The Telegraph profiles Jennifer Egan, whose A Visit From the Goon Squad is well tipped to win the Orange Prize.
‘A Visit from the Goon Squad is a work of imaginative energy and charm, and it deserves to win Egan many converts this side of the Atlantic. So much the better if those converts went on to explore some of the back catalogue, which takes in five books of great talent and surprising range.
Given the vigorous experimentation in the later work, the apparent traditionalism of Egan’s first two books is striking. She followed a hit-and-miss collection of short stories, Emerald City (1993), with the novel The Invisible Circus (1995), a coming-of-age story set at the tail-end of the Seventies that follows a young American girl who heads to Europe to investigate her sister’s death. But the Germany and Italy she dreams of are still in the grip of the Baader-Meinhof attacks and the Italian anni di piombo, and a quest that begins simply will end with some disturbing revelations. The Invisible Circus ends up delivering a disproportionate emotional charge, and Egan’s precise, calm, underwater prose is a persistent pleasure even as her protagonist slips further into trouble.
Egan’s next book, Look at Me, took five years to write, and marked a turning point in style and content. Borrowing from generic stylings — among them information-age satire, conspiracy thriller, teenage bildungsroman and Lynchian identity-drama — it worryingly anticipates many of the public and private social changes we now take for granted.’
Writing in the New York Review of Books, Julian Barnes reviews Joan Didion’s and Joyce Carol Oates’ differing recollections of widowhood.
‘Joan Didion had been married to John Gregory Dunne for forty years when he died in mid-sentence while on his second pre-dinner whisky in December 2003. Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond Smith had been together for “forty-seven years and twenty-five days” when Smith, in hospital but apparently recovering well from pneumonia, was swept away by a secondary infection in February 2008. Both literary couples were intensely close yet noncompetitive, often working in the same space and rarely apart: in the case of Didion-Dunne, for a “week or two or three here and there when one of us was doing a piece”; in the case of Oates-Smith, no more than a day or two. Didion realized after Dunne’s death that “I had no letters from John, not one” (she does not say if he had any from her); while Oates and Smith “had no correspondence—not ever. Not once had we written to each other.”
The similarities continue: in each marriage the woman was the star; each of the dead husbands had been a lapsed Catholic; neither wife seems to have imagined in advance her transformation into widow; and each left her husband’s voice on the answering machine for some while after his death. Further, each survivor decided to chronicle her first year of widowhood, and each of their books was completed within those twelve months.
Yet Oates’s A Widow’s Story and Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking could not be more different. Though Didion’s opening lines (the fourth of which is “The question of self-pity”) were jotted down a day or two after Dunne’s death, she waited eight months before beginning to write. Oates’s book is largely based on diary entries, most from the earliest part of her year: so in a 415-page book, we find that by page 125 we have covered just a week of her widowhood, and by page 325 are still only at week eight. While both books are autobiographies, Didion is essayistic and concise, seeking external points of comparison, trying to set her case in some wider context. Oates is novelistic and expansive, switching between first and third persons, seeking (not with unfailing success) to objectify herself as “the widow”; and though she occasionally reaches for the handholds of Pascal, Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Richard Crashaw, and William Carlos Williams, she is mainly focused on the dark interiors, the psycho-chaos of grief. Each writer, in other words, is playing to her strengths.’
The Telegraph magazine talks exclusively to Christopher Hitchens about being Godless in Tumourville.
‘One physician who is taking an active interest in Hitchens’s treatment is Francis Collins, the former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which pioneered the treatment Hitchens is receiving. Collins is now the director of America’s National Institutes of Health. He is also an evangelical Christian, the author of a bestselling book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. He and Hitchens had actually debated religion publicly before Hitchens fell ill, and have become good friends. I’m not sure, I say, whether that constitutes irony.
‘Well, take your time…’ he says.
‘It is a rather wonderful relationship,’ he goes on. ‘I won’t say he doesn’t pray for me, because I think he probably does; but he doesn’t discuss it with me.’ He pauses. ‘He agrees that his medical experience does not include anything that could be described as a miracle cure – he’s never come across anything.’
Hitchens’s attitude to people praying for him could be described as a mixture of polite gratitude for their consideration, and a determined refusal to let it sway his opinions. A sort of thanks, but no thanks. There have been various studies, he says, on whether or not intercessionary prayer works. ‘And one is not surprised to find they don’t.’ On the contrary, the most comprehensive study concluded that it could even have a detrimental effect, causing those who knew they were being prayed for to become depressed when they didn’t get better, ‘because they thought they were letting the side down’.
‘And I now realise in a secular way how that could be, in that I get a huge number of letters and emails every day, a lot of them from people I don’t know, and they quite often say things like, “If anyone can beat this, it’s you”, “Cancer is a fool to take you on”… Jaunty, upbeat stuff like that.’
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