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Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

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I think my friend Kirsty first mentioned Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, and it falls in a genre I particularly like – the sort of essay that is both personal and well-researched. When they lean too much one way (entirely confessional without any sort of context) it can feel a little unrelenting. If they fall more into the objective-research category, then I don’t feel sufficient connection.

The latter, of course, has been a mainstay of essay-writing forever. In recent years, a number of excellent essayists have written in the area I most appreciate. (Recent-ish works I’ve admired are Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm, Toxic by Sarah Ditum, Notes From No-Man’s Land by Eula Biss, The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson, Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman. Probably not a coincidence that they’re all by women.)

Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019) puts ‘self’ right in the title, and there is certainly a lot of reflecting in every sense of the world. She holds up a mirror to her own life constantly – but it is a large mirror, and she gathers in a large number of people standing around her. She sees herself in a number of different groups, about whom she writes en masse – be that millennials, women, millennial women, non-Caucasians, internet-users, unmarried people etc. It works because she doesn’t wield the sort of unanswerable certainty that we see in right-wing column writers and Twitter firebrands. Tolentino’s thoughts on (say) how we represent ourselves on social media would be self-indulgent if she considered herself a lone example of the insecure bravado of internet posting – and far-reachingly bland if she thought everybody was exactly the same. Tolentino finds the middle ground, which sounds like a wide path but is surprisingly seldom trodden.

In each essay, Tolentino often moves from the specific to the broad. In the case of that internet-essay (‘The I in the Internet’), she starts from reading back over a blog she launched in her middle teens, and almost as quickly gave up on. It harkens back to a more innocent (perhaps) era of the internet, where the ‘blog’ section of a free website was about the only place you could launch these performances of the e-self – but Tolentino follows the connected line between this sort of phenomenon and the place we find ourselves now. As she does so, she takes in more and more of the internet landscape, and I found it a compelling take even in a much-discussed arena.

Continuing that specific vs broad and personal vs universal line: Tolentino is at her best when she can combine them, leaning on the specific and personal. Easily my favourite essay in the collection was ‘Reality TV Me’, where Tolentino looks back on her appearance in a short-lived, little-known American reality TV show Girls v Boys. What makes it a fascinating essay isn’t Tolentino’s relation of her experiences – it’s the clever way she comments on the memories. She had never watched the full show – and finds that she has misremembered many elements of it, partly in service to her construction of her own identity. She gets back in touch with the other contestants and, together, they analyse how they were cast, which archetypes they were intended to represent, how the show formed their understanding of themselves, and how their recollections of it relate to it. It’s a layered, complex, extremely well-constructed essay.

Leaning more towards the detailed research side of things is ‘We Come From Old Virginia’, about rape culture on university campuses. It’s a tough, brilliant essay. Even in an era where sexual assault and sexual violence is more widely recognised and discussed than in the past, there is still a lot that shocks and saddens in this essay. It links to the essay on reality TV in its unravelling of memory and truth – centred around a notorious rape claim in Rolling Stone that turned out to include many false details. It is brave to include this sort of scandal in a feminist book – it could too easily have seemed to downplay rape culture, and was used as such by some commentators at the time – but Tolentino writes with nuance, insight and compassion. Above all, she asks, why is the false accusation of rape considered so much worse a crime to many (especially right-wing men, but beyond that too) than rape itself.

At the other end of the spectrum, Tolentino is weakest when she treads old ground. Does anybody really need her takes on marriage as a patriarchal institution? The fact that she doesn’t want to get married is only really interesting to her (and her boyfriend, I suppose). ‘I Thee Dread’ is the most formulaic essay of the lot, and has no specific hook to hang on. ‘The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams’ is interesting but, again, the idea that capitalism is rewarding the super-wealthy and nobody else isn’t ground-breaking. The one turn to literary criticism – ‘Pure Heroines’ – is solid but unexceptional.

I started reading around Trick Mirror and its reception, and discovered the furore around a piece of criticism by Lauren Oyler in London Review of Books, unforgivably badly titled ‘Ha ha! Ha ha!‘ (I don’t know if a sub-editor is to blame for that title, but they should be suspended without pay.) Oyler is apparently renowned for writing savagely about acclaimed books and, sure, it’s easier to get a reputation that way than by writing kindly about them. The critique itself is a masterclass in pieces that sound profound, but don’t actually say anything at all. I went further down the rabbit hole, and the best thing written about it all is Freddie deBoer’s takedown of Oyler’s takedown.

Pace Oyler, I think Tolentino is – at her best – astoundingly good. The only problem with a collection is that her best only comes when she balances the specific/general and the personal/broader spectrums . There are enough examples in Trick Mirror of her doing that to make it well worth reading. It’s not a perfect collection, but I think she is deservedly recognised as a thoughtful, emotionally intelligent and well-researched voice in modern essays, and I’ll certainly read more by her.

A whole bunch of audiobooks I’ve listened to recently

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As per, I’ve been listening to an awful lot of audiobooks recently – some very good, some enjoyable trash, some in between. Here’s a quick overview of some of them (…minus the trash, which nobody needs to know more about):

The First Stone (1995) by Helen Garner
After loving This House of Grief, I downloaded an earlier non-fiction by Garner – a response to two college students going to the police after being allegedly groped by the college dean. Garner poses some interesting questions about gradations of assault, and writes excellently as ever, but it is very galling to read a book by a noted feminist where Garner seems nonplussed about why a woman would complain about being groped. She recognises it’s annoying – but not in the same league as rape, and that her generation always just put up with it. I suppose it’s a good sign that, 30 years since this was published, things have moved on sufficiently that no feminist would wonder-out-loud why a woman doesn’t just cope with being assaulted.

Toxic (2023) by Sarah Ditum
Great segue into this excellent collection of essays about what Ditum calls ‘the upskirt decade’ – the 2000s, where the paparazzi were even worse than normal, and famous young women were treated as sexual consumption for everyone. There are chapters on Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Janet Jackson, Kim Kardashian and more. Sometimes the links she tries to make with contemporary political issues are a bit flimsy, but in general it’s an exceptionally good look at a recent period where media ethics (and common consensus) were so misogynistic. The afterword, sadly, shows how misogyny has largely just found a new guise…

Ride the Pink Horse (1946) by Dorothy B. Hughes
People adore Hughes’s The Expendable Man, but now – having read that and Ride the Pink Horse – I think her brand of hard-boiled Americana isn’t quite for me. In this novel, Sailor comes to town during fiesta trying to exhort money from a man whose wife he was ordered to kill. Along the way, he gets to know various desperate locals. It reminded me of a less miserable Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock – but I still didn’t find much momentum beyond the atmosphere.

You Are Not Alone (2023) by Cariad Lloyd
I love Cariad Lloyd’s podcast Griefcast, interviewing people (usually comedians) about the people they love who’ve died, and how they cope with the grief. This book is closely related – drawing on Lloyd’s grief about her father dying from cancer when she was a teenager. Unsurprisingly, she writes excellently and wisely about grief, and I think this book would be helpful to a griever – perhaps particularly someone who doesn’t know why they haven’t ‘got over it’. Audiobook includes snippets from a fair few podcast episodes.

What’s That Lady Doing? (2023) by Lou Sanders
Lou Sanders is one of those comedians who makes every single sentence funny, and I really enjoyed her memoir. She clearly went through quite a lot as a teenager, and tells stories that balance humour and pathos. I’d have liked even more about her career, but perhaps there is a second book coming.

Broken Horses (2021) by Brandi Carlile
Brandi Carlile is a singer I deeply love, and her audiobook was a real journey. She doesn’t always come across as the easiest person to know, but she’s certainly transparent. The way she delves into songwriting is fascinating and the audiobook includes new versions of many songs at the end of chapters – a perfect reason to choose the audiobook.

Tales from the Café (2017) by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
I’d heard a lot about this book about a café where you can be transported back in time. What I didn’t realise until I was quite a long way through this audiobook was that (a) it’s an episodic selection of four separate stories, and (b) this is a sequel, not the original. Oops! I enjoyed it, though there is so much world-building and so many rules that the actual emotional moments get a bit lost.

Middle England (2018) by Jonathan Coe
Read for my book club – I really enjoyed my first Coe, often called his Brexit novel (though Brexit takes a long time to appear). There is a broad cast of characters doing ordinary and not-so-ordinary things – ranging from the amusing (an arrogant author on a cruise) to the moving (a man losing his faculties doesn’t understand where his factory workplace has gone). I found a woman dealing with accusations of workplace bigotry particularly interesting and even-handed, and at its best I was really engaged. But it’s also (oops again) the third of a trilogy, and I haven’t read the others – so some of the characters meant very little to me, as they get bit parts that seem to rely on previous time spent with them. Coe is also not subtle in his anti-Brexit stance. (I share his political views, but would like a novelist to be a bit less polemical.)

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

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This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial: Amazon.co.uk: Garner, Helen, Weinman, Sarah: 9780553387438: Books

I hadn’t heard of Robert Farquharson or Cindy Gambino, or their children Jai, Tyler, and Bailey, before I started Helen Garner’s This House of Grief (2014). I suspect the same wouldn’t be true of most Australians. They were at the centre of a tragedy that led to a trial, and a retrial, for murder. This much was clear from the outset: Robert Farquharson drove his three young children into a farm dam and all three drowned. He managed to get out of the car. But was it murder or was it a tragic accident, caused by Farquharson blacking out during a coughing fit?

The initial trial took place in 2007, and Garner was there throughout as a journalist – as she was at the second trial, in 2010. I listened to the audiobook, after hearing Garner’s non-fiction praised repeatedly on the Chat 10 Looks 3 podcast – I’d previously read her novel The Spare Room but hadn’t tried any of the non-fiction. And it is absolutely masterful.

This is the sort of case that would make a compelling newspaper article, or perhaps a podcast episode or hour-long documentary. In Garner’s hands, it becomes something much more granular. Since she is able to devote so much space to the trial, it feels like we are in the courtroom with her. The initial trial took seven weeks, so of course it isn’t in real time, but it sometimes feels that way. Periods of questioning are detailed so thoroughly – say, for instance, the doctor who is brought in to answer questions about whether or not Farquharson could black out from a coughing fit in something called ‘cough syncope’. We go back and forth, back and forth – an aggressive cross-examination, the attempts to discredit his medical credentials, the reactions from the jury. The actual evidence the doctor relates is a small part of Garner’s presentation of the scene. Her eyes are everywhere.

Garner notices things other people wouldn’t – and probably wouldn’t mention, if they did. How often a witness bites their lip, or the look on the face of a juror, or even how bored some people seem during the more technical sections of evidence – ‘the air in the court became a jelly of confusion and boredom’:

The judge took off his spectacles and violently rubbed his eyes. Journalists sucked lollies to stay awake. Jurors’ mouths went square with the effort to control their gaping yawns.

This certainly isn’t an objective book. One of many ways in which Garner’s writing reminds me of Janet Malcolm’s is that the writer is fully present in the reading experience. Garner relates how she takes the trial home with her, how she desperately wants to believe that Farquharson is innocent but is very unsure, and the mental exhaustion of going back and forth. She writes about camardarie (and the reverse) with other journalists, including being berated by some for her supposed light-heartedness.

Her detailed observation does slip into needless cruelty at times. I was startled by one moment – she bumps into a lawyer she used to know, and he says one line. In that time, she manages to say he is looking bad for his age, has lines on his face, is wearing an ill-fitting suit and hasn’t polished his shoes. It’s all so unnecessarily unkind. Like Janet Malcolm, she doesn’t have any sense of what is kind or unkind to say. She is merciless in the way she presents any of the people she sees. Even the grieving mother is described as having put on too much weight. She censors none of her thoughts.

That’s not to say she always highlights negative things. They are just more shocking, in a context where we might expect a certain generosity of empathy. She applauds a female witness whenever she outwits the unpleasant machismo of the cross-examiner, or describes ‘that little buzz of glamour peculiar to the Australian tradie’ when Cindy Gambino’s new husband takes to the stand. Indeed, he sparks one of the asides which make Garner herself such a dominant figure in the reporting:

But, having recently watched a bunch of blokes pour a concrete slab in my own backyard, I was equipped to imagine the effect of this sight on a young woman in Cindy Farquharson’s stifling situation. A concrete pour is a dramatic process. It demands skill, speed, strength, and the confident handling of machinery; and it is so intensely, symbolically masculine that every woman and boy in the vicinity is drawn to it in excited respect.

Somehow, the tragic deaths of the three boys do not get lost in the maelstrom and minutaie of the court proceedings. Garner manages to keep the emotion of their deaths central, without being maudlin, even while we are preoccupied with the minute-by-minute trial. And it is that clash of the absurdities – and some mundanities – of the legal system with the searing emotional pain of a grieving mother that makes this book so extraordinary. To the everyman, it feels ridiculous that this tragic event can become, for instance, hours and hours of analysing photographs of wheel marks, and disputing over whether or not the police officer’s yellow lines next to them are accurate. Garner is too subtle a writer to spell out this disparity. But it is key to what makes her analytical eye work so well.

And her writing can be beautiful, without being self-conscious. Sentences like this tread the tightrope of poeticism and journalism so well: “Judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.” ([sic] to ‘men’, please!)

I didn’t think I’d find a non-fiction writer as curiously brilliant as Janet Malcolm – but I think Helen Garner is in the same league. If you’re looking for reportage or dry facts or even a kind, considerate piece about a tragedy – this isn’t the place for you. But if you’re looking for something sharp, odd, poetic and haunting – This House of Grief is a masterpiece.

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

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Sorry I’ve been quiet recently – I got Covid, and while it wasn’t a bad bout of it, I have been quite low on energy since and have spent my evenings watching TV rather than blogging.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado | Waterstones

But I’m back with a review of an audiobook I listened to – and one of the best books I’ve read this year. Published in 2019, I’m rather late to the party – so perhaps you already know In The Dream House, a memoir by Carmen Maria Machado. But ‘memoir’ doesn’t do justice to the innovation that Machado brings to this patchwork world – quite unlike anything I’ve read before, though the nearest comparison I can think of is another unusual and brilliant memoir I’ve read this year, Joan Givner’s The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer, which follows a slightly similar fragmented style.

At the heart of In the Dream House is an abusive relationship had years earlier with a woman whom Machado calls solely ‘the woman in the dream house’. Queer abusive relationships are, as Machado explores, hardly ever written about – indeed, barely even recognised as possible by many people. Particularly when both partners are women, it goes beyond all the stereotypes of abusive relationships that people are familiar with from screen and page. It is all the more alienating.

The bare bones of her story are these: that she met a woman who was in an open relationship with another woman, and became another partner. Eventually, they decide to become exclusive – and it is Machado’s first relationship with a woman. They have deep intimacy and some wonderful experiences. But The Woman in the Dream House has a dark side that erupts now and then. The abuse is seldom physical – but there is constant controlling, and anger that is unpredictable and unappeasable. The Woman in the Dream House accuses Machado of sleeping with any man or woman she mentions. She screams the most appalling abuse at her and then claims not to remember. Some of the most chilling moments are when the anger comes with a terrifying calmness – like her whispering that Machado is the most selfish, terrible person she’s ever met when she makes an innocuous comment, or when she refuses to let Machado share the driving on a long car journey even when The Woman is so tired that Machado fears they will crash. The Woman deliberately drives dangerously fast when she sees Machado is scared.

Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.

Machado shows us the silencing terror at the heart of this sort of abusive relationship so brilliantly. It is not the sort of memoir that lingers on horrible details, but it does make you feel breathless with fear nonetheless. Because the relationship seems so inescapable. To outsiders, there is little to suspect. The Woman is usually on good behaviour with others – and has, of course, used the usual ploy of separating Machado from her friends and her safety network.

Machado could have written a straight-forward memoir of this time and it would have been very compelling. But what makes In The Dream House even more brilliant is the unconventional way in which she tells us – as I hinted at in that comparison with Givner’s book. Each chapter is titled ‘Dream House as’ something – a dizzying array of things, from the simple (‘Dream House as Confession’, ‘Dream House as Romance Novel’) to the more unexpected (‘Dream House as Hypochondria’, ‘Dream House as Thanks, Obama’). Many of them are genres or literary styles – though the chapters are not told in these styles, necessarily. The title is often very loose, but frames a new bit of the puzzle. Machado shares memories or stories out of chronology – and many of the chapters are reflections on literature or philosophy or history that weave in and out of personal recollection. A lot is about queer history and reception. For instance…

I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them. I know I should have a very specific political response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s line-up of vain, effete ne’er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling, lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually—the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other—I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.

At first, when I saw that In the Dream House had this fragmented, multidisciplinary approach, I was a bit nervous. The words of the prologue didn’t encourage me – it felt a bit overwritten, a bit self-consciously literary. But that impression disappeared quickly. Machado takes an experimental, innovative approach and makes it as compelling as a thriller. She finds the perfect balance between literary writing and searingly honest storytelling. And it is a fine balance, extremely difficult to achieve with the assured success that Machado shows.

I was wary about going into In the Dream House for various reasons – would I find it too scary, would I find it too opaquely written – but I am so glad I gave it a chance. It’s an extraordinary book, and one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.

The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight #ABookADayInMay No.17

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The Premonitions Bureau: A Sunday Times bestseller: Amazon.co.uk: Knight, Sam: 9780571357567: Books

I didn’t know anything about The Premonitions Bureau (2022) by Sam Knight when it turned up in the Audible sale – but the title, the cover, and the unexpected subtitle telling me that it was a true story were enough for me to take a gamble on it.

The story starts with the Aberfan disaster in 1966 – I’m sure you all know about it, but
it’s when a colliery waste tip atop a Welsh hillside suddenly fell down into the valley with devastating effect. 144 people died, including large numbers of pupils in the village school. And several people claimed to have predicted that the tragedy would happen.

‘Claimed’ is perhaps the wrong word, since apparently two of the people who predicted it also died in the disaster – neither of them apparently having any sense that they were having a premonition. One of the children in the school told her mother “I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.” Another had drawn a picture of people digging at the hillside, with the words ‘The End’.

John Barker, a psychiatrist who ran a mental hospital in an old Victorian asylum in Shropshire, was fascinated by the possibilities in this phenomenon. He had already been deeply interested in unusual psychiatric issues – such as Munchausen syndrome, or the idea that people could literally be scared to death.

Being a scientist, he decided to go about this systematically. He set up the Premonitions Bureau, inviting people to send in any premonitions they had – whether in dreams, visions, or convictions. They got hundreds of replies from all over the place – some trolling them, but others very serious. Few seemed to be particularly specific – more along the lines of ‘something terrible will happen to a plane’ – but each was catalogued carefully. The hope was to be able to present their findings to the Medical Research Council and perhaps, in turn, set up a system to warn people of impending disasters. (Though there was also a debate about whether you could have a premonition of an event that then doesn’t happen – a Catch 22 for any way of using this tool to save lives.)

I had never heard of the Premonitions Bureau, and I did find Barker a likeable, fascinating and curiously impenetrable person. And I found much the same with Knight’s book. It goes on so many tangents, exploring interesting side-roads to the main discussion – often spending large chunks of chapters talking about these other matters in great detail. And some of them are certainly interesting, but by contrast, the bits about the actual bureau seem a bit flimsy. We don’t learn much about the hundreds of contributions or contributors, or what happened when they were right or wrong (though, as an exception, we do get a lot of detail about a train crash that was apparently predicted and which one of the BeeGees survived). It does feel as though there isn’t enough material to give a thoroughly researched book about this bureau – that it is an enthralling and enticing topic which isn’t quite followed up by what we learn about it. The bureau is there throughout, but sometimes as a shadowy thread at the centre of a lot of other topics.

And Knight is careful in not committing either way to whether or not he believes premonitions can happen. There are moments which seem to defeat any scepticism, but not much on probabilities of success or alternative explanations of the ‘accurate’ premonitions.

I did finish The Premonitions Bureau having found it interesting and well-written, but thinking that I might prefer to read a fictional story that could equally well be invented for this eye-catching title. Perhaps truth is stranger than fiction, but I think fiction could have been more satisfying.

Foster by Claire Keegan #ABookADayInMay No.16

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Foster by Claire Keegan | Waterstones

Today’s book is so short that it is almost a short story – 88 pages, or an hour and half as an audiobook (which is how I read it – indeed, since I listen to audiobooks fast, it was a little under an hour). So many people have raved about Foster (2010) in the past couple of years that I couldn’t help downloading it when it was on offer.

This is a thoroughly Irish novella, Irishness seeped through every sentence – whether that be depictions of the County Wexford countryside, the turns of phrase like ‘It was a cottage she lived in’, or the open casket at a funeral that takes place halfway through. It is 1981 and the unnamed narrator (another one!) is a young girl who has been deposited with John and Edna Kinsella. They live on a farm in County Wexford, and she has come from Country Carlow – not knowing exactly why she is there, or for how long, or indeed if she is ever going to go home. Her father leaves with a warning not to fall in the fire, and departs with no kinder word of affection. He has also forgotten to leave any of her clothes – but the Kinsellas have some that she can use, until they can buy her some more.

Keegan’s novella is a masterclass in what is not said. We don’t learn a huge amount about the home that she has left, except that it is busy, crowded and not a particularly kind place to live. The narrator is used to incident. There is no space for rest, for simply being. And even while the Kinsellas’ farm is being productively run, there is peace and there is calm.

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end – to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something – but each day follows on much like the one before.

There is a twist in the story, though it is one that simply deepens our understanding of character. It isn’t played to jar the reader; the plot is not as important as the people.

This is a beautiful little book, showing in not-many pages the richness of human kindness, the complex simplicity of country life, and the transformation that can take place when love is gently, generously shared.

People who got Stuck into this Book:

“Foster is a sublime novella, a masterclass in the ‘less-is-more’ school of writing – a poignant story, beautifully told.” – Jacqui Wine

“It is a very well written story, subtle and nuanced with a clear focus on the characters. I think I expected more from it, though.” – The Mookse and the Gripes

“Foster is as lyrical as poetry and has the depth of a full-length novel, yet it’s very brevity is what makes it so impressive.” – 746 Books

 

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe #ABookADayInMay No.2

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Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty: Amazon.co.uk: Keefe, Patrick Radden: 9781529062489: Books

Day two of this project will reveal two things that I had previously left unstated. My aim is to finish a book each day in May, but that doesn’t mean that I have also started that book. I did not read all 560 pages of Empire of Pain (2021) by Patrick Radden Keefe in one day. In fact, I didn’t actually read any pages at all – I listen to the audiobook, and finished the final hour of it today.

When I downloaded the book, I thought it was about the opioid crisis in America and the court cases surrounding it. And it sort of is about that, but opioids don’t even exist until we’re a considerable way through the book. While a large chunk of the end of the book is about attempts to address the terrible cost of opioid addiction through the courts, Keefe takes us decades and generations back in the first half of the book. He is documenting the Sackler family’s rise from nobodies to billionaires right from the beginning.

As I’m writing this quite late in the day, and it’s an enormous book, I’m not going to detail all that much of it. But Empire of Pain is certainly a book of two halves. The first is about Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler and their humble origins – and how Arthur Sackler’s genius for advertising led to him being the first to advertise medication directly to doctors. He was, indeed, the first in many fields of advertising – he basically appears to have invented the idea of medical advertising, which still has such a stranglehold on the American healthcare system.

This half of the book documents every rung of the brothers’ steps to success, as well as all their feuding and pride. Their various marriages, dalliances, children and personal tragedies. Arthur’s obsession with art collections is dealt with in astonishing detail. Everything is dealt with in astonishing detail.

In the second half of the book, the Sackler family and their in-fighting gets a little sidelined as Purdue takes centre stage. This company developed research into opioids which would then turn into Oxycodone – and Keefe shows us, again in rigorous detail, how the marketing of the drug in a completely ruthless way led, incrementally (Keefe argues), to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people – and how the company sought to tarnish those who were lost as wilful addicts rather than victims of their determination to prescribe higher doses for longer to as many people as possible. The end of the book looks at how the untouchable family start to become hate figures, as the truth about their tactics and deceit becomes wider known. It also shows how they’ll probably get away with everything.

I’ve skimmed the surface of this book. It really is researched to an astonishing degree. It will leave you furious about the total lack of ethics behind this company, and the granular way in which Keefe unpacks their lies and manipulations, and the way that good lawyers will let you get away with everything, will certainly infuriate most listeners. Even if, like me, you thankfully don’t have any connection to the opioid crisis. (It is worth noting, though this comes late in the book, that Purdue weren’t the only company to market opioids aggressively – apparently they never had more than about a third of the market – so Purdue and the Sackler family are certainly huge in this arena, but not lone wolves.)

Is all the detail necessary? I will say that, like almost any book over 500 pages, it would have been better if it were shorter. In the first half, where the level of granular detail has no bearing on showing injustices, I’d say that two out of every three sentences is extraneous. We hear about the lighting that someone chose to hang above their artwork. We hear about the graffiti on an archaeological item that Sackler paid to ship to the US. There is seemingly nothing that Keefe learns that he doesn’t include.

In the second half these details feel more like they are building a court case – and, in this half, Keefe leans a little towards repetition. We hear the same lines repeated over and over again – for instance, that Purdue marketed Oxycodone as giving pain relief for 12 hours even though their own studies had shown it wore off after eight. That fact must have been in the book at least six times.

It’s hard to fault somebody who has done years and years of research, and risked the notoriously litigious Sackler family, so I will say that this overlongness doesn’t lessen from Empire of Pain being a masterful and extraordinary work. It doesn’t make for fun reading – but, since opioid addiction is now the leading cause of preventable deaths in the US, it fees like essential reading.

Anne of Avonlea… isn’t very good?

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Anne of Avonlea--cover page.jpgHere’s a blog post that might get me in hot water – but I recently listened to the audiobook of Anne of Avonlea and, let me tell you, I felt let DOWN.

Anne of Avonlea (1909) is the second book in the Anne of Green Gables series. Until now, I had only read the original – and loved it. Anne is so spirited and fun, and there is a great deal of heart and humour in Anne of Green Gables. Fast forward to the next book, Anne is in her late teens, still living in Avonlea. All of the books are available for free in the Audible Plus catalogue, so I thought it was worth diving in.

Oh.

So much that made Anne of Green Gables wonderful is missing here. Anne is a schoolteacher, a founding member of the Avonlea Village Improvement Society, a sort of grown-up foster sister to a pair of twins who arrive on the scene (more on them later), and generally a noble and good member of society.

The rest of this post is going to be in bullet point form, because that is the best to describe my disappointment. Though I’ll try to throw in some good things along the way.

  • Anne is so Noble and Good in this book. She has become the quintessential heroine of a Victorian children’s novel (albeit this is later than that), thinking good thoughts and doing good deeds.
  • ALL her spirit seems to have gone. I cannot emphasise how dull she is now.
  • Gilbert Blythe gets maybe four lines of dialogue?
  • Even in his most interesting scenes, writing pretend letters to someone, he barely appears.
  • WHY SO LITTLE GILBERT?
  • (I know he comes back in later books, but I cannot fathom why L.M. Montgomery took away one of the two most interesting relationships from Anne of Green Gables. The other was with Matthew, so I can at least see why that isn’t present.)
  • Marilla takes in the twins, Dora and Davy. And lord knows I wish she hadn’t. Davy is forever doing naughty things then saying “Good gosh, Miss Anne, I had no notion this was a naughty thing to do! How will I ever repent of it when it was so fun?” and Dora just cries. How did an author who made a girl character like Anne also make these Boys Will Be Boys And Girls Will Cry characters? I loathed them.
  • Mrs Lavendar Lewis was great, I will acknowledge. An old lady who is something of a recluse but brings joy and wit to every scene she’s in.
  • Did I mention that there is basically no Gilbert?

I had planned to go on with the rest of the series, but I’m much more reluctant now. Anne has gone from one of the best characters in fiction to one of the most tedious – and, without her spark, the novel really dragged for me.

Others have promised me that the series looks up in later volumes. Does Anne get her spark back? Should I continue?

 

A whole lot of audiobooks

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I continue to listen to lots of audiobooks, many of them from the Audible Plus free catalogue, and here is a round up of some recent listens… I’ve marked them with an asterisk if they’re in the free catalogue, or at least were when I listened to them, so you can hunt them out if you wish.

On Color (2018) by David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing*

This is an absolutely brilliant non-fiction book – about, as the title suggests, colour. Kastan and Farthing devote 10 chapters to the colours of the rainbow, followed by black, grey, and white. Each chapter looks at the significance of the colour in many different ways – while each chapter is quite wide-ranging, they are often also tied to particular issues. ‘Red’ is largely about science, ‘yellow’ about race, ‘green’ about politics, and so on and so forth. One of the authors is an artist, and so art history is threaded throughout.

It’s an ambitious premise for a book, particularly one that comes in at little over 200 pages in the print edition, but is done brilliantly. I found it fascinating, thought-provoking, and captivating. It was free in the Audible Plus catalogue, so if you’re an Audible subscriber then I definitely recommend downloading it.

Piranesi (2020) by Susannah Clarke

You probably already know all about this award-winning fantasy novel, long awaited from the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (which I never actually read). Piranesi lives in an enormous, perhaps endless, house which consists of halls after halls after halls. Many have statues in, some are empty, and some are filled by the ocean. He believes there are only 15 people in the world, and only regularly meets one of them.

Even for someone without a visual imagination, I found this world-building enveloping – brilliantly simple while also being other worldly. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s narrative expertly capture Piranesi’s naivety and gentleness. As we gradually learned more about the world, and followed stray clues to build a complete picture, I thought Piranesi was a wonderful success.

Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by M.E Braddon*

One of those books I’ve read about quite a lot, this sensation novel is about Sir Michael Audley’s new young wife, who is mistrusted by Sir Michael’s nephew – and the mysterious disappearance of Sir Michael’s friend George Talboys. It was a fun and interesting read, nowhere near as histrionic as I’d imagined, and Braddon’s writing is a joy.

Is it let down by the fact that George Talboys is appalling, and his disappearance should be considered an enormous blessing in a paper-thin disguise? Or by the fact that at least one of Lady Audley’s secrets is obvious to any modern reader by the end of the second chapter? Well, those things help make this something of a period piece – but it’s still a silly delight.

Ayoade on Ayoade (2014) by Richard Ayoade*

You’ll either really enjoy this or hate it and, judging by the Amazon reviews, most people are in the latter category. I really liked it, though it wasn’t what I expected. Supposedly about cinema, it is actually quite a silly and surreal serious of interviews between Ayoade and… himself. Not a moment of it is serious, and you have to chime with his off-the-wall humour. Luckily I do.

A Damsel in Distress (1919) by P.G. Wodehouse*

I mean, what can I say – the usual wonderful Wodehouse stuff of misunderstandings, falling in love at first sight, improbable coincidences, and bucketloads of brilliant, brilliant writing. As always, absolutely delightful and hilarious.

The Cross and the Switchblade (1963) by David Wilkerson*

What a brilliant (true) story – about a minister from a small rural community who is called by God to reach teenagers in criminal gangs in New York. He initially goes because he feels called to help a particular group of seven teenagers, but ends up transforming whole communities. The book is packed with examples of miracles and interventions by God, and is a moving and powerful account of what happens when somebody humbly obeys. An extraordinary story that I had previously seen adapted for stage, but is even more amazing as a book (although I did have to skip some of the drug bits). Co-written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill.

Escaping the Rabbit Hole (2018) by Mick West*

This is a non-fiction work about helping people escape from conspiracy theories. It’s really written for people who have a friend or relative who needs help getting out of the grip of these theories. I don’t have anybody in my life in that position – I just find the topic interesting. West goes through some of the most ‘popular’ conspiracy theories – from 9/11 to chemtrails to flat earth – and painstakingly explains why they aren’t true, and what arguments and evidence will help demonstrate that to people ‘down the rabbit hole’. As such, a lot is very detailed – West’s main advice is to learn all you can, and have polite and informed conversations, since so many conspiracy theorists think that ignorance is the only reason people don’t agree with them.

One of the most interesting notes in the book was that we are all conspiracy theories – it’s just that, for most of us, that theory might be ‘the government doesn’t always tell us everything’. Conspiracy theories are along a spectrum, and you’ll find that everyone has a point where they stop believing things. For example, a 9/11 ‘truther’ might think that a flat earther is very wrong. Definitely a book that would be useful to help a loved one, but fascinating even if that’s not your position.

So You Want To Talk About Race (2018) by Ijeoma Oluo*

A look at racism – individual and institutional – in America. Probably nothing much new to anybody who has paid attention to the issue, but Oluo’s detailed research and thoughtful writing help present things like police reform, cultural appropriation, the ‘model minority’ myth, and much more in a succinct, accessible, and still impassioned way.

8 Deaths (And Life After Them) (2021) by Mark Watson*

This seems to have been exclusively an audiobook – Watson telling the story of his life in comedy, largely through the times it went wrong. Most memorably while almost dying in a reality TV show. He is enjoyably candid about the motivation for some of his work being financial, or simply to keep his name out there, and clear-sighted about his profession. I always like his self-deprecating humour – the reason 8 Deaths didn’t work perfectly for me was that it quite often veers into self-help territory, which is a genre I don’t really have any interest in.

Reasons To Stay Alive (2015) by Matt Haig*

This short memoir (described as ‘novel and memoir’, but really seems just a memoir to me) is about Haig’s experience with depression. It is extremely honest and moving, and I thought it was very powerful. Occasionally there are things that are clearly page-fillers – lists, or observations that don’t add much to the book – but overall a very worthwhile and well-written book.

Just Ignore Him (2020) by Alan Davies

A memoir by the comedian Alan Davies – about grief at his mother’s death when Alan was a young child, and about the abuse he faced from his father. It’s obviously a very sad book, and important to talk about these things. Sadly was let down by Davies being an unexpectedly bad narrator (very staccato) and by some curious framing that didn’t really work.

 

More audiobooks: the good, the bad, and the funny

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I don’t seem to be finishing many paper books at the moment, but I am tearing through audiobooks. If I continue at this rate, I might end up listening to as many books this year as physically reading them. Thanks Audible Plus! (Not a sponsor, but I’m open to offers.)

Here are three more that I’ve listened to recently…

Surprised by Joy (1955) by C.S. Lewis

I’ve actually got the book on my shelves, but I decided to listen instead. I thought it was about his encounter with Jesus and decision to become a Christian – and it is, but only at the end of what is really a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood. With emphasis on childhood. It takes us through his days at various different schools, and really delves into what makes these positive or negative experiences. Nobody has better expressed how awful P.E. is, and what a blessing it is not to have to do it anymore.

I really enjoyed this book, and Lewis’s gentle thoughtfulness. The only downside with the audiobook is that I think it would have been better in Lewis’s (presumably) Northern Irish accent. The fact that the narrator was English was particularly odd when Lewis was talking about feeling out of kilter in England, as an outsider.

Come Again (2020) by Robert Webb

One could hardly ask for a better narrator than Olivia Colman, and in Come Again she often juggles three or four distinct accents in conversation with each other. She is brilliant, but sadly the book isn’t. It’s about a middle-aged woman called Kate whose life has fallen apart in the wake of her husband’s death from a brain tumour that had been growing for decades – but with almost no symptoms. She wishes she could go back to when they met at university, and warn him. And one morning she wakes up to find out that her wish has come true – she is waking up on the day she met him, as a 19-year-old.

This part of the novel is brilliant. Kate is snarky, funny, and a complex emotional character. The book is often very poignant, as well as delightfully funny (though some tangents on Brexit and Donald Trump, while I wholeheartedly agree with Webb’s/Kate’s stance, don’t really cohere). The trouble is that it doesn’t work at all with the rest of the novel – which is about gangsters trying to track down a memory stick that exposes the secrets of a powerful man. The final quarter of the novel, particularly, is very weak – car chases, fights, and all sorts of nonsense that lets down all the emotionally sophisticated narrative that preceded it. If only an editor had spoken to Webb about not putting ALL his ideas in one novel.

The Adventures of Sally (1922) by P.G. Wodehouse

Oh, inject Wodehouse straight into my veins. What a delightful experience. The plot scarcely matters – it includes a surprise inheritance, various actresses, a theatre impresario, boxing, jaunts across the Atlantic, broken engagements, irritating brothers, love at first sight and all the other usual Wodehouse ingredients. Sally is funny, spirited, and with a lovely dryness. As usual, it is Wodehouse’s mastery of the humorous sentence that, time and again, makes this novel a hoot. I particular loved Ginger and his inability to translate his own brand of slang.

He glanced over his shoulder warily. “Has that blighter pipped?”

“Pipped?”

“Popped,” explained Ginger.

As before, anything you’d recommend from the Audible Plus catalogue? Do let me know! (I think I paid £3 for Webb’s book, but the other two were free.)