"The Rest of Our Lives" by Ben Markovits

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Twelve years ago, Tom's wife, Amy, had an affair. He decided then that he would leave their children had left home. Now he is driving daughter, Miriam, from the environs of New York to university in Pittsburgh. After settling her in ... he keeps driving westward, visiting his brother and an ex-girlfriend, as well as others, before ending up in Los Angeles with his son.

It's a road trip novel, whose antecedents include Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig, TRoOL parallels the physical journey with a psychological journey into the memories of the narrator. Like Rabbit, Run by John Updike, the protagonist is representative of middle-class America (though in this case upper-middle-class) and considers the ins and outs of marital problems with a didactic frankness. Another echo of this novel is that both protagonists were basketball players in their youth.

There are two other plot lines that run parallel to his reminiscences. The first is that he is growing increasingly ill - he thinks it is long Covid. The second is that he has been suspended from his law school because he got involved in a dispute where a basketball club owner was accused of discriminatory practices. He is becoming redundant as an old white male, refusing to use the standardised pronoun sign-off on  his email. On his journey, he meets a white player who wants to sue the basketball authorities because of the under-representation of white players in the top flight of basketball and seeks the narrator as representative. 

I found it difficult to get involved in the story for two reasons. Firstly, the style of the prose which is matter of fact to the point where much is told rather than shown. Secondly, there were so many culturally-specific references to American life that I began to long for footnotes. I am sure that this increases the verisimilitude of the novel for an American audience, but it led to me feeling alienated and consequently less empathetic towards the protagonist-narrator. Sometimes, I understood the reference, after long immersion in Hollywood movies and US TV shows and novels, such as "We obviously had ... a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life." (Ch 1) which references the American school grading system. I am struggling to catch up when a character "graduated salutatorian, and even got elected Homecoming Princess" (Ch 1) When the narrator starts talking about baseball or basketball (and he seems, like so many Americans at least in novels, utterly obsessed with sport) I am hopelessly lost and I don't really care.

It also had that thing that quirk typical to American novels in which character is exemplified through  possessions, menu choices, and particularly clothing:

• "He wore a Foegley Landscape short-sleeved collared shirt." (Ch 2) He is a very minor character, a walk-on part, and yet what he wears appears to be important. Presumably 'Foegley Landscape' is a brand.
• "Betty had on black leggings and Nike running shoes, with a neon yellow swoosh; she wore an oversized men's shirt." (Ch 3)

Selected quotes:

• "I started signing off with he/I/mine ... I don't like being referred to in the accusative. It literally objectifies I." (Ch 1)
• "All that was thirty-five years ago. Ar a certain point with these family dynamics, you'd think the stature of limitations would run out." (Ch 2)
• "Nobody tells you what an intense experience loneliness is, how it has a lot of variations." (Ch 2)
• "The whole afternoon had a post-nap flavour of unreality." (Ch 2)
• "It's a funny thing to be driven by your son, you feel the power dynamic shifting." (Ch 3)
• "That look you get from flying, where you put up a front all day, and the front gets a bit dented." (Ch 3)

The reviews, for example that of the Sunday Telegraph which claimed the novel "Packs a serious emotional punch" left me mystified. True, the plot ends up in a life-or-death situation for the narrator. But I found it difficult to identify with an upper-middle-class American man and the prose had failed to engage me so, actually, I was an observer to the crisis rather than a participant; fundamentally, I didn't really care.

January 2026; 239 pages

First published in the UK by Faber & Faber 2025

My paperback edition was issued in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Three Lives" by Gertrude Stein

Three short stories/ novellas by the famous American ex-pat novelist who also write Blood on the Dining-Room Floor.

Despite Stein's privileged upbringing, the stories focus on ordinary folk. The Good Anna and The Gentle Lena are both servants, Melanctha is a girl of mixed heritage who "liked to wander" rather more than is good for her. Trigger warning: some of the characters conform to racial stereotypes. 

The prose style is not nearly so difficult as in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor. However it does contain some very rambling paragraphs which use recursiveness and quasi-repetitiveness to interesting effect, both in and out of dialogue:

“That certainly is the way always with you, Jeff Campbell, if I understand you right the way you are always acting to me. That certainly is right the way I am saying it to you now, Jeff Campbell. You certainly didn't anyway trust me now no more, did you, when you acted so bad to me. I certainly am right the way I say it Jeff now to you. I certainly am right when I ask you for it now, to tell me what I ask you, about not trusting me more then again, Jeff, just like you never really knew me.” (Melanctha)
“All he knew was, he was an easy now always to be with Melanctha. All he knew was that he was always uneasy when he was with Melanctha, not the way he used to be from just not being very understanding, but now, because he never could be honest with her, because he was now always feeling her strong suffering, in her, because he knew now he was having a straight, good feeling with her, but she went so fast, and he was so slow to her; Jeff knew his right feeling never got a chance to show itself as strong to her.” (Melanctha)

The Melanctha story itself loops back to the beginning and repeats itself, except the third person of Rose Johnson becomes a first person in her dialogue.

Classic stories by a writer with a distinctive (unique?) style.

Selected quotes:

• “The languor and the stir, the warmth and weight and the strong feel of life from the deep centres of the earth that comes always with the early, soaking spring, when it is not answered with an active fervent joy, gives always anger, irritation and unrest.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “The sharp bony edges and corners of her head and face were still rounded out with flesh, but already the temper and the humour showed sharply in her clean blue eyes, and the thinning was begun about the lower jaw, that was so often strained with the upward pressure of resolve.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Her bearing was full of the strange coquetry of anger and of fear, the stiffness, the bridling, the suggestive movement underneath the rigidness of forced control, all the ways the passions have to show themselves all one.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “It was wonderful how Mrs Lehntman could listen and not hear, could answer and yet not decide, could say and do what she was asked and yet the things as they were before.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Anna was never daring in her ways. Save and you will have the money you have saved was all that she could know.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Friendship goes by favour. There is always danger of a break or of a stronger power coming in between.” (The Good Anna 2)
• “Melanctha had not found it easy with herself to make her wants and what she had agree.” (Melanctha)
• “In these next years Melanctha learned many ways that lead to wisdom. She learned the ways, and dimly in the distance she saw wisdom. Those years of learning led very straight to trouble for Melanctha, though in these years Melanctha never did or meant anything that was really wrong.” (Melanctha)
• “It was very early now in the Southern springtime. The trees were just beginning to get the little zigzag crinkles in them, which the young buds always give them.” (Melanctha)

November 2025; 224 pages

First published in 1909

My paperback edition was issued by Renard Press in 2022

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Blue Ruin" by Hari Kunzru

The hook: During a pandemic, protagonist Jay is a gig economy zero-hours driver. He delivers groceries to a posh house in its own estate in the countryside. At the door is Alice, an old girlfriend, who left him for his best friend, with whom she is still living. Jay is sick and collapses, so Alice hides him in a barn on the land until he gets well.

As Jay recovers, he reminisces in an extended flashback and we learn about how he studied art in London and became a performance artist and how he met, loved, lived with and lost Alice to Rob, his friend, a fellow student who is now a successful artist.

As the book progresses, we start to discover more of Jay's story and exactly why he is no longer making art. And the pressures of both the pandemic and the art world combine to bring things to a frightening climax.

It's an fascinating exploration of a subculture that spans everything from starving in squats to multi-millionaire collectors. There is a huge amount of verisimilitude in the descriptions of the drug-fuelled lifestyle associated with that world. Sometimes, the narrative seems a little plot heavy, although it doesn't seem to actually go anywhere (which is perfectly consonant with the theme). There are intimate portrayals of the personalities within it, vulnerable and insecure like the rest of us, but obsessed by the idea that making marks on a piece of canvas (or videoing a performance, or building a sculpture, or ...) is perhaps more important than anything else. 

The narrator-protagonist is quite an impressive person for a casual worker in the gig economy. Not only is he a legend on the internet (and totally unaware of the fact, rather like the eponymous hero of Vernon Subutex 1) but he is an art-school graduate qualified to crew and navigate ships whose interior monologue is full of learned references, not just concepts with art (which suffuse the book):

• The ship of Theseus: a concept in classical philosophy (p 25)
• The (un)examined life: a concept from Socrates (p 30)
• The science of metabolism (p 33)
• Marlowe's Faust (p 123)

Blue Ruin is a painting of a "giant white cruise ship disgorging passengers into a semi-submerged city ... In the foreground, crowded into the frame, were the tourists, horrific semi-human figures, all wearing orange life vests." (p 230)

The pandemic context, the feeling that we are living in a dystopia, perhaps nearing an apocalyptic end of times, and the theme of  rootlessness and anonymity in a world (of art) where reputation is crucial, are the primary colours in this bleak portrait of the pointlessness of life.

Selected quotes: (page numbers refer to the Simon & Schuster 2024 edition)

"If people viewed me in a certain way because I was cleaning a toilet or picking up trash, that was on them, not me." (p 4)

"My beard is turning white and my eyes are sinking into their sockets like pebbles slowly dropping down a well. ... if I catch sight of myself in a mirror, on a good day I'm reminded of a piece of driftwood. Knotted, ground down by sand and water." (p 5)

"It's a fiction we seem to demand, that a person be substantially the same throughout their lives - human ships of Theseus, each part replaced, but in some essential way unchanging. We are less continuous than we pretend. There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood." (p 25)

"Surrounded by students signaling distressed bohemia, all patches and thrift store irony." (p 29)

"Maybe she could live the unexamined life. Mine presented itself as an endless decision tree, a constant steeplechase of exhausting and difficult choices." (p 30)

"Later I would discover Rob's sponge-like quality, his ability to metabolise culture, efficiently and rapidly, to break down its sugars and use them to grow." (p 33)

"As I stepped inside, my feet sank into the deep-pile carpet of the vestibule and something metaphysical closed all around me, a feeling that my reality had just forked and the life in which I hadn't crossed that threshold was now utterly irretrievable." (p 97)

"If technique or craft wasn't what made someone a good artist, what did? The conventional answer was that a good artist was someone who had good ideas." (p 106)

"We smoked weed from the moment we woke up in the morning, moving about our pale green undersea world like unquiet ghosts. Occasionally the real world would intrude, but usually it felt as if we'd slipped through the cracks, the difference between inner and outer space collapsing until reality was purely a function of what we'd ingested that day. At first it seemed exciting, as if we'd found an illicit truth, a doorway in to a place that was inaccessible to normal people, but gradually the returns diminished, and instead of beauty and wonder, our artificial paradise began to feel like a trap." (p109)

"I looked at the face that had launched a thousand of my twenty-something ships." (p 123)

"It was as if I'd come upon a portal, a point where the world was touched by some other nearby reality. The birch glade had been sliced up like a vertical louvre, the filigree of branches and dappled light superimposed on another near-identical version of itself, segements of splinters of a second forest transposed or rhymed with the first, or - that was it - reflected." (p 130)

"I've worked alongside men for weeks, sometimes months, withouyt finding out a single piece of personal information, or being asked one question about myself." (p 145)

"The work of all artists - was an alibi for the desire to put a frame around a certain part of life, to declare that inside the frame was art, and outside was not." (p 161)

"Only in the system we have, where everyone is expected to be an entrepreneur of the self, is anonymity a kind of death." (p 180)

"But I've been travelling for years. ... going somewhere isn't the point. The point is finding somewhere to stay." (p 213)

July 2025; 257 pages

Published in the USA by Knopf and in the UK by Simon & Schuster, 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

The Guardian review suggested that both characters and plots were stereotypes. 

Other books about art and artists reviewed on this blog:

• Literary fiction:
• My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
• The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
• The Masterpiece by Emile Zola
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
• Murder mysteries
• The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte: set in the world of art restoration.
• The Brutal Art by Jesse Kellerman: set in the world of New York art galleries.

And, unreviewed here but utterly brilliant in my eyes, is my own novel with an painting protagonist: Bally and Bro which only costs £1.99 on kindle.

"Pity the Beast" by Robin McLean

An epic poem in prose, a sort of Iliad for the modern-day Wild West.

It is set in a ranching community. Dan has discovered that his wife, Ginny, has been having an affair. Furthermore, his mare is pregnant by a Percheron horse and suffers a difficult birth. Neighbours gather to help with the consequences and one thing leads to another and the gathering turns into a drunken party and, inflamed by an erotic story started by Ginny's sister, Ella, Ginny is gang-raped, flung into a lime pit and left for dead. But she isn't. She escapes into the mountains. And the party-goers must form a posse to track her down and either persuade her to keep silent or finish the job they started.

It’s a story about the animal inside each of us, but it is also about how this is in tension, in humans, with their need to be accepted. Wanting to be part of the group makes people do things that later they may wish they hadn’t, either though guilt or from the very practical consequences that might stem from the act.

The narrative is driven by the characters. Ella is a storyteller who discovers the devastating potential power of a narrative especially one fuelled by sibling rivalry. Saul. Ella’s husband, plays the preacher when a blessing is requested (although he thinks that “The Burning Bush was Abraham”). Like anyone so self-certain, so flawed, he can be encouraged by his wife to participate in gang-rape, he can be recruited to murder. The Rodeo Kid dreams of fame and fortune like any youngster; being young, he can’t imagine himself as a failure, as a lost cause, as dead. The Deputy, a greenhorn in the mountains, sees himself as the avenging hand of the Law, doing his duty even when he’s lost. Dan loves his wife and wants to forgive her even though she is the one who has been sinned against and is now seeking to escape; perhaps he really wants to forgive himself. Maul the muleman is gay. Bowman the tracker is a martinet who cannot show any sign of vulnerability. Ginny’s fatal flaw is that her passions overrule her reason, even to the extent of undermining her own instinct for self-preservation.

Each of these characters is tested by the challenging trek into the mountains. Their hopes and dreams crash into reality. But more than this, the author shows how each of these characters develops in response to the others. Our experiences mould and warp our souls. Life as survival can make life not worth living, just as the progress of our species might destroy the world.

But this is not a judgemental novel. The author describes her characters with tenderness and love. We get inside the head of each of them so that we understand them - as much as one can understand their ambiguous and muddled thought processes - and empathise ('Pity the Beast') with them. This reminded me of the inhabitants of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

There also interludes of science fiction. I didn't really understand why they were there, the're very short and widely-spaced and seemed to me to add little to the novel. Perhaps, together with the sometimes fractured narrative, they provided a faint atmosphere that reminded me of a William Burroughs novel such as The Place of Dead Roads or The Wild Boys.

Much of the writing uses short, sometimes staccato phrases, densely packed with meaning. It needs to be deciphered which can be hard work and slows the reader down. Often the paragraphs contain what seem to be unrelated items and these too need to be separated and related to themselves. For example: “The valley was a great black bowl with a few lights. The kid unsnapped his first pearly snap, then the second and third. The sky was clear but for a thunderhead. Heat lightning is a misnomer. There is always thunder. Its sound dissolves over distance obstructed by mountains or hills or the curve of the earth. ... The kid’s shirt was open to his belt. His skin steamed from the too-close flame. The party rubbed hands on knees, crossed and resettled their legs, and a boot kicked a leg and the fire sparked and flared and resettled.” (Percheron, p 51 - 52) We have description setting up a sympathetic fallacy. There is a sentence about ‘The kid’ and later in the paragraph another couple which are working to establish his macho naivety. There is more scene-setting description. There is talk about ‘the party’ which is a group of individuals who are attending an impromptu party, one which will end in tragedy. 

It felt hugely original, as if it was a sort of stream of consciousness in which the thoughts of the characters were mingled and mixed with the thoughts of the environment. It felt as if the stream-of-consciousness-tag of Virginia Woolf in which the interior monologue hops from head to head had merged with the cut-up technique of William Burroughs. It wasn't easy to read but - boy! - what a ride.

Selected quotes:

• “On the old ranch, running water was a girl sprinting with a bucket.” (Percheron, p33)
• “The Kid stands in the dusty ranch yard, his fists at the navy piping of dirty pants. He wears no shirt. He lost it in the confusion before our commercial break. His face is filthy, his chest and arms likewise. ... His eyes are blue as the sky, as sapphire shining in the sun, too rare a color to play an Indian. His day as the Indian is done. He is young. He is both thrilled and disappointed. He walks to the well, bows to it. There is soap in a tin cup. He sets his arm to work at pumping and he cleans himself of Indian. ... He’s been a child, a puppet. The strings are broke now. His privates still tingle. His eyes are full.” (Percheron, p 65)
• “The winds here can scream like a human man.” (Percheron, last sentence)
• “The mind contracts around paradox like a pearl.” (Bear, p 86)
• “Grannie never believed in trauma. She’d laughed at the word when it came into style. The world was made by trauma. Pray you have some or your life is dull.” (Bear, p 91)
• “We are each separate little dinghies, all floating alone but together, all caught in the same currents in the same ocean: a human lifetime.” (Dog, p 282)
• “The straying mariner is honor bound also. His duty is to offer an oar across the gap, to catch hold of the rope thrown to him, to pull back to the boats with all his might, to make the greatest effort to save himself. ... His life is borrowed property while he lives it, and so muct be preserved. The duty of each boat os equal and opposite and reciprocal.” (Dog, p 283)
• “The water jugs gonged on the mules’ ribs.” (Mule, p 320)

May 2025; 377 pages

First published in 2021 by And Other Stories

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Booth" by Karen Joy Fowler

 This is the story of the Booth family leading up to the assassination, by John Wilkes Booth, of US President Abraham Lincoln. It is history in the sense that all the major events actually happened, but in the way that it is told, with added family conversations, it has been turned into historical fiction.

The head of the family was the Shakespearean actor Junius Booth, an Englishman whose grandmother had been a relative of the English radical politician John Wilkes and who had competed with Edmund Kean on the London stage before becoming the foremost actor of his generation in the US. He acted primarily in Shakespearean roles (as rewritten by Colly Cibber) and his large American family was technically illegitimate because their parents had not married, or had married bigamously. His sons included Edwin Booth, who became another star actor, famous for his portrayal of Hamlet, and youngest son Joe who was a doctor. But the family is most known for actor John Wilkes Booth who shot Lincoln during the performance of a play at a Washington theatre days after the US Civil war had been won by the government troops and the rebellion by the South had been crushed.

JWB believed that Lincoln had monarchical ambitions.

The book is shot through with historical irony. Almost the first page is adorned as an epigram with a quote from Lincoln: “Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.” The deep divisions in American society were then over the question of slavery, nowadays the dividing lines may be more nuanced but they are still there. There is one moment in which a riot takes place during which a policeman is killed ... and all those brought to court are acquitted. But the fundamental question that the book seems to ask is whether the upbringing of JWB was responsible for what he did and given that each of the Booth children grows up in a different way I think the answer must be know.

The style of the book is interesting in that the PoV is sometimes omniscient as the author chronicles historical events but when she tells us of what happened in the family (also historical but in rather more detailed close up) she chooses the perspective of one of the siblings of JWN, normally his eldest sister Rosalie, his famous actor-brother Edwin, or his other surviving sister Asia. 

It is a well-written, mostly straightforward narrative and I read it quickly, wanting to reach the assassination which occurs very close to the end.

It's also interesting in the way it considers and dissects the different styles of acting.

Selected quotes:

• “The house wakes up when Father is in it, the threads that connect the family tightening like violin strings until they buzz.” (2: Edwin, i)
• “The way Rosalie sees it, pretty much everyone in London was abandoning their wives to run away with their sweethearts around the time that Father met Mother. It seems to have been quite the fad. Sodom and Gomorrah with tea.” (2: Edwin, viii)
• “In a grand tradition reaching back through the centuries, he insists that war was forced upon him by unprovoked aggression. He seizes huge swaths of the West as recompense.” (2: Lincoln and the Whigs at Sprigg’s)
• “‘Have you ever noticed,’ Rosalie asks, ‘that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?’” (3: Asia: vii)
• “Streetlights have been installed all over the city and that soft glow now drifts in the windows at night, dimming the stars, and puddling on the floors.” (start of Book 4)
• “No acting is great which pleases only a single class ... the gods of the gallery are as good critics as the blues of the boxes.” (4: Edwin: xii)
• “The war will intensify the growing preference for suppressed over expressed emotion, especially when the suppression comes with evident (though delicately played) struggle.” (4: Edwin: xii)
• “Naturalism can go too far. No one wants to pay for a performance of everyday life, scenes from the supper table. Her ideal is an elevated naturalism. Lines with cadence, not overpowered by the delivery, but allowed to echo in their own intrinsic power. Scenes and situations with weight and moral significance. Gorgeous tragedy. Art that inspires. Art that feels like art.” (4: Edwin: xii)
• “Fechter builds his characters visually from a myriad of physical moments ... Edwin builds his characters through motive and emotion.” (5: Edwin: 1)

Karen Joy Fowler also wrote We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Booth was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize

March 2025; 464 pages

First published in 2022 in the US by G P Putnam's Sons

My UK paperback edition issued in 2022 by Serpent's Tail

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Buddha in the Attic" by Julie Otsuka

This remarkable book dispenses with the norms of writing in order to express the experiences of a community.

It starts with a boat-full of Japanese women heading to the USA to marry the husbands as selected by the matchmakers. It describes their disillusioned dreams as they follow the full immigrant experience, working as agricultural labourers and domestic servants, working their way up to self-employment. And babies, lots of babies. And tragedy, a lot of that too. And then, as most of them reach prosperity, the aftermath of Pearl Harbour sees the whole community interned as enemy aliens and transported to labour camps.

I knew something about the Japanese-American experience having read, years ago, Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. But 'The Buddha ...' is told in a completely different way. There are no individual character arcs. History happens but there is little in the way of a conventional plot. Instead the experiences of the women are listed in sentence after sentence, creating a powerful chanting effect. Here are two examples: 

• “Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto, and were delicate and fair, and had lived our entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house. Some of us were from Nara, and prayed to our ancestors three times a day, and swore could still hear the temple bells ringing. Some of us were farmers' daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders who had never gone to bed after nine. Some of us were from a small mountain hamlet in the Yamanashi and had only recently seen our first train. Some of us were from Tokyo, and had seen everything, and spoke beautiful Japanese, and did not mix much with any of the others. Many more of us were from Kagoshima ...” (Come, Japanese!)
• “Home was a bit of straw in John Lyman's barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse in Stockton's Cannery Ranch. Home was a bunk in a rusty boxcar in Lompoc. Home was an old chicken coop in Willows that the Chinese had lived in before us. Home was a flea-ridden mattress in a corner of a packing shed in Dixon. Home was a bit of hay atop three apple crates beneath an apple tree in Fred Stadelman’s apple orchard ...” (Whites)

The whole book is like this. It is mesmerisingly effective.

Nouveau roman? Certainly it reminded me of Natalie Sarraute's Tropismes. But whereas that book feels like an impressionist painting, whose message lies in the creation of an ambience, this is a collage of fragments with the punch of pop art.

Selected quotes:

• “In our dreams she would always be three and as she was when we last saw her: a tiny figure in a dark red kimono squatting at the edge of a puddle, utterly entranced by the sight of a dead floating bee.” (Come, Japanese!)
• “They gave us new names. They called us Helen and Lily. They called us Margaret. They called us Pearl.” (Whites) As ‘Whites’ might suggest, three of these four names refer directly to skin colour: lilies and pearls are white and Margaret is a name derived from the Latin word for pearl.
• “We threw out their cheese by mistake. ‘I thought it was rotten,’ we tried to explain. ‘That's how it's supposed to smell,’ we were told.” (Whites)

It was a New York Times bestseller but don't let that put you off (some truly dreadful books have achieved the same accolade)

It was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and won the 2012 Pen Faulkner Award. 

January 2025; 129 pages

First published in the US by Knopf in 2011

My paperback edition issued in the UK by Penguin in 2013

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Ben-Hur" by Lew Wallace

Until Gone With the Wind, Ben-Hur was the best-selling American novel. It was written by Lew Wallace who was the Governor of the territory of New Mexico who ordered the arrest of Billy the Kid.

It is melodrama. No doubt when it was published in 1880 it was written in the style of a best seller but I found it very difficult to read. There are the appeals to the reader "O! My reader" and there are the capitalisations "IT WAS THE NAZARENE", the stragne sentence structures "Both had hair and eyes black" and the preponderance of Thous and wilts and dosts and the long explanatory descriptions and the stock characters.

The first of the eight books is the story of the wise men coming to Bethlehem at the birth of Jesus and has nothing whatever to do with the main narrative which starts in book 2.

Judah is a rich young lad who lives in a big house in Jerusalem with his mum and his sister and his servants, his merchant dad having died. One of his best friends is the slightly older Roman lad called Messala (usually, for some reason, the Messala) who, perhaps because he is jealous that Judah is so extraordinarily good looking, seizes the pretext of an accident in which Judah nearly kills the Roman governor to have Judah arrested and his mum and sisters tossed into the darkest dungeons and all his property seized. Becoming a galley slave (this first part reminded me very much of The Count of Monte Cristo which is another revenge story but a far better book) kills most people within a year but it just toughens Judah until, three years later, he saves the life of a rich Roman in a shipwreck and becomes an adopted son. Of course the purpose of his life is first to find his mum and sister and second to revenge himself on Massala although he spends a good few years becoming a pampered young Roman first (learning how to become the best fighter and the best chariot racer) and then a few years more, in Jerusalem, training an army of rebels, before really setting his mind to the task.

The plot sets up some good situations and then wastes them. The high point of the film was the chariot race and there is no question that this is an important part of the story but it is over and done with just over half way through; not only that but Ben-Hur's victory isn't exactly fair and square. Sometimes the book sets up interesting conflicts such as the choice facing Judah between the beautiful but mysterious Egyptian, daughter of Wise Man Balthasar, and the humble slave for life Esther but in the end the choice is rather made for him. Similarly there is an interesting conflict facing Simonides, a slave who must embrace slavery if he recognises Judah, but the resolution is rather a damp squib. The potential enmity of Messala is defused too quickly and so is the problem that Judah is actually an escaped galley slave. Towards the end of the book Judah is a rich man with dreams of commanding a rebellion against the Romans. Then he meets Jesus and the conflicts between the two contrasting visions of Power and Glory are acknowledged but never properly explored.

I think my problem with the hero is that Judah shows very little character development of the sort required by modern audiences. As Simonides (whose story reveals true heroism both in his sacrifice for love and in his sacrifice to serve the Hur family) says when Judah waltzes in and demands that this faithful slave give him his inheritance because the fortune was achieved using the capital Simonides saved from the confiscation of Ben-Hur's assets, “The fortune cost him nothing - not an anxiety, not a drop of sweat, not so much as a thought” (B4C11) And this is the same all the way through. OK he has to serve three years as a galley slave but everything before and after that drops into this young man's lap.

And yet there are some areas of grey in the portrait Wallace paints of his hero. Messala's denouncement comes about after Judah drops a roof tile on the Roman governor's head; Judah says it was an accident but he wasn't framed. The victory in the chariot race is obtained by breaking the rules. Judah wants to be a resistance hero (a terrorist in modern terms?) and never really understands the message the Jesus is preaching. Judah's quest for his mum and sister is very easily diverted. There is so much potential nuancing that could be done with this. But I don't think Wallace realised that. I think Wallace was selling an Anerican dream in which you can be rich and powerful and beautiful and still a good Christian. I don't think, for all the cod theology burbled in this book, Wallace had the subtlety and psychological insight to turn this potentially brilliant story into a great work of literature. He was too busy trying to tell the Greatest Story Ever Told.

On the other hand I haven't written a best-seller.

I must be one of the few people in recent years to have read the book before watching the film. I have now watched the Oscar-winning Charlton Heston version. I was pleased to note that the film scrapped the first book (the story of the first Christmas) which underlined the fact that it had little to do with the plot. It also moved the chariot race, for many the peak of the drama, to a later position. Furthermore, it omitted the idea that Judah trains troops with the intention of starting a rebellion against the Romans; the film maximises the good boy potential of Judah. The old housekeeper is scrapped and her role in the leprosy sub-plot is taken by Esther. Esther's love rival (Balthasar's daughter) is removed which takes away this sub-plot but the fact the Esther has been seeing Judah's leper mum and sister without telling Judah provides the opportunity for a lover's tiff. The film (as with the book) climaxes with the crucifixion (which coincides with the healing) but later events have been compressed to get to where we are going in a more economical manner. The film therefore represents a tighter and better-paced plot while losing some nuances of character. However, the film has a serious time problem. It is widely accepted the the ministry of Jesus lasted three years but he is already going when Judah is sent to the galleys and Judah is in them for three years not to mention the extra time he spends as a playboy in Rome and therefore by the time he returns to Jerusalem Jesus sh ould already be dead and buried (and resurrected perhaps).

I enjoyed the following lines:

• “The sunburnt ways of the wilderness.” (Book 1, Chapter 1)
• “It was morning time. Before him was the sun, half curtained in fleecy mist.” (B1C1)
• “the lamp of Hindoo genius was let down a well, where ever since it has lighted narrow walls and bitter waters.” (B1C4)
• “The enemy of man is man, my brother.” (B1C5)
• “In the manner of customs, climate is a lawgiver everywhere.” (B2C3)
• “Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing. lives that wondrous thing the spirit of man.” (B2C4)
• “Knowledge leaves no room for chances.” (B3C2)
• “Oh, if, in being forgotten, we could only forget!” (B3C3)
• “The hair of the dancers floated free, and their limbs blushed through the robes of gauze which scarcely draped them. Words may not be used to tell of the voluptuousness of the dance.” (B4C5)
• “How many kings have you heard of who were better than their subjects?” (B4C16)
• “It is neither wise nor honest to detract from beauty as a quality.” (B5C3)
• “When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.” (B5C8)
• “It made me restless by keeping always present a feeling that I, who have so much to do, was dropping into idle habits, and tying myself with silken chains, and after a while - and not a long while either - would end with nothing done.” (B5C9)
• “Time is in the green yet; let to-morrow answer.” (B8C2)

May 2018; 436 words

"What Happened" by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Clinton is the wife of Bill Clinton, former president of the United States, who went on to become a Senator for New York, US Secretary of State under Barack Obama, and Democrat candidate for US President in 2016 in a race in which she gained more votes than her rival Donald Trump but lost to him because of the archaic US Electoral College rules. This book tries to explain how her campaign, which everyone (including herself and, it appears, Mr Trump) thoughtshe would win, failed so spectacularly.

It is written in a very straightforward style. As is typical of US books it is obsessed with facts, in particular poll ratings, the names of people, and what she eats. She would appear to read a lot of inspirational books especially those written by religious people.  I found that these details tended to get in the way of the narrative.

It's not a rant. There is a lot of careful policy. Clinton comes over as extremely thoughtful, searingly honest, and very caring, although it is interesting that the norms she accepts (such as self-help, reducing taxes, being the world's policeman) are really rather right wing in the context of European politics.

Some interesting comments:

• "To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis on which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle." (p 9; quoting Timothy Snyder)
• “Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism.” (p 9)
• “It wasn't all yoga and breathing: I also drink my share of chardonnay.” (p 27)
• There is an opioid epidemic in the US. In 2015 over 33,000 people overdosed and died. “A woman in treatment [for opioid addiction] told me, ‘We're not bad people trying to get good. we're sick people trying to get well’.” (p 62)
• “Gun violence ... is the leading cause of death for young black men [in the US], outstripping the next nine causes of death combined.” (p 178)
• “Change might be the most powerful word in American politics. It's also one of the hardest to define.” (p 197)
• “Service is the rent we pay for living.” (p 215; quoting Marian Wright Edelman)
• “President Obama once compared Vladimir Putin to a ‘bored kid at the back of the classroom. ... he's got that kind of slouch’.” (p 327)
• “De Tocqueville ... wrote that revolts tend to start not in places where conditions are worst, but in places where expectations are most unmet.” (p 442)

February 2018; 464 pages