Goethe, James, Evenings, Writing, Hitler, Elites, Serotonin, Piranesi, Breath, Elmet, Angel, Gilead

Some reviews of my recent reading

The next Western Canon salon is about Emma by Jane Austen on Thursday, September 12th. Tickets here.

Don’t forget to vote for the best British novelist. I’ll be updating you later this week on the first round results.

Brandon Taylor is reading Second Act, so maybe you should too!

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Goethe: His Faustian Life

I know shamefully little about Goethe and learned a good deal from this book. Highly readable, as you would expect from A.N. Wilson; it is full of good information. After attending a course about Goethe, Wilson was struck with the importance of science to his work, and this book treats both the science and literary sides of Goethe as equally important. I often slowed down and lingered. Recommended if, like me, you ought to know more about this major writer. I am still struggling to read Faust as the translations just don’t really work. The new Princeton edition is good though and I’m getting there. Out late September (December in the US). Here’s my interview about this book (and many others) with Wilson.

p.s. Wilson is one of my favourite living biographers and you must read his Prince Albert book if you haven’t. (It’s interesting from a Progress Studies perspective if royal history isn’t your bag.) I also greatly enjoyed his memoir Confessions, which is full of the sort of plangent, anecdotal self-analysis I like in English memoir writing. Like all of the best biographical writers, Wilson is so honest. It reminded me of Another Self by James Lees-Milne, among others.

James

Sort-of Huckleberry Finn but where the narrator is Jim the slave. Very clever, very entertaining, very well paced. Wonderful ending. James draws on Twain, obviously, but also on a wealth of slave literature, and has both a very lively argot and compelling plot points for dealing with how people “pass”, how they adjust their speech to their superiors, how people are controlled by language as well as force, how that can be turned around… Percival Everett got a lot more famous recently after American Fiction, the movie based on his novel Erasure. That novel is much less likely to appeal to a large audience, containing, as it does, a large section of impenetrable literary theory. James is every bit as smart, but in the mode of a classic story-driven novel. Were it not for the fact that I was travelling, I would have read it in one sitting. I can’t say more without giving things away, but you should really just experience it fresh. It ought to be shortlisted for the Booker, though prizes go to longer books, not better ones. (On that note, I told you that Rita Bullwinkle’s novel Headshot would be praised because of its content despite being mediocre and it is now on the Booker long list. A.K. Blakemore was honest that it is a dull book but I think she has deleted the tweet.)

Gilead

Mesmerising novel that takes the form of a letter from a dying minister to his young son. Subtle but compelling; meditative but dramatic. A major work of our time. At the end I wanted to turn back and start again. John Bullock pointed out the King Lear reference at the end to me. I didn’t, and don’t, have anything to say about the recent New York Times list of the best books of the century so far, other than that I like lists and that I am glad it prompted me to finally read this book. Why did I wait so long? As my wife said when she read it, I am glad Marilynne Robinson wrote Gilead.

Our Evenings

Alan Hollinghurst is a splendid writer but this is too much like a “standard” Hollinghurst. The Line of Beauty was excellent, The Stranger’s Child was my favourite, I dropped out of The Sparsholt Affair because it was uneven, and this one somehow lacks the energy of the earlier books. I didn’t finish it, but you never regret reading a few hundred pages of Hollinghurst. If you have’t read The Line of Beauty or The Stranger’s Child, you must. Out in October.

In Writing

I have probably read too many interviews with authors for this book to be very interesting to me, but it is full of interviews with interesting writers and if you want to know about Brandon Taylor, Wendy Cope, Geoff Dyer, Sophie Macintosh, and Emily St. John Mandel (among many others) it might be worth a look. Out in November. There’s a Substack too.

Hitler’s People

I am reading this slowly, partly because it is not, as such, directly relevant for any project I am working on, and I am currently over scheduled, but mostly because there are only so many pages about the Nazis I can take every morning. Richard Evans is as good as you expect. What’s interesting is that in this book he has taken a very biographical view of history.

Usually Evans adheres to the standard ideology of his profession which sees history as caused by systems and “vast impersonal forces.” So strongly held is this belief that it becomes dogmatic. How telling, then, that Evans has somewhat changed his mind in part because of new source material and in part because of the developments of modern politics.

Great Man Theory has become such a bogeyman that even the best professors argue against a straw man. Is it really arguable that the most talented people make a disproportionate difference to the course of history? If it becomes the great team or the great people theory of history is that so different? In their eagerness not to be seen as outre or pandering to popular ideas, the over correction against the folk idea of great man theory has led many historians to hugely under emphasise the importance of the most significant people.

Take the example of Nelson. It has long been felt he got all the glory and that the systems which made the Navy great and the sailors who were skillfull and worked so hard were overlooked. Sure. But most modern books seriously under emphasise the central fact of the Napoleonic era Navy: it never really won a major victory without Nelson.

There were important changes of systems and operations, but those came from the temperament of Nelson and a few others. And they relied on the force of his personality to actually work in action. No-one seriously believes that the difference between the Steve Jobs Apple and the Tim Cook Apple isn’t largely about CEO personality. The Midlothian campaign, which was how Gladstone argued his way out of retirement and into office, speech by speech, was entirely conducted through the force of the Grand Old Man’s personality.

Yes, in all cases there are large systematic factors at play. Obviously. But the important marginal contribution comes from an exceptional person or people. It is common for investors to say that the limiting factor on new projects is not money or ideas but talent.

That it took the politics of Trump and others to make this clear to one of the most significant historian of our times should tell you something about his seriously you take their ideological claims about how history works. No-one claims great man theory is the only explanation, but it has to be recognised as having some significant explanatory power.

I’m glad to see biography is finally being taken seriously like this. David Cannadine once said that when writing biography you are not practising real history. That is just as silly as thinking all history is only biography. Hopefully this book is a nudge in the right direction. Just released.

Cultural Christians in the Early Church

Not my area of expertise, but I found this interesting because of the possible resurgence of Christianity and cultural Christianity today. This is about people who profess faith but behave according to normal cultural standards. In the early church that meant women pledged to be virgins being ticked off by the bishop for bathing nude in front of men. Today it might mean cohabiting before marriage. The book is based on good common sense: “recognizing that cultural sins were always a part of the story of the church and its people is a reminder that we should never idealize the people of the past.” For another sort of cultural Christianity, one in which we do not profess faith but feel affinity to the church and religion, here’s an excellent article by Madeline Davis.

Born to Rule

I wrote about one very good chapter of this book recently. Overall, I found it a bit too political.

The idea to have Oxford and Cambridge select students from a lottery of the top 5% of A-level candidates in the country is a good one, but why not recommend the expansion of those universities? And are we so sure they make that much difference? Isn’t the fact that only 12% of state school students in the North East with three ‘A’ grades at A-level apply to Oxbridge (compared to 43% in London) indicative of other cultural issues that might need some attention? The idea that private schools taking up so many places at Oxford needs correcting is surely true, but again, where is the call to raise standards in state schools rather than to bar admission at the university level? And why no discussion of the fact that while the lottery idea is appealing it is an experiment and may well have secondary consequences?

You may well think the answers to these questions wouldn’t change the outcome but I would think they deserve due consideration—certainly more than an analysis of Who’s Who which is the basis of Born To Rule’s conclusions.

In the section comparing elite opinions about tax and spend policy to the general public, I would liked to have seen some comparison with what economists think! If healthcare spending became the government’s highest priority (an opinion held by twice as many non-elites as by elites, unsurprisingly) we would not necessarily see the outcomes those people expect. Maybe the elites different opinions on tax and spend reflect, to at least some extent, how well informed they are? Again, the point it not whether that is a true statement, but whether it ought to be part of the considerations of the book.

Some of the assumptions baked into the book are so obviously Guardian editorial stuff I felt it would have been stronger to just present the data. Those are the strongest and most interesting sections, such as the data on different views of feminism and racism between different elite demographics.

Born to Rule, like so many sociology books, is written with the certainty of an economist without having the clear-cut data to accompany the claims. Why no discussion of assortative mating? What about behavioural genetics? Or changing family sizes? What evidence actually is there that taxes will work to solve the problem? Perhaps it is inevitable in a book of this nature, but all this bickering about social mobility and the elite just seems so… narrow. There are other important aspects to social mobility! I would at least like to see these topics discounted if that is the conclusion.

Why is it that even Denmark has social mobility problems? “Despite generous Danish social policies, family influence on important child outcomes in Denmark is about as strong as it is in the United States.”

And why is it that people who take social mobility this seriously never seem very interested in economic growth? Surely creating more opportunities for mobility is the most significant difference we can make… My first recommendation would be to un-do the recent decade of economic stagnation the UK seems intent of perpetuating for another decade. Membership of Boodles seems like a petty distraction in comparison. Or how about we offer to build three million new homes in London so more people can afford to move here and get started on careers in the richest and most productive sectors of the economy?

Ultimately, therefore, while the data in the book is very interesting, I just didn’t think it was a serious enough treatment of the topic and would have been better off without the recommendations at the end. The fact is, we love to sniff at the nature of our elites in the UK. Often with good reason. But if you want to change the way society works, you need to offer more than this book is ideologically capable of.

Here’s an idea that they didn’t give much time to. If social outcomes were socially caused, you would expect fathers to have more influence in patriarchies and mothers in matriarchies. But, looking at some 426,000 people from 1754-2023 this study found that the effects were the same across all social outcomes other than wealth. The promise of this book—that the elites self-reproduce using privilege and that we can “solve” this using a some tax and regulatory policies—just doesn’t seem as obvious to me as it does to the authors. The answers will be more complicated.

Still, I’m sure it’s a crowd pleaser for FT readers!

Serotonin

Remarkably dull. Could this really be the same author as Submission? It lacks all subtlety which leaves it as merely multi-page descriptions of blow jobs. I quit fairly early. Yes, yes, modern life under capitalism (boo) is anhedonisitc and it’s all like taking a little serotonin pill. My god how predictable. Anyway, there’s a new Houellebecq coming soon…

Piranesi

Surely one of the best books of the century so far? Plato. Robinson Cruso. Kafka. Borges. Narnia. Nabokov. Detective fiction. Romantic poetry. Mysticism. All synthesised into a remarkable and unique novel. Perhaps the best novel I know about mental health, unexplained illnesses, madness, and associated topics. Fascinating how Clarke’s predicted her own illness in the character of Lady Poole in Jonathan Strange and then transmuted the experience into this book. Clarke also has a new book coming in a few weeks…

A Feather on the Breath of God

One of those books that achieves, in fewer than two hundred pages, the vivid depths others wouldn’t manage in twice the space. The father, particularly, will stay with me. Sigrid Nunez also has a new book on the way…

Elmet

I read the first half of this 2017 Booker shortlisted novel in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep because temperatures were high recently and thought it was excellent, but as the plot turned towards the confrontation with the landlord I got bored and dropped out.

Miss Garnet’s Angel

I read this because Penelope Fitzgerald admired it. Splendid stuff. All about a narrow minded old woman who goes to Venice and is slowly released from her political ideology by her encounter with young people and religion. That makes it sound dull but if you enjoy late twentieth century women’s realistic fiction (as I do) then this is a must.