Humour

There can be few challenges more daunting for the assiduous reviewer than a pile of Christmas ‘gift’ books sitting on his desk exuding yuletide jollity. But this year’s aren’t bad at all. Some are serious works of quasi-academic research, others are tooth-pullingly funny and one or two are utterly bizarre. For sheer magnificent pointlessness, you should look no further than Great British Pub Dogs by Abbie Lucas and Paul Fleckney (Robinson, £12.99). Lucas (a photographer) and Fleckney (a journalist) have, for no doubt pressing reasons of their own, roamed the nation to identify the ‘wonderful variety’ of Britain’s pub- dwelling dogs. Oh, and one pig, Frances Bacon. One pub had

If you don’t yet watch Gogglebox on Channel 4, start doing so now. Far from making you despise our couch-potato nation, it will make you feel great affection for it. Sprawled on L-shaped sofas with comfort cushions or slobbering dogs on their tummies, or sitting side by side on armchairs with a vase of carnations on a doily between them, the programme’s chosen telly-watchers make what must be the most unselfconscious, and therefore genuine, remarks spoken by anyone on air. There’s no doubt in my mind that Giles and Mary are the most watchable of all the watchers. ‘Meanwhile, in Wiltshire…’ says the narrator, and you glimpse a thatched cottage,

The bestselling humourist and New Yorker essayist David Sedaris is renowned for an almost hypnotic deadpan drollery and maybe especially for The Santaland Diaries, his uproarious account of earning part-time cash as a department store Christmas elf. Now he is bringing out an edited version of his personal diaries. It’s the first volume of two, taking us from his days as a broke student, stoner and young gay man in North Carolina and Chicago, through to the years of literary fame and success in New York and Paris as the new century dawns — a distinction worn lightly. Fans, semi-fans and non-fans (I am midway between the first two categories)

In an early chapter of All Grown Up, the narrator Andrea says to her therapist: ‘Why is being single the only thing people think of when they think of me? I’m other things, too.’ ‘Tell me who you are, then,’ says the therapist. And so Andrea tells her that she’s a woman, a New Yorker, that she works in advertising as a designer, that she’s a daughter, a sister and an aunt. In her head, she adds: ‘I’m alone. I’m a drinker. I’m a former artist. I’m a shrieker in bed. I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh.’ We meet Andrea when she’s 39, asking herself,

I grew up with a skeleton in the attic. My mother’s clinical training bestowed on our family a short man’s dry remains, and his residency at home fed the nightmares of my siblings. When I started medical school, he came too, but now as an ally in passing the anatomy exam. On moving house, I stiffened as the taxi driver carried the loosely fastened casket in just one hand. A pavement littered with 200 bones would have been a challenging start in this family-friendly neighbourhood. My accustomed eyes were suddenly anxious to protect others from such a deathly interruption. Carla Valentine doesn’t want her choice of job to sound pathological.

Tim Parks is a writer of some very fine books indeed, which makes it even more of a shame that his most recent novel is flat, grim and (like its narrator) interesting only to itself. His main theme is adultery, a subject he explored in his wonderful novel Europa (1997), in the short story collection Talking About It (2005), and in the thoughtful essays of Adultery and Other Diversions (1998). But in recent years he has become the laureate of a certain kind of seedy, middle-aged infidelity, and In Extremis is single-minded to the point of obsession: anorak and dirty mac in one. The problem might be that he is

When A.A. Gill died last December, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth across the nation. I must admit this came as a surprise to me, but then I hadn’t read him for many years, having developed a ferocious dislike for the Sunday Times too long ago now to remember quite why. My memories of him were of an outrageous show pony, a wordsmith of great talent but surprisingly little taste, who essentially wrote about himself and his wonderful life (in the guise of restaurant and television reviews) in a needy, look-at-me, sub-Clarkson kind of way. He seemed to me to encapsulate everything that was wrong with the paper he

Michael Chabon’s back. He’d never gone away, of course — more than a dozen books in all — but it’s been a long time since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), a book entirely true to its title, so amazing and adventurous, indeed, so full of pizzazz, that it seems to have taken the poor chap the best part of two decades to recover from it. Moonglow is a return to form. Nonetheless, some readers will doubtless find it easy to resist the book’s obvious charms. Chabon has described it in interviews as a ‘faux-memoir novel’. In his acknowledgements he calls it a ‘pack of lies’. And in

There is a common assumption that experimental writing — for want of a better term — is obscure, joyless and arid. Or worse: that it is fake (or ‘pseudy’), a deception practised upon either the deluded or gullible reader. So I wonder what people who hold such assumptions would make of this. It constitutes the final paragraph of ‘Specialist’, one of the stories in this collection. The story itself is, not untypically for this book, less than a page long: The cyclist hit me, and it’s vile after my life ends in the afterlife. Lots of incense, resin, apes and giraffe-tails — all acquired tastes. I don’t like that kind

‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three,’ Philip Larkin famously announced in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.’ But the key line is a far more private confession, caught in parentheses like a gloomy thought bubble: ‘(which was rather late for me)’. Few of Larkin’s contemporaries would have been more sympathetic than Alan Bennett. In 1963 he was appearing on Broadway in Beyond the Fringe, the hit satirical revue that also featured Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller; and while this led to him rubbing shoulders with the stars (the first- night audience included Rita Hayworth and Stravinsky,