Book Reviews

Jonathan Franzen has made the news this week, by berating digital media and corporate capitalism. Those were themes of his most recent novel, Freedom. His previous book, The Corrections, played with the fashionable phrase ‘dysfunctional family’, and exposed how the term has been bastardised by misuse. He re-emphasises that final point in the clip above. The abuse of language and the prevalence of bad writing exercises most writers, especially the good ones. VS Naipaul and Martin Amis, for instance, are severe on the subject. Naipaul advises those who misuse words to ‘look for other work’, while the content of Amis’ The War Against Cliché is arch: this sentence on Cervantes is merciless, ‘While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote

Video killed the radio star, sang the Buggles in 1979 — assuming the synth-pop Buggles actually sang. In the same year, Mark Amory was putting the finishing touches to a collection of Evelyn Waugh’s letters. He noted in his introduction that letters were an antique curiosity; no one writes them anymore, he wrote. That grave prognosis was a tad premature. Diana Athill’s recent epistlatory memoir, Instead of a Letter, suggests that men of letters still live up to their name. Then again, Athill is 93. The telephone gave letter-writing a nagging cold, which email has turned into pneumonia. The letter’s admirers have leapt to help. The Guardian reports that Dave Eggers has joined

Mark Mason, author of Walk the Lines, is in the hot seat this week. He tells us that no woman is truly attractive unless you can imagine going to the pub with her, and admits to a fear that he may be one of Holden Caulfield’s ‘phonies’. 1) What are you reading at the moment?  Bob Woodward’s biography of John Belushi. Yes, that Bob Woodward. Strange choice of subject for the man who brought down Nixon (as Woodward himself admits) – but it’s a great read. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Agatha Christie. Once boasted to my mother that I’d been awake until 4am

Much ado about Jonathan Franzen’s appearance at the Hay Festival in Cartegna, where he sounded-off against eBooks, technology and corporate capitalism. The Guardian reports that Franzen said: ‘Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring. ‘Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always

I hadn’t given my coffin much thought until last Saturday, when I attended the South Bank Centre’s ‘Festival for the Living’. The main exhibit was a selection of coffins from Ghana. They were bizarre: a skip, a mini Mercedes and a giant cream cake. It was an absurd sight. I found myself playing Loyd Grossman in a macabre version of David Frost’s Through the Keyhole: ‘Who’s buried in a coffin like this? David, it’s over to you.’ The coffins were a wonderful distraction, but the show wasn’t about death — not as such. The ‘Festival for the Living’ concerned those who are left to grieve; and there were two literary events that

2012 is a year of Dickens anniversaries — a major one for him, and what’s turned out to be quite a significant one for me. It’s his bicentenary, of course, but it will also be 30 years since I first read Bleak House. I know that because I wrote an essay on it in my first term at Oxford. Looking at that again, when I came upon it a few weeks ago, I experienced one of those odd time-slip moments when you meet your younger self coming back. I wrote, then, about ‘angles of perception’ in the novel, which was a fancy way of saying I looked at the double