. There was something about his need to cross taboos.
Also bold: the US intelligence services, in their wiretapping. In his memoir Adults in the Room (2017), the sometime Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis writes of telling the American economist Jeffrey Sachs, over the phone, that he thought Greece was going to default on its next payment to the International Monetary Fund. Half an hour later, Sachs called back:
“You will not believe this, Yanis,” he said. “Five minutes after we hung up, I received a call from the [US] National Security Council. They asked me if I thought you meant what you’d said!”
No less bold: Russia, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and China, in sustaining their economies. In the year 2009, in response to the international financial crisis, the governments that provided the most vigorous stimuluses to their domestic economies, measured as a percentage of GDP, were Russia (4.1%), South Korea (3.9%), Saudi Arabia (3.3%), and China (3.1%), Adam Tooze reports in Crashed (2018). If you thought that it was the Western democracies who were foremost in saving their people from the consequences of financiers’ recklessness, you would be wrong.
News: I wrote a review of Lucy Ives’s novel Loudermilk, a satire of the Iowa writing program, for the New York Times Book Review (“Ives’s novel is full of signs that she doesn’t think much of traditional literary shibboleths like three-dimensionality of character”) and a review of Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, a new collection of sci-fi stories (“the symmetry of the story is so perfect, its structure so artful, and its spirit so enlightened that there’s something a little porcelain and eighteenth-century about it”) for the New York Review of Books.
Recommendations: Alex Abramovich on the history of organized crime in Russia (“The vor’s code was strict: in the Gulag, thieves maimed themselves to avoid work; outside the Gulag, a vor was expected to get by on stealing and gambling alone”). Giles Harvey on Olivier Assayas’s filmed satire of the French publishing world, Non-Fiction (“Léonard is left repeating truisms about the autonomy of fiction, which, though they are sound as far as they go, come off as self-serving”). Christian Lorentzen on the fading out of secrecy from novels: “Writers become the opposite of the spy: They must always be just what they appear to be, because their job has ceased to be distinguished from self-promotion.” Stephen Rodrick on the epidemic of suicide among middle-aged men: “ ‘No one up here wants to hear that you’re depressed and need help,’ Emily told me. ‘And no one wants to even talk about getting guns out of the hands of sad people.’ ” David Leavitt on writing and reading novels set in Lisbon: “I spent my days walking, and looking at old newspapers in the city’s hemeroteca, or newspaper library, and at old shipping records in the archives of the marina.” Melissa Anderson on the new Elton John biopic: “Rocketman exhibits about as much homo carnal abandon as Pete and Chasten Buttigieg at a Panera during a campaign stop.” Elaine Blair on the feminist writings of Andrea Dworkin: “ ‘Andrea you are so prescient,’ someone has written in the margin of my public library copy of Woman Hating.” Scott Sherman on the journalist Seymour Hersh’s autobiography: “One of [Hersh’s] editors at the Timestold me incredulously sixteen years ago that ‘he would call people and he’d say, “I’m Seymour Hersh, I’m doing a story on this…If he doesn’t call me, I will get his ass.” They’d call back.’ ” Andrew Martin on the new Sally Rooney novel: “There’s an extremely generationally accurate scene in which the central couple listen to Vampire Weekend while drinking gin and arguing, in 2012, about the Reagan administration.”
My second novel, Overthrow,will be published by Viking in August. It has recently been spotted in Instagram“shelfies.” Order your copy now!