Naomi Fry
In September of last year, two months before the presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump appeared on NBC’s Tonight Show. In what felt like one of the grossest media moments of our recent era—and let’s face it, the competition is stiff—host Jimmy Fallon asked his guest whether it would be OK to do something “not presidential” with him. “Can I mess your hair up?” Fallon proposed, puppyish and wide-eyed. Trump, pantomiming good-natured reluctance, let the host reach over and muss his thin, gingery strands, setting that precarious hair soufflé askew and earning a big hand from the audience. “Donald Trump, everybody!” 
No matter how many years I’ve spent on the proverbial couch—about fifteen, at last count—I still find myself wanting to say to my therapist “I wish I were dead inside.” The formulation is at least half joking—note, for one, that hilarious cliffhanger between the last two words—but the feeling is nonetheless both lingering and sincere. A clearer way of expressing it would be: I wish I didn’t feel pain/I wish I didn’t show pain; I wish I didn’t care/I wish I didn’t show I cared. I wish, in other words, that I were more like Kim Gordon. As we hunch over computers in airless office cubicles, many of us wish we could take a break from our daily routine. But vacationing can be an anxious endeavor in its own right. The following books begin with pleasant holidays, but end up delivering something darker and more complex. Or as the perennially grand-touring Miss Lavish muses while strolling the alleys of Florence in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View: “How delightfully warm! But a wind down the side streets cut like a knife, didn’t it?” Forgetting Elena by Edmund White White’s beautifully written first novel, full of California is usually portrayed as a palm-treed Eden, wholesome and easeful, but as the Roman Polanski scandal has reminded us, this sunny vision has a lurid underside. Noir is one form this shadow world takes, but the books I’ve selected below aren’t noirish and share none of that genre’s sense of mystery. Rather, transgression here is casual, explainable, and inextricably linked to the everyday world. The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald Fitzgerald’s final, unfinished novel depicts ruthless and tormented producer Monroe Stahr (loosely based on 1920s–30s Hollywood wunderkind Irving Thalberg) and marks a rethinking of the Kunstlerroman. In this