Late in John Irving’s 13th novel, “In One Person,” the narrator, an aging writer named William Abbott, recalls visiting a high school friend dying of AIDS. It’s the early 1980s, the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and Irving evokes the deathly terrors of that period, a time when people seemed, literally, to evaporate, to become, in the words of the late David Wojnarowicz, “a dark smudge in the air that dissipates without notice … glass human[s] disappearing in rain.”
When J.G. Ballard died in April 2009, he left behind a body of work dominated by a few key ideas. First were the erotic possibilities of violence, as embodied by his 1973 novel Crash. Equally important was his sense of suburban life as not just soul-dead but also dangerous.
The legendary playwright and self-declared “reformed Liberal” explains his turn to Fox News-style politics, writing: “The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable, Sisyphean burden.”
“On the day I turned twenty-five,” Julia Wertz tells us at the beginning of “Drinking at the Movies,” her charming graphic memoir, “I came to consciousness at 3 a.m. in a twenty-four-hour Laundromat in Brooklyn, New York, eating Cracker Jacks in my pajamas. … To understand how I got there, we need to go back one year… “
Jim Crace opens his ninth novel, The Pesthouse, in a place not unlike what Greil Marcus once called “the old, weird America,” a nation of folk traditions and superstitions, of bindle stiffs and highwaymen. This is the land of Boxcar Bertha, the country Mark Twain captured in the river odyssey of Huck and Jim. It’s a mythic territory, dark and apocalyptic, one that seems forever lost to us beneath the slick culture we now occupy. For Crace, however, the old, weird America is not just where we’ve been but where we’re going. It’s our history and our destiny all in
