Such, Such Were the Joys

Lists Screening Room
June 4, 2008 | 15 books mentioned 12 2 min read

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I am a fan of nostalgic genres, as my last list testified: Not the least of the charms of the country house movie, following in the tradition of classical pastoral, is that the country house comes to represent a pre-Lapsarian, Edenic space associated with leisure, pleasure, and harmony. Usually this harmony is destroyed or interrupted (“Brideshead” is the archetypal example of this: Ryder returns to a decayed and abandoned Brideshead as a soldier during World War II, and begins to reminisce about the golden age gone by), but it’s the idea that – however fleeting or fragile – such happiness and peace and pleasure shared with friends is possible.

Today I share with you another list, for another nostalgic genre: the school story. These pieces are often simultaneously nostalgic for the youthful abandon and friendship and simple pleasures of schooldays, and meditations on the betrayals and abandonment that turn children into adults. I largely exclude American high school movies (they seems a different beast) in favor of boarding school novels and films:

is a staff writer for The Millions living in Virginia. She is a winner of the Virginia Quarterly's Young Reviewers Contest and has a doctorate from Stanford. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Times, In Character, VQR, Arts & Letters Daily, and The Daily Dish.

Screening Room

Fry and Laurie: From Footlights to Fiction

Screening Room
August 29, 2007 | 15 books mentioned 5 4 min read

From the venerable halls of Cambridge University in the early 1980s, emerged two of the finest comedic minds in British Comedy. From their years as writers and performers in Cambridge’s Footlights troupe, through their acting stints in Jeeves and Wooster, various seasons of Blackadder, and especially their brilliant BBC sketch comedy series “A Bit of Fry and Laurie,” Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie have spent the better part of my life making me laugh, often uncontrollably, and (occasionally) like a blithering idiot.In the 1990s, Stephen Fry reached perhaps a wider audience with his pitch-perfect performance as Oscar Wilde in Wilde, and as for Mr. Laurie, well, unless you’ve been spending the last three years on Pluto, you’ve probably heard of a certain brilliant but tormented diagnostic genius named Gregory House.All of which leads me to this: For years I’ve been fully aware that both Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie are also accomplished novelists. And despite my knowledge that they, separately and together, could seemingly write and perform anything, comedy or drama, brilliantly, in any medium, I still held off reading their critically acclaimed novels. When I eventually relented, I did so with enormous trepidation. Maybe I was worried that they wouldn’t reach the same heights, in my estimation, as they already had in other media.I needn’t have worried.Hugh Laurie’s first novel, The Gun Seller is a comical, first-person account by one Thomas Lang, former soldier, now a civilian, who finds himself drawn into a bit of intrigue involving state-of-the-art weaponry, international terrorism, and well, the love of a good woman (Or is she a femme fatale?). The story moves along at a fast clip, building tension, and saying a few things about human morality along the way. And as it was published in 1996, it reflects that now almost nostalgically quaint post-Cold War, pre-9/11 era.But it’s all recounted with a savage tongue planted firmly in cheek. Describing the facial features of one of the parade of brutes who for various reasons want to kill our hero:We find that Rayner’s ears had, long ago, been bitten off and spat back on to the side of his head, because the left one was definitely upside down, or inside out, or something that made you stare at it for a long time before thinking ‘oh, it’s an ear.’While Laurie’s The Gun Seller is a comic-thriller pure and simple, Stephen Fry’s 1991 debut novel, The Liar seems a bit more layered. It tells the story of Adrian Healey, and shifts back and forth through various stages of his life. We see his English ‘public school’ adolescence – a lovelorn time spent genuinely yearning for Hugo Cartwright, one of his fellow classmates, while trying on other personae for size – rebel, actor, schemer. We see him a few years later studying at Cambridge and later still traveling to Hungary in the employ of one Professor Trefusis. On A Mission. Adrian’s mendacity proving to be his most appealingly useful trait. The one thing others can count on.There’s a thriller bubbling underneath involving codes and ciphers, and a 70s update of the Enigma cipher machine. But all of the plot machinations serve to sharpen the focus on Adrian’s character. As Trefusis tells him:”I am a student of language, Mr. Healey. You write with fluency and conviction, you talk with authority and control. A complex idea here, an abstract proposition there, you juggle with them, play with them, seduce them… You recognize patterns, but you rearrange them when you should analyze them. In short, you do not think. You have never thought… You cheat, you short-cut, you lie. It’s too wonderful… You are a hound of hell and you know it.”As good as The Liar is, Stephen Fry’s second novel, The Hippopotamus, is even better. His Ted Wallace is a giant of a character – a sly, sarcastic, 60-something jaded poet and critic. Unfailingly polite when social or family circumstances dictate, he saves up his venom and unleashes it on us, the gentle reader.The story is this: Recently fired as a newspaper theatre critic, Wallace is retained by the terminally-ill niece of an old family friend to, essentially, pay an extended visit to that old friend and his family, and report “anything unusual” back to her. The jaded poet becomes a spy. We, and he, are left in the dark as to what, exactly, we should be looking for. But gradually the fog clears. In an astonishingly moving bit of back-story, we learn of Albert, the secular, spiritually disenchanted Austrian-Jewish grandfather, who returned to Vienna in the 1930s to try to bring his cousins back to England with him:In that awful little room with its imponderably hateful smell, a smell that took all the dignity and colour and strength away from him, his tweeds, his expensive luggage and his small blue passport, in that dreadful stinking room he swore a new loyalty, to his people – his stupid, moaning and cosmically irritating people, whose religion he scorned, whose culture he despised, whose mannerisms and prejudices he abominated.We also, in the present, get a sense of the unusual circumstances that Ted was dispatched to uncover. And what began as scathing social satire with a bit of a mystery gradually forming underneath, turns into a rich, stunningly written novel full of tension and eventual catharsis. It’s a fantastic read.There are several other novels and at least one memoir in the Fry and Laurie canon, and I’d be astonished if they all weren’t written with the same penetrating wit and fierce intelligence. The halls of Cambridge would expect nothing less.

Screening Room
| 15 books mentioned 5 4 min read
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Lists

Ten Ways to Organize Your Bookshelf

Lists
July 20, 2017 | 15 books mentioned 17 5 min read
Part of the fun of reorganizing your books is considering all your options, so here are 10 organizational strategies for the next time you find yourself in the throes of moving, decluttering, or, if you’re anything like me, procrastinating.
Lists
| 15 books mentioned 17 5 min read
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12 comments:

  1. A Prayer for Owen Meany and lots of other John Irving is very boarding school-esque.

    Catcher in the Rye! Holden doing his post-boarding school wandering.

  2. Also…

    The film "if…" by the great British director Lindsay Anderson from a script by David Sherwin and John Howlett is a very powerful, occasionally surreal, "English boarding school" story, whose protagonists, led by a young Malcolm McDowell (pre-Clockwork Orange, pre-O Lucky Man), stand-in for the revolutionary tide of the late 60s.

  3. Dude, I forgot "Taps"! (speaking of revolution and actors pre- their famous roles) And also "Outside Providence". Good movie.

  4. I would add R. F. Delderfield's To Serve Them All My Days, both in print and video.

  5. Odd that "A Separate Peace" by John Knowles didn't make this list. It's one of the leading lights of the prep school novel genre.

    John B.

  8. i second the motion for wolff's 'old school,' but where oh where is donna tartt's masterpiece, 'the secret history'?

  9. I feel like I talk about The Secret History all the time, but maybe that's not true. It's great. And you're right that it fits, though I was, sort of, excluding college stories, for not fully determined reasons.

  11. Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays is an incredible book. I read it in conjunction with John Addington Symond's Memoirs, which remained unpublished until 1984. It tells a very different of schoolboy life in England's prestigious boarding schools.

    Good catch on the Ledger-Levitt connection. I was thinking the same thing when watching (and re-watching) Brick.

  12. Emily, this is the first Millions blog I've read by of yours. I love it. I agree with your connection of A Separate Peace, that was a great book and one I often forgotten. -Lucia

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Screening Room

Literary Hollywood

Screening Room
February 21, 2004 | 15 books mentioned 2 min read

When I lived in Washington, DC, I remember there being a slew of excitement in the local newspapers and in local bookstores when a book like Primary Colors came out. Local interest is a big seller in books, especially when there’s scandal involved. Here in Los Angeles this means that books about Hollywood get top billing, and there are lots of them on the local bestseller lists at any given time. They come in a few different flavors. There’s the now-we-can-finally-make-all-those-juicy-stories-public, recent-history-of-Hollywood books. These books come out a generation or so after the action depicted in the book takes place. The main players have either died or they no longer wield any power so their stories are fair game for the reading public. Connie Bruck’s biography of Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman, When Hollywood Had a King and A. Scott Berg’s biography of Katherine Hepburn, Kate Remembered are two recent examples. Then there’s the down-in-the-trenches, you-have-to-be-there-to-really-get-it, borderline-inside-joke, behind-the-scenes-entertainment-industry-workplace-dramas. Take David Rensin’s book The Mailroom, which, as far as I can tell, you would only want to read for one of two reasons. You once worked in Hollywood mailroom and you want to reminisce about those high-energy, low-pay days back before you became a high-powered agent, or you desperately want to become a high-powered agent and you want to read up about what it’s like in the mailroom, your first step on the road to glitz and glamour. Finally there is the true story thinly disguised as fiction like producer Robert Cort’s recent novel, Action!. I got to thinking about all of this Hollywood literature because of a recent review by Caryn James in the New York Times that assesses the latest crop of Hollywood lit. (LINK). Wading through big-selling tell-alls like Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures and Joe Eszterhas’ Hollywood Animal and all the rest, she finds a novel that transcends the Hollywood genre in The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters and also mentions that when it comes to books about Hollywood, The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West is “unsurpassed.”

Screening Room
| 15 books mentioned 2 min read
Lists

What, if Anything, I Taught Them

Lists
November 26, 2007 | 15 books mentioned 3 4 min read

This fall, among other pursuits, I’ve been teaching one section of “Composition & Rhetoric” at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus. I’ve led fiction writing workshops at the university level before, but this has been my first foray into expository writing. At times, I’ve found myself questioning my professorial fitness (as regular readers of this blog may even now be doing); how can I claim to explain a set of forms that I haven’t myself mastered?But when it comes to writing, we’re all apprentices (to paraphrase Hemingway), and I’ve been blessed with a group of creative, curious, and hardworking writers-in-training. Of my 16 students, 14 are enrolled in the Alvin Ailey School of Dance – which is to say that they’re well on their way to being artists in another medium. This may account for the high quality of their work.Or maybe it’s the pedagogical principle I cribbed from my quondam teacher Lawrence Weschler: Assign your students readings that you really love. My syllabus, thrown together in a single manic week in August, wound up coalescing loosely around ideas of New York before and after September 11, 2001. Even in a week when my Socratic skills failed me, my class and I would at least have the consolation of having read something complex and beautiful, like the city itself. What follows is a diary of our mutual education.Week 1: “Here is New York,” by E.B. White (from Essays)For me, this is what a good essay looks like, but at this point in the semester, I can’t quite explain why. My instructions: “Go sit in Central Park when you read this. You can thank me later.” They do.Week 2: “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” by Herman Melville (from Great Short Works) and “Bartleby in Manhattan,” by Elizabeth Hardwick (from Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays)One of the weird things about literary criticism at the college level is that students are often asked to write it without ever having read it. I’m hoping that this pairing might provide an object lesson in good criticism. My class, of course, prefers the story to the essay. The fiction writer in me sees this as a promising sign.Week 3: “Still-Life,” by Don Delillo (an excerpt from Falling Man originally published in The New Yorker) I tell students to treat DeLillo the way Hardwick treated Melville. That is, critically. Instead, they fall in love with him. I end up thinking more highly of Falling Man than I did when I first read it, and liked it.Week 4: “Echoes at Ground Zero,” by Lawrence Weschler (from Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences and “Against Interpretation,” by Susan Sontag (from Against Interpretation)The Weschler reading, which included photographs, leads to a discussion of reading images critically – a skill we all need these days. Then we read the Sontag, which is kind of an argument against everything I’ve been teaching them up to this point. Is this brilliant, or suicidal?Week 4: “Come September,” by Arundhati Roy (from The Impossible Will Take A Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear)Moving away from literary criticism and toward social criticism proves difficult, as many readers, myself included, find this essay frustratingly orthodox in its politics. We end up talking about “preaching to the choir,” and the failure of partisan arguments to persuade their opponents. Victory snatched from jaws of defeat.Weeks 5 – 7: The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin.Rereading this clarifies some things for me. Among them, that an essay doesn’t always have to be an argument; that it can be an exploration. This will become a theme. (Damn you, Sontag!)Week 8: “What I See When I Look at the Face on the $20 Bill,” by Sarah Vowell (from Take the Cannoli)This one doesn’t get quite the reaction I had hoped for; students find it a little didactic. Maybe I should have chosen “Ixnay on the My Way.” Still, the Vowell essay on Cherokee history does offer an example of how exposition can be structured narratively.Week 9-Week 10: “The White Album,” by Joan Didion (from The White Album)With its jagged, discontinuous structure, this memoir of the ’60s provokes the strongest responses I’ll probably get this year, ranging from, “I loved this” to “I hated this” – which is pretty much what I’ve been hoping for all semester. When I read my students’ personal essays, I’ll see that “The White Album” has challenged them to become better writers. It never hurts to expose undergraduates to a surgically precise stylist like Didion, either.Week 11: “Dancing in the Dark,” by Joan Acocella (from Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints)Yet another of those frequent occasions when the professor learns more from the students than vice versa. The dancers tell me all about Bob Fosse, and evaluate Acocella’s claims critically. In the end, most agree that Fosse’s choreography is more about power than about sex. And again, exposure to a writer of Acocella’s intelligence and lucidity can only help their prose. It’s certainly helped mine.Week 12: “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn,” by Jonathan Lethem (from The Disappointment Artist)This should be interesting. We’re now in the middle of the research essay unit, but I’d love to see my students push beyond the conventions of the term paper; to combine research, personal reflection, and critical thought as Lethem does in this essay about a subway stop.Week 14: “Last Cigarettes,” by Marco Roth.This piece originally appeared in N+1, and has a lot to say about college, and becoming a writer. Like the Lethem essay, it pushes against the rigid boundaries of the “four rhetorical modes.” If I’ve learned anything this semester, it’s that good expository writing doesn’t always adhere to such neat distinctions. Though at times I’ve wished I could tell my class, “This is how you write an essay,” throwing them into the messy process of discovery may ultimately be a more honest initiation into the pains – and joys – of writing.

Lists
| 15 books mentioned 3 4 min read
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Book Previews Lists

June Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

Book Previews Lists
June 1, 2017 | 15 books mentioned 3 3 min read

We wouldn’t dream of abandoning our vast semi–annual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around).  Here’s what we’re looking out for this month. Stay tuned for next month’s huge Second-Half Preview, and let us know what you’re looking forward to in the comments.

Hunger by Roxane Gay: A few years ago, Gay wrote Tumblr posts on cooking and her complex relationship with food that were honest yet meditative. It was on the cusp of her breakthrough essay collection Bad Feminist. Now she may be a household name, but her second nonfiction book delves into the long-running topic of the role food plays in her family, societal, and personal outlook with the same candor and empathy. (Tess M.)
 
 

The Changeling by Victor LaValle: A book that somehow manages to be a fairy tale, an agonizing parenting story, a wrenching metaphor for America’s foundational racist ills, and a gripping page-turner to usher in the summer. It’s got internet trolls, forest trolls, intergenerational evil, a magical island commune of traumatized warrior women, and antiquarian book dealers. Read it. (Lydia)
 
 
 

The Accomplished Guest by Ann Beattie: 1976 was a good year for Beattie: she published her first story collection, Distortions, as well as her debut novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter. Forty years and roughly 20 books later, Beattie has a new collection of stories, closely following last year’s The State We’re In, linked stories set in Maine. One defining trait of Beattie’s short fiction is her fondness for quirks: “However well you write, you can become your own worst enemy by shaping it so highly that the reader can relate to it only on its own terms. Whereas if you have some little oddities of everyday life that aren’t there to be cracked, it seems to me that people can identify with it.” (Nick R.)

So Much Blue by Percival Everett: In Everett’s 30th book, an artist toils away in solitude, painting what may be his masterpiece. Alone in his workspace, secluded from his children, best friend, and wife, the artist recalls memories of past affairs, past adventures, and all he’s sacrificed for his craft. (Nick M.)
 
 
 
 

The Last Kid Left by Rosecrans Baldwin: The Morning News cofounder and author of Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down returns with a murder mystery/romance/coming-of-age story set in New Hampshire. (Lydia)
 
 
 
 
 

The Answers by Catherine Lacey: Granta Young American and author of Nobody is Ever Missing delivers her second novel to just about the best review one could hope for, from Dwight Garner, who says Lacey is “the real thing” and now “takes full command of her powers.” A somewhat dystopian social novel about “the neurobiology of love,” The Answers follows a woman who signs up to be part of a sinister scientific “income-generating experience.” (Lydia)
 
 
 

The Windfall by Diksha Basu: A class commentary cum comedy of manners about a middle-aged, middle-class Indian family’s dizzying rise to nouveau riche status following the sale of a website. Karan Mahajan says Basu’s debut “has a gentleness that belies its furious subject: money.” (Lydia)
 
 
 
 

Blind Spot by Teju Cole: A strange, sumptuous collection of text and images by the virtuoso essayist, novelist, and photo critic. Kirkus calls it a “cerebral and very beautiful journey.” (Lydia)
 
 
 
 
 

Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim: Lim has long been publisher of the small, avant-garde Ellipsis Press, whose authors, including Joanna Ruocco, Evelyn Hampton, Jeremy M. Davies, and Lim himself, are remarkable for their unique voices, their attention to language and experimentation. Together they make a significant if lesser-known body of work. Dear Cyborg, Lim’s third novel, will be his first with a major press (FSG). Tobias Carroll has said, “Lim’s novels tread the line between the hypnotically familiar and the surreptitiously terrifying.” With comparisons to Tom McCarthy and Valeria Luiselli and praise from Gary Lutz and Renee Gladman, Lim’s work is worth seeking out. (Anne)

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal: A ne’er-do-well law school dropout and bartender signs up to teach a writing course for her west London Sikh Community Association. While a local morality police lurks, she leads a workshop on erotic storytelling for a group of the titular Punjabi widows, discovering the many currents that shape women’s lives. (Lydia)
 
 
 

The Gypsy Moth Summer by Julia Fierro: In this follow-up to Cutting Teeth, about a zeitgeisty group portrait of Brooklyn hipster moms, Fierro turns back the clock to the summer of 1992 when a plague of gypsy moths infests Avalon, an islet off the coast of Long Island, setting in motion a complex tale of interracial love, class conflict, and possible industrial poisoning at the local aircraft factory. Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year, says Fierro, director of Brooklyn’s Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, has written “a novel to slowly savor, settling in with her characters as you would old friends.” (Michael B.)

The City Always Wins by Omar Robert Hamilton: A debut novel about the Egyptian revolution from filmmaker and activist Hamilton, who has written about the events of Tahrir square for The Guardian and elsewhere.  (Lydia)
 
 
 
 
 

Book Previews Lists
| 15 books mentioned 3 3 min read
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