"The Wedding People" by Alison Espach

This funny, well-observed and sometimes profound novel opens with a stunning hook, when Phoebe, the only guest at the hotel not to be part of a week-long wedding party, announces to the bride that she is there to kill herself: “‘This is the most important week of my life,’ the bride pleads. ‘Same,’ Phoebe says.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)

Just before this was a very clever section in which two at first anonymous characters, guests at the wedding, are gossiping. Phoebe, the third person narrator, overhears them and thus the scene is set. It reminded me of how Shakespeare often has an early scene using two citizens chatting, but it seemed much more natural and integrated with the narrative.

But then there is a section of back story which (a) dampens some of the curiosity aroused - I wondered whether it would have been even better to have drip-fed many of these details into the story later - and (b) interrupted the narrative drive. 

The book then continues with a frankly unbelievable juxtaposition of two characters although I, as reader, forgave the unlikeliness because of my fascination with the ensuing cage fight.

And the book, like the wedding, continues, the author forever highlighting the contrast between the shallow consumerist extravagance of the celebrations and the real emotions of the people doing the celebrating. We soon become aware that not all is as perfect as it seems. We explore at least some of the characters. Some, like High Bun and Neck Pillow, are primarily there as foils and to provide comedy; they are what E M Forster calls 'flat' characters. But we explore the principals such as the bride and her mother, and the groom and his daughter, and Phoebe, and these characters are developed into complex and real-feeling persons. 

The plot is basically a set of opportunities to put these characters together and see what ensues. The reader than wants to know what will happen and this tension turns the pages. Did I anticipate the end? To some extent. But there are details left unresolved even on the last page.

It is told in the present tense and the third person from the sole perspective of Phoebe.

There are some moments of pure comedy, such as the delightful scene in which Phoebe, driving, is loaned a mobile phone from someone in the car so she can use sat nav ... only for sexts from the woman’s boyfriend to keep popping up.

The are some interesting discussions of literature (Phoebe teaches Victorian literature) and the book neatly parallels  Mrs Dalloway, another novel in which a party clashes with a suicide.

I learned other things as well. I learned that the Cubists “believed if you aren't seeing something from all sides, you aren't seeing fully.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party) And there are a lot of interesting thoughts about Life. 

Detailed analysis: spoiler alert

This is an old-fashioned comedy. There is a pair of lovers, who actually fall for one another on first sight (in the initial hot tub scene) and then must overcome a whole series of obstacles (principally the man being about to marry another woman) before they can be together.

Towards the end there’s even the introduction of a second set of lovers. I explain below the need for this.

But there is a fundamental problem. A different interpretation of the story is that Phoebe steals the groom from under the bride’s nose, after the bride has befriended her. And the bride, though spoiled, is fundamentally a nice person. So the reader might hate Phoebe. And we want the reader to love Phoebe, even though she is a man-stealer.

So a lot of work has to be done to convince the reader not only that Phoebe and Gary are perfect for one another, and that this will be a destined marriage made in heaven, but that Lila and Gary are not right for each other. This is why, in the end, it has to be Lila that jilts Gary, not the other way around. And that is why we have to introduce the second set of lovers when, quite late in the narrative, we discover that best man Jim is in love with Lila. This will give the bride an opportunity for happy ever after.

The subplot is the rebuilding of Phoebe, from someone who wants to take her own life, to someone capable of rebuilding it. To juxtapose a suicide with a wedding party may be one hell of a hook, and it introduces a gripping conflict between the life-affirming joy of a wedding and the death-drive of self-slaughter, but it also poses another problem.

The tone of this book (it is a comedy) is fundamentally light. The protagonist starts off suicidal. This is a real problem. Potential suicide can’t be allowed to cast too gloomy a shadow. Hence the means of death being cat sleeping tablets which may well be ineffective anyway; it’s a sort of comedy suicide attempt. I’m not sure that this doesn’t leave one with a bad taste in the mouth.

Somehow, this author gets away with misdirecting the reader’s attention. It’s a bit like a typical ABBA song: they were incredibly successful through adding jaunty upbeat tunes to potentially depressing lyrics, such as “I've been cheated by you since I don't know when ... Mamma Mia, Here I go again!” The very first line is about betrayal, a primal downer. Let’s celebrate! The rather desperate singer of ‘Take a Chance’ begins: “If you change your mind, I'm the first in line” suggesting rejection. The preamble to ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’ is “Half past twelve/ And I'm watching the late show in my flat all alone/ How I hate to spend the evening on my own/ Autumn winds/ Blowing outside the window as I look around the room/ And it makes me so depressed to see the gloom.”

The misdirection starts the moment the bride walks into Phoebe’s room in the fourth section of the first chapter. (Sections two and three have explored Phoebe’s back story, grounding her character, exploring her motivation, her reasons to kill herself; these have been fundamentally downbeat moments which, as I noted above, somewhat jar with the breezy start.) This juxtaposition is itself fundamentally unbelievable but the author gets away with it by focusing on the bride, exploring her essentially spoiled character and her air-headedness. The reader is swamped by the gush of words Lila utters.

There’s one final scene, when Phoebe takes the pills after eavesdropping from her balcony on the wedding party. She chickens out and makes herself sick. And from there on we can start the rebuilding.

We are immediately (this is the 25% turning point) introduced to Gary, the groom, who will be Phoebe’s love interest, in the guise of an anonymous man in a hot tub with whom Phoebe falls in love (or at least lust: this is a twenty-first century updating of the classic tropes) at first sight. This love is unrequited (it has to be to create conflict) and immediately followed by another dip into Phoebe’s history. Then the bride invites her to the sailing party in the afternoon, where Phoebe discovers who the man in the hot tub really is, and plunges into the maelstrom that is family and friends.

We’re now into the middle section of the book. Here the author has to step by step convince us that Phoebe and Gary are a perfect match and that Phoebe will be able to get on with her future in-laws, especially a new step-daughter. This is done principally by showing that Phoebe can hit it off with Gary’s disaffected teenage daughter, who is mourning her dead mother. All this is done so that the happy ever after resolution can be achieved without blame.

Lila the bride actually is instrumental in getting Gary and Phoebe together:

• She sends Gary to find Phoebe when Phoebe is on the cliff walk at the start of Wednesday.
• She gets Phoebe to substitute for her at surfing, a threesome with Gary and Juice, symbolically recreating Phoebe’s new family.
• She pairs Phoebe with Gary at the start of the third act as they drive around town to prepare him for his wedding

Lila the bride tells Phoebe, near the end of the middle section, that she doesn’t want to marry Gary.

The end section, as it approaches the climax, reiterates the ‘don’t blame Phoebe’ theme. On page 275, so almost exactly at the 75% turning point, Jim reveals to Phoebe that he is in love with Lila and sacrificed himself for his best mate Gary’s happiness. At which point the reader realises that if the marriage goes ahead, four people will be unhappy and if it is stopped four people have a chance to find happiness. This is the ultimate get-out-of-blame card.

The end also throws in a complication, a final twist, in which Phoebe’s ex turns up and they sleep together (but this prompts her to realise that whatever else happens their relationship is over) which might make Gary think twice.

At the climax, it will be the bride who refuses to get in the car to her own wedding, another get-out-of-blame card.

But after the climax of stopping the wedding, we have to move to the resolution. We actually echo the inciting incident with another hot tub scene in which Phoebe and Gary discuss things. They don’t go off into the sunset (this is a modern novel) but the potential is there. At the same time, Jim knows that Lila has gone to Canada and we feel sure he will follow.

The sub-plot
At the same time, we have to see Phoebe recovering from her thoughts of suicide. For example, on p 159, Gary says that when he met Phoebe “you struck me as a person who was fully alive”. On p 182, the more-or-less-exact midpoint of the book, she is standing on a cliff fighting the urge to throw her phone into the waves (because of a phone call from her ex reminding her that the cat is dead) when Gary comes upon her and he says: “Is this the moment when the protagonist throws her phone into the ocean to symbolize how she’s ready to begin a new life?” And it is!

Selected quotes:

• “The hotel ... sits on the edge of the cliff like an old and stately dog, patiently waiting for her arrival.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “Wasn't that the point of clothing? To prove that you were normal?” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “Cinderella never would have been at the centre of the novel if her mother had lived. (Neither would Jane Eyre ...) The mother had to die so that the girl started in a place of desperation.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “It made her feel silly, fighting over her husband with a female colleague who had her arm wedged in drawer five, like she was about to help birth a document.” (Tuesday: the opening reception) Neat image.
• “Seems more plausible that Hell is some revenge fantasy concocted by unhappy people so they could punish all the happy people in their minds.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “My father owned landfills. Gary is a gastroenterologist. totally different jobs, but ... they're both in waste management.” (Tuesday: the opening reception)
• “The professor is always tempted to say something wise that will get the student to reflect on their own words.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Don't even bother telling me you have plans, because I know you are planning on being dead right now.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Bridesmaids need the same kinds of stories soldiers do, stories that justify why they do what they do.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “They are a classic older man and younger woman combo. Gary is the stage and Lila is the song.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “I'm not a monster, Phoebe. I would care if a woman died at my wedding. I have feelings.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “If everybody in my life is always telling me I can be anyone I want, but then whenever I do one thing they don't like, they act like I ruined myself.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body.” (Wednesday Sailing)
• “Her face is too stiff, the way people's faces look when their abs are slightly clenched.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “I’m like Rapunzel. Except nobody wants to abduct me.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “Do you know what a talker Lila really is? ... As a little girl, she was even worse. Total stream of consciousness. Like living with a little Salinger novel.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “I fell in love with what Henry gave me. And he gave me so much. He truly did. But loving someone like that doesn't make you a better woman. Only losing them does.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “She always imagined getting older as a narrowing street that got darker as you walked.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “We’ve only been sexting since Tuesday and I've already run out of ways to describe my vagina.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “You are a thousand different people orbiting around a pole. ... Aren't we all that pole? ... Though sometimes I'm not sure there is even a pole.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “I don't think about what I want. I just worry about what might happen to me and then figure out how to keep those things from happening.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “Nobody can take care of you the way you need to take care of yourself. It's your job to take care of yourself like that.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “That's the point of art, isn't it? ... Artists look at the world and see opportunities for creating meaning.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “She is drawn to the exhaustion of a lived life.” (Thursday, the Bachelorette party)
• “Good writing is driven by a question ... And the essay is the writer's best attempt at answering that question.” (Friday, the Blending of the Families.)
• “How are we not supposed to talk about the slow decay of our bodies?” (Saturday, the Rehearsal Dinner)
• “To collect is to care more than most. But it is also to hoard. To take things out of the world and make them only yours.” (Saturday, the Rehearsal Dinner)

August 2026

First published in the USA by Henry Holt in 2024

My paperback edition was issued by Phoenix Books in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Iceman Cometh" by Eugene O'Neill

 This classic play is  set in a bar in New York in 1912; the characters are all failures in life, such as a bent policeman drummed out of the force, two combatants from either side of the Boer war, a card sharp from a circus, and an ex-socialist. The barman has a couple of prostitutes working for him but he denies he is a pimp because he doesn't best them up and a pimp wouldn't have another job; he sees himself as an agent for the girls. He still takes their money (and slaps them but that isn't the same as beating them ...) The owner of the bar and associated rooming house in which many of the characters live is Harry, who hasn't been outside for twenty years, since his wife died. They are waiting to celebrate Harry's birthday. A young man, Porritt, unknown to the rest, arrives to talk to Larry, an ex-anarchist who has given up causes to become a "grandstand philosopher"; Porritt is clearly troubled about the fact that his mother, an anarchist, has been arrested and may be facing a life sentence in jail. Hickey is expected to come any moment; the deadbeats look forward to his arrival because he always buys them drinks and cheers them up.

But when he does arrive, they discover he is on a mission. He wants to improve them. He wants them to face up to the fears that have paralysed them, that has caused each one of them to put his life on hold, awaiting a better tomorrow. He wants them all to be free.

I became convinced, in Act Two, that there was a religious dimension to this play. One of the key characters is the "grandstand philosopher" Larry, described by O'Neill thus: “He stares in front of him, an expression of tired tolerance giving his face the quality of a pitying but weary old priest’s.” (Character description of Larry Slade). Hickey had lines that made him sound like Jesus, for example: “I saw I couldn't do what I was after alone. Not in the time at my disposal. I knew when I came here I wouldn't be able to stay with you long. I'm slated to leave on a trip. ... Why, if I had enough time, I’d get a lot of sport out of setting my line of salvation to each of you all by my lonesome.” (Act 2: Hickey) The furniture which is cabaret style in the first act is rearranged in the second to form a single long table: the Last Supper, I thought, and Larry's comment: “By God, it's a second feast of Belshazzar, with Hickey to do the writing on the wall!” (Act 2: Larry) reinforced the religious vibes. Meanwhile, Parritt is a Judas-like betrayer. And, true enough, Hickey is preaching a gospel of salvation from the curse of tomorrow to slightly more than twelve disciples. Even the ending (spoiler alert) in which Hickey is led away by the police to be condemned to death and executed, follows the story of Christ.

The play has a lot of words; it is a very wordy play which needs nearly four hours to be performed in an uncut version. Each of the characters has an arc and there are a lot of characters. They all have their individual issues and most of them have a number of speeches. The final act is dominated by some very long speeches from Hickey.

The play has very specific descriptions for each character. Not all of these were obeyed by the production I saw - Hickey, described as having "a stout roly-poly figure" was played by a slender actor. The stage settings are also minutely described. Sometimes the playwright instructs the actors how to speak. O'Neill didn't seem to want to leave much to the discretion of the director!

I read this as a playscript but at the same time I watched a brilliant (if black and white and grainy) 1960 American TV movie production starring Jason Robards as Hickey (he played the role in the second theatre production, in which TIC was recognised as a classic of American theatre) and featuring a young Robert Redford. The production I watch cut more than a few lines to trim the play into two feature-length halves; the original must have run for at least 3h 30m excluding intervals.

It may be a marathon but it is an extraordinarily wonderful play.

Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. 

Selected quotes:

• “I saw men didn't want to be saved from themselves, for that would mean they'd have to give up greed, and they'll never pay that price for liberty.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “No one here has to worry about where they're going next, because there is no further they can go. It's a great comfort to them.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you're damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it's all question and no answer. As history proves, to be a worldly success at anything ... you have to wear blinders like a horse and see only straight in front of you. You have to see, too, that this is all black, and that is all white.” (Act 1: Larry)
• “I know all about that game from soup to nuts.” (Act 1: Hickey)
• “I've watched many cases of almost fatal teetotalism, but they all came out of it completely cured and as drunk as ever.” (Act 1: Mosher)
• “You can't be too careful about work. It's the deadliest habit known to science.” (Act 1: Mosher)
• “He has to be punished, so he can forgive himself.” (Act 2: Hickey)
• “She just had to keep on having lovers to prove to herself how free she was.” (Act 2: Parritt)
• “Honour or dishonour, faith or treachery are nothing to me but the opposite of the same stupidity which is the ruler and king of life, and in the end they rot into dust in the same grave.” (Act 2: Larry)
• “The Iceman of Death.” (Act 3: Larry)
• “It was like a game, sizing people up quick, spotting what their pet pipe dreams were, and then kidding ‘em along that line, pretending you believed what they wanted to believe about themselves. Then they liked you, they trusted you, they wanted to buy something to show their gratitude. It was fun.” (Act 4: Hickey)
• “I could see disgust having a battle in her eyes with love.” (Act 4: Hickey)
• “I'd get so damned lonely. I'd get thinking how peaceful it was here, sitting around with the old gang, getting drunk and forgetting love, joking and laughing and singing and swapping lies.” (Act 4: Hickey)
• “Go, for the love of Christ, you mad tortured bastard, for your own sake!” (Act 4: Larry)

The play was first performed in New York by the Martin Beck Theatre in 1846.
The script was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in 1947
The script I read was for the Royal National Theatre production and published by Nick Hern Books in 1993.
I read it, and watched it, in August 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Outside Looking In" by T C Boyle

 

A novelisation of the story of Timothy Leary and his promotion of LSD.

After a 'Prelude' set in Basel in 1943 in which we learn of the discovery of LSD from the point of view of the discoverers research assistant, we move to Harvard in 1962 where Professor Tim Leary is conducting 'research' into the effects of psilocybin, ostensibly to see whether its hallucinogenic properties could be used in the treatment of mental issue (a debate still very much alive today, with some scientific evidence that it can but other suggestions that it is no better than alternative treatments). 

The psychologist researchers, and their families, start experimenting at parties in Harvard, before spending a couple of summer vacations in Mexico, before being expelled by the authorities and dismissed by Harvard and ending up living in a giant commune in New York State. Sexual boundaries start to dissolve, the children become feral, and the local authorities start to persecute them.

The first and third sections are narrated in the past tense and 3td person from the point of view of Fitz, a graduate student who feels himself on the outside and desperately wants to be part of the inner circle. The middle section is narrated by his wife, Joanie. 

The finish of the book was so sudden that, even though I knew there could not be more than one or two pages, I turned the page looking for the start of the next paragraph. And yet it was a good line to end on.

This novel links to real people and other works of art. Tim Leary was real and his Castalia foundation was named after the sect in Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. The music of the Beatles is mostly despised by the psychologists who adore jazz and Satie's Gymnopedies. One of their heroes is Aldous Huxley; his latest novel Island is mentioned. Another is Ken Kesey, a fellow psychologist whose debut novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is also mentioned. Kesey later appears with his Pranksters in their coach, as documented by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 

Wolfe's book is so outrageous - consonant with its subject - that it might be thought to overshadow this novel. But the two have different aims. Wolfe is celebrating psychedelia. Boyle is chronicling the damage caused by the hedonistic lifestyle - and it doesn't need to be mind-altering drugs, it could have been alcohol, or sexual promiscuity, or gourmandising, or even unbridled capitalistic consumerism - to the participants. Yes, the 'squares' in society are repressive but the true dangers lie in ignoring real relationships in the obsessive pursuit of elusive dreams. It could equally well apply to writing a novel.

I enjoyed this book. There were some delightful moments and there are some interesting descriptions of the hallucinations caused by taking these drugs, although that was somewhat downplayed compared to the more experimental fiction concerning drug abuse. It is particularly good at portraying the bleak realities of ordinary life, dramatically juxtaposed against the siren promise of chemical liberation.

Selected quotes:

• “Did you see the way the daffodils are pushing up everywhere? I thought somebody'd smeared the whole landscape with butter while we were asleep.” (Prelude)
• “Table legs. the antimacassar on the chair. The end table, the telephone, my shoes! Everything has a life of its own totally independent of us.” (Prelude)
• “This haggard red-faced pathetically ordinary woman who wouldn't have known transcendence if it swooped her up on angels’ wings and sailed her high out of the glittering crest of the universe.” (1.1)
• “Mid-January, bleak as the bottom of a shoe” (1.2)
• “Interiority by its very definition was exclusive, selfish even.” (1.7)
• “The village and its stew of smells.” (2.1)
• “She'd ... watched the full moon scroll its icy script across the face of every wave in existence.” (2.1)
• “They’d gone back to the apartment with the mouse turds, only to find that it too had been taken by somebody whose level of desperation must have been positively Dostoevskian.” (2.3)
• “Worlds collided, glaciers calved, civilizations marched across the landscape erecting temples and tearing them down and starting all over again.” (3.1)
• “Nothing quite fit right, as if the world were a suit of clothes that had shrunk in the dryer and had to be pinched and tugged till it stretched back out again.” (3.2)
• “A June morning, the air heavy as a wet sock and the sun hanging unencumbered overhead.” (3.4)
• “He saw himself as from a distance, a partially dressed great ape with a tube of tobacco in one hand and the concentrated residue of a caffeinated plant in the other.” (3.4)
• “For a long while he sat there on her bed while the sun backed away from him inch by inch across the carpet till it hung suspended in the window and finally dropped out of sight.” (3.6)

July 2026; 385 pages

First published in the US by Ecco Press in 2019
My paperback edition issued in 2020.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Strange Angel" by George Pendle

 This is a biography of American rocket pioneer Jack Parsons, whose actual first name was Marvel.

Inspired by science fiction, Parsons dreamed of constructing a rocket that would travel to the moon. But this was in the 1930s, after his wealthy grandparents had lost their fortune in the Wall Street crash and his privileged upbringing on Orange Grove Avenue ('millionaire's row') in Pasadena had come to an end. And, at the time, when aeroplanes were still in their glamorous infancy, rocketry did not exist outside a handful of amateur eccentrics. 

Not being able to afford a university education, Parsons began working in explosives for mining companies. Then he teamed up with schoolfriend Ed Forman, who was an engineer equally lacking in tertiary qualifications, and maths graduate Frank Molina, to persuade CalTech professor Theodore von Karman (an aerodynamicist who had explained the collpase of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge) to let them use CalTech facilities to test rocket motors, although they still had to fund the experiments themselves. They began working with the military who wanted to add jets to help bombers achieve take-off speeds on shorter runways. But they had problems with the powder fuel: there were always cracks between the clumps of powder grain so burning was uneven. After watching workmen laying molten asphalt on a road, Parsons made his breakthrough and turned the powder into tar which could be poured into the rocket engines. The 'Suicide Squad' founded NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the company Aerojet which still sends rockets into outer space.

Parsons was increasingly interested in magic and became the leader of the Agape Lodge in LA, a group following the Thelema teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley (whose biography Do What Thou Wilt by Lawrence Smith I read recently). Parsons moved the group to a large house on Orange Grove Avenue which he had bought and began performing sex magick ceremonies. According to this book, L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, moved in and stole Parsons's girlfirend (but Parsons, psychologically dominated by Hubbard, put up with it). In the end it all went wrong and Parsons, having lost most of his money in a failed business venture with Hubbard, went back to making explosives. He blew himself up.

This was a brilliantly written book. I loved the way it clothed its story, by telling us the background: LA in the 1920s, a mix of “evangelists like Aimee Semple McPherson ... performing exorcisms over the new medium of radio ... while the social campaigner and writer Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment of the United States Constitution (the right to freedom of expression) in public." (Prologue). The core rocketeers, a group of young men, working like dogs and risking their lives for their passion, seem just like the young geeks who founded Google and facebook and Microsoft and the other IT start-ups of the internet revolution, or like rock musicians hoping to be big. And the 'also starring' cast has a host of other names such as Suicide Squad members Apollo Smith whose father had given his sisters the names Diana and Athena, his brothers the names Hermes and Orpheus, and the dog was called Cerberus and Tsien who “was descended from the tenth-century emperor Qian Liu Tsien", science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein, E E 'Doc' Smith, L Sprague de Camp and L Ron Hubbard, Jack Cornog who first isolated tritium, and  rocket pioneer Robert Goddard who lived in Roswell, New Mexico, 

Selected quotes:

• “John Whiteside Parsons had gone from being a young genius dead before his time to the most overworked, hackneyed, science fiction cliche of them all." (Prologue)
• “The world is drowning - that is exactly why it will clutch at a straw.” (Ch 6, quoting Crowley)
• “Magic, like science, was an attempt to control events by performing technical acts.” (Ch 6)
• “Bob Cornog remembered stumbling into Parsons’ room one morning to find Hubbard and Betty entwined, ‘like a starfish on a clam’.” (Ch 11)
• “The Parsonage, as it had come to be called, had briefly been an adult playground saturated with philosophical hopes and pungent romanticism, fruit brandies and fencing, bohemians and scientists, poetry and rockets.” (Ch 11)

A fascinating story told by a born storyteller.

Novels and books about Magic and Magicians reviewed in this blog.

June 2026; 307 pages
First published in the USA by Harcourt in 2005
My paperback edition was issued in the UK by Weidenfield and Nicholson in 2006

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Vigil" by George Saunders

 Saunders returns to the theme of his 2017 Booker winning Lincoln in the Bardo with this novel. Dead Jill returns to earth (as a ghost? an angel?) to comfort a dying man. During his life he was the CEO of one of the biggest oil extraction firms, responsible for a huge amount of climate change and also responsible for denying climate change even while (through his firms secret research) being aware it was happening and taking steps to mitigate the consequences for his company's profits. Even on his deathbed he is justifying himself, often to other ghosts summoned to accuse him by a dead Frenchman responsible for the invention of the 'machine'. Is he responsible or is he a helpless product of his genetic make-up and the circumstances of his upbringing? And can he manage to find peace before he passes over? Furthermore, can Jill, who seems to be doomed to repeat her task of comforting the dying until she too can be 'elevated' to a higher sphere?

If there is any philosophy behind this, it would seem to be the Buddhist idea that we are trapped on this earth, endlessly reincarnating, until we can learn to renounce the self and achieve, on death, nirvana, nothingness. In this book, ghosts, including Jill, are trapped as ghosts, until they can renounce the self and achieve 'elevation': "If your worth depends on your glories, it must also depend on your sins ...forswear the glory, forswear the culpability. The self is the culprit." (p 81)

The glory of this novel is the characters, almost all of them ghosts (again, this is very similar to LitB) and the imaginative whimsy used to create them. But Saunders also has the ability to nail images and ideas in remarkably simple, sometimes shocking, phrases.

Selected quotes:

• "I made for the front door and, not yet walking competently, collapsed to the earth like a just-unstrung puppet" (p4)
• "When you regretted, folks pounced. You were weak with regret, they felt it, they pounced." (p 39)
• "From the wedding came a squeal of shock, as if something unthinkable but delightful had just been revealed to a previously demure matron." (p 67)
• "A bottom-dweller has one bright, shining moment and can't help shit the bed about it." (p 93)
• "Soon will come that special thunk made by: inert load, dropping ... After which, devoid of its former vitality, his sad former-person-bearing meatlump will begin to rot." (p 100)
• "Sheet buttloads of senseless crap" (p 103)
• "My charge had been born him. But he had never chosen to be born him. That had just happened to him. Then life had happened to that him, exerting upon it certain deleterious effects ... which had led him to strive, which, in turn, led him to accomplish, and, in accomplishing, he had brought about harm." (p 165)

Part clifi, part meditation of dying and death, this is a fascinating book of ideas.

May 2026; 174 pages
First published by Random House New York in 2026
My edition was the paperback International Edition

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Lazarus Man" by Richard Price

 Days after a five-storey tenement in Harlem collapses, Anthony is dragged from the ruins. His miraculous survival is used to inspire young New Yorkers on the periphery of gangs. Meanwhile Felix, a young photographer who lived opposite the disaster, is seeking paid employment, Royal, a funeral director, is seeking bodies, and Mary, a detective, is seeking a missing person who might or might not have been in the building.

I was spell-bound by the first part of this take of ordinary New Yorkers struggling to survive and make sense of their lives. The characters of Felix and Mary had me hooked, Royal providing a lighter touch. But the book started to become less engrossing from the moment that Anthony, like Lazarus, rose from the dead. I persisted to find out what happened to Mary and Felix, and to solve the mystery that is being woven around the survival of Anthony, but somehow the moment stalled. 

But I loved the gritty authenticity and I hope to read more from this author. 

The author has a particular skill in creating original descriptions, such as "straw-sipping", "weed-poked", and "sitting slump-shouldered". 

There are some super lines such as:

• “When the doors opened at the next stop he bailed like a bailiff.” (Boom)
• “Bobby Hazari, her partner du jour.” (Boom)
• “A lover who was nothing more than a clap-on clap-off dick.” (Boom)

Selected quotes:

• “Maybe-this-time is the drug, you-never-know is a drug.” (Angels)
• “Straw-sipping something peachcoloured.” (Angels)
• “Both left him feeling like a spy in the world; a double agent inside a double agent.” (Angels)
• “The big man in the dark sunglasses sitting slump-shouldered.” (Boom)
• “The street itself, a glittering quilt of daggered glass topped here and there with scatters of mail and magazines.” (Boom)
• “The buckling weed-poked macadam.” (Boom)
• “The sneaker skitter of the small kids randomly running in and out.” (Boom)
• “Nodding like an over excited oil rig.” (Boom)
• “Maybe something could be salvaged if the film editor used a machete instead of a splicer.” (Boom)
• “So oblivious to their surroundings that whenever one of them tried to cross to the other side of Fifth Avenue all the cars had to go into slalom mode.” (Boom)
• “The police would make their periodic sweeps, but it was like pushing a broom without a dustpan.” (Boom)
• “A young lady such as yourself should never have to pay for her own banana.” (Boom)
• “She could hear his heart beating in his throat, sounding to her like one of those plush toy animals you'd put in the crib of a newborn that imitated the swashing sound of a womb.” (Boom)
• “The sexual equivalent of a square meal - hearty and filling.” (Boom)
• “The elevator was a crawler, Royal able to clock its ascent with a calendar.” (Risen)
• “The street can be a brutal sculptor.” (Risen)
• “Doubling his fee, otherwise known as two times zero.” (Risen)
• “If it weren't for genitals, she thought, people could live for hundreds of years.” (Risen)

May 2026; 337 pages

First published in the USA by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2024

My UK paperback edition was issued by Corgi in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin

 

This entertaining book felt like YA written for adults. I wasn't surprised that John Green, author of YA classics such as The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and Paper Towns called it "one of the best books I've ever read." 

It is propaganda for the American Dream: that hard work allied with capitalism will make you rich (though it helps to be incredible talented). In this sense, it reminded me of that other fantasy about hard-working geniuses, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, though T&T&T has far less misery.

Sam is half-Jewish, half-Korean, handicapped after his foot was injured in a car accident, but he is a math genius so he gets into Harvard. Sadie has a better start in life but she is sufficiently brainy not only to get into MIT but to be an outstanding student. Marx has rich Japanese parents and he's at Harvard. They take time out from their studies to create a computer game and set up their own company to sell it. They work incredibly long hours so, of course, the game is hugely successful. An everyday story of typical folk this is not. 

It is written in the past tense. At first sight it appears to adopt a multi-third-person-close perspective but given the fact that the narrator repeatedly chips in with exposition, character notes and back story, it is more like third-person-omniscient.

A feature of the narrative style is the remarkable amount of exposition. Time and again, something happens and we then cut to an explanation, usually involving back-story but also frequently describing character. For example:

• “Without knowing why, Sam had tried to keep Sadie and Marx apart. It wasn't about either of them as individuals. But Sam could be private, verging on paranoid, and he liked to control the flow of information. He feared them comparing notes and somehow ganging up on him ... No one, Sam felt, had ever loved him except those who had been obligated to love him: his mother (before she had died), his grandparents, Sadie (disputed hospital volunteer), Marx (his assigned roommate).” (2.2)
• “Marx was great at being in love, for a bit, and certainly, no one ever left a relationship with Marx feeling abused or hurt. He had the gift of letting people think it was their idea to end the relationship, thereby converting most of his ex-lovers into friends.” (2.3)
• “She hated being drunk, though she did enjoy smoking a joint every now and then. She liked playing games, seeing a foreign movie, a good meal. She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things - a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. ...” (3.3)
• “Including Lola, Sam had had four different sexual partners in his life, and he had never enjoyed sex with any of them. He had slept with one boy and three girls. While no one had ever mistreated him, sex had given him considerably less pleasure than masturbation. He did not like to be naked in front of other people. He did not like the messiness of sex - it's fluids, it's sounds, it's smells. He worried that his body could not be relied upon.” (3.4a)
• “He was no longer the boy who wanted to taste everything at the buffet.” (5.2)

 This is, I suppose, a good way of giving lots of information while keeping the story moving along at a swift pace. This is already a long book and I imagine it would be much longer had the author tried to 'show don't tell'. 

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it. It was a fast-paced entertaining blockbuster. But the repeated nuggets of exposition meant I was being told how to perceive the characters, rather than being allowed to find out about them for myself.

Selected quotes:

• “A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say ‘Excuse me’ while meaning ‘Screw you’.” (1.1)
• “It was impossible to be eleven, with a sick sister, and for people to find your conduct beyond reproach. She was always saying the wrong thing, or being too loud, or demanding too much (time, love, food), even though she had not demanded more than what had been freely given before.” (1.2)
• “Sadie was, by nature, a loner, but even she found going to MIT in a female body to be an isolating experience.” (1.3)
• “A bromide about the creative process is that an artist's first idea is usually the best one.” (2.2)
• “The alternative to [cultural] appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don't you?” (2.2)
• “Beauty ... is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.” (2.2)
• “When Sadie was asked a question ... she gave a specific answer, usually no more than two sentences. ... When Sam was asked a question, he turned into a novella.” (3.2)
• “Marx is always in love. He's an emotional harlot. What does love even mean when you can find it with so many people and things?” (3.3)
• “The last thing she packed were the handcuffs. She slipped them into the zippered pocket of the large duffel she was planning to check. She didn't want Dov to use them on some other girl. She wasn't sure if this impulse came from a sense of sorority or sentimentality.” (3.5)
• “Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.” (4.3a)
• “The whiteboard was no longer white, and its permanent palimpsest was an archive.” (4.1)
• “You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it's a perfect time to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.” (5.1)
• “It isn't a sadness, but a joy, that we don't do the same things for the length of our lives.” (5.2)
• “She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)” (5,2)
• “It was easy to dislike the man; it was harder to dislike the little boy who existed just below the surface of the man.” (6.2)

March 2026; 478 pages

First published in the USA by Alfred P Knopf in 2022

My Vintage (Penguin) paperback was issued in 2023

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Model Behavior" by Jay McInerney

In Bright Lights, Big City the 2nd person narrator works for a New York magazine as a fact-checker although his employment seems precarious; his girlfriend is a model who has vanished off to Paris and he is afraid she has left him. In this novel, the 1st person narrator works for a New York magazine as a writer although his employment seems precarious; his girlfriend is a model who has vanished off to Paris and he is afraid she has left him. So there was a distinct sense of deja vu.

The 'gimmick' this time is that the story is broken up into small sections, some no longer than a paragraph though most manage more than a page, as if the novel is in the style of a magazine article.

I found this rather tedious at first. I forgave him because he can write wonderfully wise-cracking descriptions (see the selected quotes). And because of one brilliant scene in which the narrator's mum and dad take him and his depressed sister to a meal at a posh restaurant and the conversation unwinds into a hilarious show-down.

The ending is pretty clever too.

Selected quotes:

• “Phil calls Brooke the scrambled egg head.” (Immediate family)
• “Watching the other men. Sorry bastards. ... And I am one of them. Sitting at our tables naked with yearning, inappropriately dressed for the party. We are penises trussed up in wool suits and silk ties.” (Mount Olympus) He is in the audience at a lap-dancing club.
• “There are exactly two kinds of movie star, the Solipsist and the Seducer: one speaks only of himself, not believing in the existence of anyone else; the other still seems not to believe in his or her own existence at all, and has to seek constant verification from every possible fan in the room, working it like a politician, looking into the great round mirrors of our eyes, trying to seduce us all one at a time.” (Connor among the plutocrats)
• “As a straight male I am viewed as the urban equivalent of the village idiot - harmless, perhaps, but kind of a communal embarrassment.” (How I got my job)
• “Somewhere between the middle and the end is always the best part, but we never know exactly where it is until it's over.” (The first time)
• “Within the year we moved to New York - which is to monogamy what the channel changer is to linear narrative.” (Tokyo, autumn 1993)
• “I've always found the minute portraiture of nineteenth century fiction fairly useless. For me, those precise descriptions of the hero's nose/ mouth/ eyes/ moles/ forehead never come together as an actual face ... they always end up jumbled, like a portrait in the analytic cubist mode.” (Physical appearance)
• “You know I don't like drugs that make me feel stupid. I feel stupid enough to begin with.” (Psychopharmacology)
• “I didn't want other guys to fuck her, honest. I just wanted other guys to want to fuck her.” (The Silk route)
• “Sent the cleaning lady away last week ... because I was embarrassed even for her to see the wreckage, with the result that it has grown and compounded itself as rapidly as the interest on an unpaid VISA balance.” (House call)
• “It should be counted to Jeremy's credit that he is generally unaware of the interest he excites in the opposite sex, though an ill-wisher might chalk up this obliviousness to self-absorption.” (Another literary mystery solved.)
• “Not the limelight, exactly. More like the lemonlight, the reflected
  glory experienced by one-day sensations and the sexual partners of the stars.” (Connor faces the Press)

February 2026; 230 pages

First published in 1998

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Bright Lights, Big City" by Jay McInerney

 

Naturalistic contemporary literary fiction narrated in the 2nd person (which is extremely unusual in a novel) and the present tense.

The narrator works in the fact-checking department of a magazine but, since his model girlfriend left him, he has spent too many nights snorting coke through the hours of darkness in nightclubs to have any chance of holding down a job. This is a chronicle of a world too chaotic and self-destructive to be called hedonistic. It reminded me of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson or Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis.

It's beautifully written. The narrator, an eternal outsider, a wannabe writer who knows of Praxiteles and Socrates, is trapped in this self-imposed hell. But somehow he can keep his perspective in witty and perceptive observations of his fellow losers.

Selected quotes:

• “You have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “His friends are all rich and spoiled, like the cousin from Memphis you met earlier in the evening who would not accompany you below Fourteenth Street because, he said, he didn't have a low life visa.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “Cheekbones to break your heart.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “His voice ... is like the New Jersey State Anthem played through an electric shaver.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “You like the way she moves, the oiled ellipses of her hips and shoulders.” (It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?)
• “If there were a branch of the family business in a distant, malarial colony, you would have been shipped off long ago, sans quinine.” (The Department of Factual Verification)
• “You suspect that his sexual orientation is largely theoretical.” (The Department of Factual Verification)
• “We must locate party fuel. Cherchez les grammes.” (The Utility of Fiction.)
• “You don't like this role of bird with broken wing, especially since that’s exactly how you feel. The lame-duck husband. You'd rather be an eagle or a falcon, pitiless and predatory among the solitary crags.” (The Utility of Fiction.)
• “Elaine moves with an angular syncopation that puts you in mind of the figures on Egyptian tombs. It may be a major new dance step.” (The Utility of Fiction.)
• “You think of Socrates, the kind of guy who accepted his cup and drank it down.” (A Womb with a View)
• “You feel like an integer in a random series of numbers.” (A Womb with a View)
• “More and more you realize that sport trivia is crucial to male camaraderie. You keenly feel your ignorance. You are locked out of the largest fraternity in the country.” (Coma Baby Lives!)
• “Above Forty-Second they sell women without clothes and below they sell clothes with women.” (Coma Baby Lives!)
• “She's still in media dress, as we say.” (Coma Baby Lives!)
• “You pass the Helmsley Palace - the shell of old New York transparently veiling the hideous erection of a real estate baron.” (Sometimes, a Vague Notion)
• “The man looks like he was carved by Praxiteles in 350 BC and touched up by Paramount in 1947.” (How It’s Going)

February 2026; 174 pages

First published  by Vintage in the US in 1984

My Bloomsbury paperback was issued in 2007.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God