Omar Robert Hamilton’s debut novel The City Always Wins offers a street-level view of one of the most resonant events of our time — the Egypt’s 2011 Tahrir Square uprising — and is one of Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers selections for Summer 2017.  We asked the author about what he reads to make sense of a world in which the headlines can feel overwhelming.

“The City Always Wins is about the Egyptian revolution and the subsequent counterrevolution. But it is also about the political moment we are all in now, the violence of late capitalism and people’s attempts to imagine, and build, a different world.

In the age of information we can sometimes feel overwhelmed with the mass marketing of cheap news and quack punditry — but these are five books that cut through the noise and illuminate.”– Omar Robert Hamilton

 

Look
By Solmaz Sharif

America, ignore the window and look at your lap:
even your dinner napkins are on FIRE.

“Sharif’s debut collection uses the U.S. Department of Defense’s Dictionary to create a world in which warfare permeates every private moment, where violence shapes language and therefore all of experience. Cutting from Alabama to Shiraz and back again, Look’s poems are the modern American experience, the one endured by both the immigrant and the countries they left behind.”

 

Age of Anger
By Pankaj Mishra

“There are few better theorists of the present than Pankaj Mishra, and Age of Anger shatters the tired narratives that have dominated the endless “War on Terror.” Mishra asks why the technological advances of the past century have not led to a fairer or happier planet and why, rather, we find ourselves living in a state of permanent panic, how we have become interconnected yet isolated, overconnected yet increasingly xenophobic. Mishra’s prose is as thrilling as his analysis as he charts the rise of Trump, ISIS, and other fragmentary forces pulling at the fabric of the present.”

 

China Miéville’s introduction to Thomas More’s Utopia

“Miéville’s writing can be breathtaking in its ability to combine pyrotechnic prose with explosive politics. Now, in Verso’s reissue of More’s Utopia, Miéville has written a brilliant new introduction that reaches through the history of the politics of the possible and brings us to today, to the everyday utopianism enjoyed by unaccountable, polluting corporations around the world: ‘We live in utopia; it just isn’t ours. So we live in apocalypse too.’”

 

Carbon Democracy
By Timothy Mitchell

“We can’t understand our world without a comprehension of the global economic forces that are actively shaping it — and there is no more consequential force than oil, chief among the toxic industries enjoying their utopian era. Mitchell rewrites the history of energy and democracy to give us powerful new tools of comprehension with which to assess our own place — and possibilities — within the global web of carbon-based politics.”

 

No Is Not Enough
By Naomi Klein

“At the forefront of the corporate carbon-utopians is the Trump administration. Bringing us right up to the present moment is Naomi Klein’s urgent new work, which details the makeup of the ideologues now in the White House and the tactics they will use to entrench their extremist vision of market fundamentalism. Because utopia is never enough. But Klein is a writer of possibility and presents the urgent, coordinated, ecological, intersectional action needed to resist the perpetuation of the corporate utopia of 2017.”

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All of us can fall into some very odd Google holes when we can’t sleep. But for author Christopher Bollen, his insomnia-fueled searches actually became the foundation for his most recent thriller, The Destroyers. “Be it murder or parasailing accidents, I will read about how people found their end on resort islands, forever,” he admits. “It’s fascinating what kind of trouble people wander into while they’re supposed to be having the time of their lives.”

The Destroyers, Bollen’s third novel, follows Ian, a trust fund kid, who finds himself written out of his father’s will and in need of money and, arguably, a good time. Ian’s desperation leads him to Patmos, a Greek island where his elusive but charming childhood best friend, Charlie, now lives. When Charlie offers Ian a lucrative job working for his luxury yacht company, it seems like Ian is set to spend an idyllic summer in paradise; but there are sinister forces at work on the island, and Charlie’s yacht company is not what it seems. Soon after Ian’s arrival, Charlie goes missing, and Ian is forced to answer not just to Charlie’s loved ones but to his nefarious business partners, including a Mercedes-driving priest, who all want to know when they are going to get paid. The book also delves into the more pressing and timely matter of the global refugee crisis, as Syrians begin to literally wash up on the shores of the tiny island, looking for shelter or safe passage to other parts of Europe. The Destroyers is a tense page-turner, but one with a deeply humanitarian pulse that asks the reader to face the destructive machinations of capitalism head-on.

I spoke with Christopher in an outdoor cafe in SoHo on one of those warm and, dare I say it, Patmos-esque summer days, about the challenges and joys of genre writing, navigating desire in male friendships, and of course, the apocalypse.

The Barnes & Noble Review: What about the mystery/thriller genre is interesting to you? Do you feel like that genre accurately describes the worlds you are writing in?

Christopher Bollen: The way that I went from reading as a child to reading as an adult was purely through Agatha Christie. In fifth grade, I remember discovering her books and becoming completely obsessed to the point where my teacher actually told me to stop reading in class. At one point, we had to make a quilt of one of our heroes, and I chose Agatha Christie. The way that a child might love horses or dogs was how I loved Miss Marple.

But I never intended to write mysteries as an adult. I was initially only thinking about the literary, agonizing sagas one writes in their early twenties. In the first novel I wrote, Lightning People, there is a murder, but it’s not a mystery. Orient, my second novel, was my first murder mystery proper. The hardest part of writing a murder mystery was giving myself permission to write a murder mystery. I was still under the impression that murder mysteries were too genre-y. But then I thought, “That’s absurd, go where the water is warm.” The Destroyers is not so much focused on a murder, though there are murders, but it is a thriller. I never want to write a whodunit it again. You feel so much pressure to keep so many different story lines going at the same time and not reveal your cards.

BNR: What was so impressive to me about The Destroyers was how you managed to render literally dozens of full and complicated characters.

CB: I’m glad you said that, because I feel like I write from place and character. Characters are so important to me, and I think as soon as you start saying “genre” people imagine these cardboard cutouts who come in purely in service of the plot. I never want to do that. But I am naturally drawn to that genre and to the feeling of suspense or dread, and to those sensations in writing, to the point where I worry that it will be hard for me to withdraw from mystery/thrillers.

BNR: When you were writing did you feel that fear in your body? Or was it a different kind of fear?

CB: [Laughs] Right, well there’s always that absolute horror and dread that you’re failing miserably with your writing, but in The Destroyers, there were scenes that were frightening to write. I wouldn’t say I felt the fear of those scenes, but I felt that tingling sense that I was creating something weird, and that’s always a good place to be in. As soon as you’re bored of your own sections, you know the reader is going to be much more bored than you. I really write best from a feeling of momentum, and I think thrillers are like a built-in engine.

BNR: What was your interest in locating The Destroyers in Greece?

CB: I’d written two books about New York and about people who were really unsatisfied and moping. I wanted to write a book about people in the sun. People who weren’t wearing a lot of clothes and were swimming all day. I had just been in Patmos for the first time because I was really interested in the Book of Revelations as a kid. Patmos was a place that seemed infinitely fascinating, because it had the Cave of the Apocalypse, and these rich Europeans, and hippy backpackers, but it wasn’t like Mykonos, which is just a party island. So for me, it pressed all the right buttons.

But I had a really hard time with the book at first because I had never written in first person. I’m used to brain hopping because I get really bored with one character. And at first, I hated Ian [the narrator] and wanted to kill him. He’s really judgmental, especially in the way he sizes people up. But the reason I wanted to do first person is it allows you to really take on the perspective of an outsider coming to this island for the first time and knowing as little as the audience knows. When you’re on vacation, especially in a foreign country, you’re pampered but you’re so vulnerable. You don’t know where anything is, you might not even know how to call the police. I needed to stick with that perspective in order for the book to work.

BNR: Once you decided it was going to be based in Patmos, what was the research process like?

CB: I had never written about rich people before this book and I don’t come from wealth, but, like anyone in New York, I have friends who are from a lot of money and they fascinated me, the way in which an ecosystem develops around their wealth, and I have a sense that I can rely on them if something goes awry but also never mention that they’re wealthy. So Greece seemed like a great place to explore that fascination, because it has all of these people running around with a lot of money.

If you go before August, people are much more open to talking to outsiders, because by August they are just super bored with the glut of tourists. So at some point early in the summer during one of my trips there, I met this billionaire Italian who said he was “in finance” — whatever that meant — and I needed to know for the book if they checked your passport if you came by yacht from Greece to Turkey and vice versa. So I brought it up with this Italian man and he was just like, “Let’s take my boat to Bodrum and we’ll see.” So we sailed to Bodrum [in Turkey] the next day on his mega-yacht and sure enough, if you sail somewhere in a luxury boat, they don’t check at all.

BNR: How did you decide to include the refugee crisis in the book?

CB: The refugee crisis happened the last time I went to Patmos, at the same time Greece was in peril of bankruptcy and was about to leave the Eurozone, and cash machines had stopped working. When all of that happened, I stopped writing for a short time. I had such a hard time deciding how much of current politics I wanted to put in the book. I think there’s this idea with Trump where people think that books have to change and we have to write to this new time, and of course the danger of that is that books will be dated very quickly.

BNR: Although, including the refugee crisis feels really appropriate because we’ve reached a crisis point in capitalism and globalized labor and climate change such that a massive shift of populations will be happening for decades, if not longer.

CB: It’s like the death-of-the-planet time, or the saving-of-the-planet time. It’s funny, I started writing the book in 2014 during the Obama administration, and I remember thinking “Oof, writing a book about rich people with inherited wealth feels so out of touch with the moment.” But it just wandered backward into being really relevant. And now the word apocalypse comes out of people’s mouths on a daily basis.

BNR: You mentioned that you were obsessed with the Book of Revelations as a kid. What was your relationship to the Bible, given that it’s threaded through much of The Destroyers?

CB: I am not a practicing Catholic anymore and I try not to think about God, but I must seem like a religious fanatic, because religious themes keep creeping into all that I write, so maybe subconsciously, I am having a conflict with faith. Being Catholic had a huge influence on me in terms of how I think about morality — which I think came from having been forced to sit in two Masses a week from the age of seven to eighteen.

The Book of Revelations is actually much more popular in Protestantism than it is in Catholicism. I don’t think Catholics celebrate the end in the same way. We believe in heaven, but I don’t think there’s as much joy in the idea that people will be suffering while we’re lifted up. Catholics are ultimately a little bit sketchy and they know it. Because we — and here I go saying “we” like I’m still in the Church — have confession, so that we can wipe the slate clean. But that book always fascinated me.

I went to an all-boys Jesuit high school, and I took a class on the Book of Revelations where we read every chapter and then illustrated it. I still have the drawings somewhere of like, a woman on a seven-headed bull drinking wine, topless, and I hope that someone doesn’t find them because they will think I’m insane. But that book is so interesting because it became the template for how we conceive of destruction. The Four Horsemen, and 666, and the Beast with Seven Heads, and the Whore of Babylon, all of these characters are still so a part of our belief system about what the end of the world is like. And I like bringing the charge and fear of Armageddon to the book, because we all share in that fear.

BNR: I know that Charlie and Ian are straight, but did you feel like there was some sexual tension between them?

CB: Oh, totally. At first I wanted to make Ian gay, but then I was worried it would be too much like The Talented Mr. Ripley, even though I think Tom Ripley is a sociopath, not a gay man. I think there is something sexual and intimate between all men in friendships. There is a lot of noticing the body. I wouldn’t say there’s a heavy sexual dimension to all of my relationships with men, but there is moments of touching and noticing and momentary feelings of arousal. I wonder why it’s not mentioned more on the page. And again, I really was just interested in making things more bodily in this book. I often wonder if a reason why there’s a lot of depressed people in novels is because the writer is just sitting in a room alone for hours on end.

I remember in Lightning People, my first novel, I had a male main character who is straight and had a lot of problems, and I remember I wanted to make him also have a gay experience. The editor and everyone else who read it felt like it was too much turbulence to have happen to him. At the time I agreed, but now I look back and think it was a missed opportunity. I think you can have all these little lives in a life, and an experience like that doesn’t have to become a big plot point or a thesis statement on sexuality.

I’m working on a new novel set in Venice, and I want to make the main characters gay and also thieves. There’s a history of turning a gay character into a criminal and then of redeeming them and bringing them back into mainstream society. But nowadays it seems like you have to write gay characters as if they are almost these shiny volunteers of humanity. And I want to try to make a gay character who is dark without being depressing and without returning to criminalizing gay people.

BNR: I think you can write a queer person as a character without making their sexuality or the morality of their sexuality the main focus. But I also think it’s still very relevant to consider all the ways in which being a thief as a queer person would show up for a queer person. I always feel like I’m stealing something.

CB: [Laughs] Yes, that there’s been a crime and I’m about to be thrown in jail. Which we very well could be, one day.

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Angelica Baker’s Our Little Racket is a massively ambitious debut novel about the fallout from massive ambition coupled with unbridled greed. Her tale of the human wages of capitalism run amok explores how the malfeasance and meltdown of an investment bank that was one of the pillars of the financial industry — think Lehman Brothers in 2008 — affects its longtime CEO and his family. To chart the damage, Baker spreads her narrative’s wealth between five women in Greenwich, Connecticut: the CEO’s coolly elegant wife and feisty teenage daughter, their two purported best friends, and the family’s Ivy League–educated nanny.

Our Little Racket takes its title from Anne Carson’s “Little Racket”: “I can hear from their little racket, the birds are burning up and down like holy fools . . . don’t keep saying you don’t hear it too.” But its concerns — with old money versus new, the powerlessness and helplessness of women whose positions rise and fall with their husbands’ net worth, and the moral implications of extreme wealth — come from Edith Wharton.

In lieu of New York society, Baker takes aim at Greenwich’s elite (though not the Russian billionaires who have taken up residence more recently). Among the targets most squarely in her sights are the over-groomed, over-educated, under-occupied women who have outsourced the care of their children and obscenely opulent gated estates to hired help. She has a bead on the telling details, from iced tea garnished with sprigs of basil to a private, in-home shopping party that spares these trophy wives the awkwardness of having to seek their latest luxury fix of jewel-toned stilettos and bead-encrusted gowns in public so soon after the financial collapses that devastated so many investors. This scathing description, from the nanny’s point of view, of the scene along Greenwich Avenue captures Baker’s tone:

It was a mommy playground, and by midafternoon all the frustrated energies of these underutilized women had them trolling this street in droves. They prowled the boutiques and the juice bars, quaking with everything they had but could not use. The Ivy League educations they’d been allowed to pursue, matriculating when they did, in the wake of feminism’s second wave. The endless pluckings and bleachings and injectings that left them in a perpetual state of both tranquility (no wrinkles) and surprise (unnatural eyebrow arches) but also seemed to extract their sexuality from them as if by syringe. She’d never seen so many beautiful women who seemed to live life at such a distant remove from their own sexiness.

The question is, how much time do you want to spend in this company? The bulk of the novel — and it is bulky — focuses on the “shell-shocked year” after Bob “Silverback” D’Amico’s investment bank, Weiss & Partners, sinks into bankruptcy amid swirling suggestions of possible criminal wrongdoing, including shady accounting tricks. While Bob, largely a cipher, stays holed up in their New York apartment, his classy wife, old-moneyed Isabel Berkeley, retreats to her Greenwich bedroom in shock. Isabel gets through the first weeks on Xanax supplied by her friend Mina — the classic outsider straining for admission — before she uncoils into action.

Meanwhile Lily, the D’Amicos’ overqualified nanny, keeps the household running, though we never fully understand why she would embed herself with these people and endure their condescension for nearly ten years, with no plan to write a Nanny Diaries sort of exposé, no matter how much they’re paying her. Her function in Our Little Racket is the critical observer, and above all she’s outraged that neither parent thinks to comfort their eight-year-old twin “robber barons” in training or their fifteen-year-old daughter, Madison, a sophomore at Greenwich Prep, in the midst of this upheaval.

Poor Madison, acting on scant information from her AWOL parents and unable to conceive of her hard-driving, hard-drinking father knowingly committing any wrongdoing, must navigate the brutal gossip and cold shoulders at school, but she’s no pushover: “Madison was her father’s coarse energy poured over ice,” Lily notes. “She was her mother’s goddess features, infused with her father’s ceaseless certainty that he was right.”

As if things weren’t bad enough, Madison’s best friend’s father, a Yale economics professor, considers it his moral imperative to vent his outrage at her father and his ilk in his Paul Krugman–esque columns for The New York Times, despite his daughter’s pleas for tact. The first of his many diatribes on the subject includes these lines: “Weiss is now the Roach Motel — its investors checked in, but they can’t check out . . . And what of D’Amico himself, the King of the Cockroaches? Did he scramble his way out of that car before it went over that cliff? Or will he have to answer, in court, for his crimes?”

Madison, at once unbelievably savvy and credibly vulnerable, takes her father’s “implosion” the hardest, and her story dominates the book. It is the most fully realized — in fact, her perspective alone could easily have carried this novel — but also, in the early chapters, the most tiresome. Pages upon painful pages unfold in school hallways, locker rooms, playing fields, and at the unchaperoned parties where Madison’s unbearably catty, snooty peers trade slights, barbs, precious intel, illicit cocktails, drugs, and sexual favors to elevate their status, making us feel at times as if we’ve wandered into a “Fast Times at Greenwich Prep” sort of story.

But the novel — like many businesses — picks up in its fourth quarter, when the whole situation comes to a head at a local gala and Baker finally generates a modicum of sympathy for these spoiled characters. She captures their very real misery while stressing the repercussions of a heedless “willingness to gamble away” the most important things in life — including family and empathy.

Years later, Madison reflects sagely, “No one, it turned out, ever told the truth about this kind of pain. It wasn’t a crucible; it didn’t always make you new.” Our Little Racket, while it takes too long to get there, ends in just the right place and on just the right note. The bottom line: Angelica Baker is a writer to watch out for.

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As many gawky teens discovered in their misspent youths, there was comedy and then there was Monty Python. Exploding penguins, a crime-fighting bishop, and Karl Marx struggling to answer questions about soccer on a TV quiz show; it was all surreal grist for their mill. Fully embodying the high culture/low humor synthesis that produced the better countercultural artifacts of the 1970s, their TV series, films, concerts, and books embedded arch literary references inside a dense framework of Dada performance art-pieces, cultural satire, and broadly silly skits in a classically comedic idiom.

They were a flagrantly well-read bunch, with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, who could ace a quiz on the Western Canon blindfolded, excepting one rogue American member (the not quite-as-well-read Terry Gilliam, who would nevertheless spend many years of his post-Python life trying to realize an accident-plagued film adaptation of Don Quixote). They remain a bookish lot today, witness the richly diverse reading list that Eric Idle keeps on his website.

The Pythons would later steadfastly claim that they weren’t interested in satire or making grand statements; as might be borne out by things like the “Spam” sketch, whose humor rotated mostly around singing Vikings and repeating “spam” as many times as possible. That being said, they were fervently opposed to pandering. If you didn’t have at least a glancing awareness of, say, the evils of the Spanish Inquisition or the verbosity of Marcel Proust, many of the gags would fly right over your head. Still, if one was an inquisitive and bookish youth, as many fans were, even if you didn’t quite get the reference, the Pythons’ manic goofiness and high-velocity smarts intrigued you to find out more.

Herewith, a few things one might discover about literature and the English language from the collected works of Python, Monty:

 

1 — The Correct French Pronunciation of Marcel Proust’s Masterpiece

In the “Fish License” sketch from Season 2 of Flying Circus, a pestering and pinched little oddball (John Cleese) demands that a shopkeeper issue him a license for his pet halibut. Finding some opposition to this request (“You don’t need one,” the shopkeeper pleads), the customer despairs about being called a “looney” just for having a pet fish, claiming as backup that Proust had a pet haddock. This results in the shopkeeper calling him a looney. Providing a handy pronunciation lesson for every future English major, the customer then proclaims the shopkeeper to be in fact slandering the great Proust: “If you’re calling the author of A la recherche du temps perdu a looney, I shall have to ask you to step outside!”

 

2 — The True Misery of a Playwright’s Life

A snarky little gem from the second episode of Flying Circus, “Working-Class Playwright” starts off as classic kitchen-sink melodrama of the kind littering postwar British culture. But it upends the expected generational labor-versus-culture struggle by having the crusty father (Graham Chapman) sneering at his soft-spoken son (Eric Idle) for “poncing off” to be a coal-miner and not understanding just what soul-sucking labor is involved with being a playwright: “What do you know about getting up at five o’clock in the morning to fly to Paris and then back at the Old Vic for drinks at twelve, sweating the day through press interviews? … That’s a full working day, lad!” The son belts back, “One day you’ll realize there’s more to life than culture!” The skit ends without rapprochment, the father wincing with writer’s cramp but realizing “there’s a play here.” It shows that not only is writing hard work, but that you can make something out of nothing, as the Pythons usually did.

 

3 — Arthurian Legends Understand Nothing About Governance

One reads T.H. White and Malory for their depiction of a glorious world of heroism, battles, love, and tragedy. Just as clearly, one should not read the Arthurian mythos for lessons on running stable governments. A case in point from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: a testy King Arthur (Chapman) is lectured by an autodidact Marxist peasant (Michael Palin) who upsets the world’s entire assumed feudal power structure—rarely questioned by its readers. First, he questions the very idea of a monarchy (“we’re living in a dictatorship! A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working class is exploited…”). Then, he challenges the “divine providence” that put Arthur on the throne, casting suspicion on that whole Lady of the Lake scenario: “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.” Noam Chomsky and Frantz Fanon couldn’t have put it better.

 

4 — Chekov is Best Performed by the Literate

With their handerchief-covered heads, round spectacles, Hitler mustaches, demolition derby physical comedy, and monosyllabic lockjaw dialogue (“my brain hurts!”), the Gumbys were one of Python’s more sublimely silly creations; no Python concert was complete without a few Gumby cosplay fans. But when they tried their hand at adaptations of classic theater, as with the Gumby take on Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard in the “Gumby Theatre” sketch on Another Monty Python Record, the results were about as literary as the Stooges crashing a poetry reading. While the genteel radio host gamely narrates the action (“meanwhile, in St Petersburg …”), the Gumbys smash through walls and windows, and howl and bellow at each other in a way that’s gaspingly funny to Python fans and merely annoying to most everybody else. Like “Fish License” with Proust, this sketch made clear to young listeners who didn’t have the Pythons’ schooling that if they didn’t know who Chekov was, they’d better figure it out—to better understand the gag, if nothing else.

 

5 — Elizabethan England was Just Flooded with Pornography

Episode 36 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus tells the thrilling story of Superintendent Gaskell (Palin) of the Vice Squad, tasked with stopping foreign pornography from polluting the minds of Elizabethan England. But smut knew no boundaries, infiltrating even the works of the Bard himself. Gaskell returns home from a busy day of vice raiding to find his wife reading one of Shakespeare’s “latest works: Gay Boys in Bondage.” “What is it, comedy, tragedy?” Gaskell asks innocently. “It’s, er, a story of a man’s great love for … his fellow man,” she replies tentatively. “How fortunate we are indeed to have such a poet on these shores!” He exclaims. Now, while Shakespeare most likely did not write Gay Boys in Bondage (that we know of…), his contemporary Thomas Nash was penning clandestine erotic poetry for the noble “Lord Strange” at around the same time the Bard was composing The Taming of the Shrew. So the Python boys were partially right: there was smutty writing in Elizabethan England, only it was home-grown.

 

6 — Never Trust Your Foreign Language Handbook

Short and pungent, like the best, most surreal Flying Circus flash-bombs, “Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook” starts with a screen crawl in gothic script (“In 1970, the British Empire lay in ruins”) before opening on a tobacconist’s in which a tall Hungarian (John Cleese) is attempting to use the strangled English provided in his phrasebook (“My hovercraft is full of eels,” “you have beautiful thighs”). A wise imprecation to not believe everything you read.

 

 

 

7 — Thomas Hardy’s Favorite Articles

Anarchists and dynamiters of conventional humor they might have been, but even the Python boys had a few standbys they frequently fell back on. One of their favorite tricks was a simple bit of contrast: take a cherished piece of high culture, drop it into a bucket of lowbrow muck, and play with the resulting fizz. That’s how Karl Marx got stuck answering questions about sports and pop music on a game show and German and Greek philosophers battled in a soccer match officiated by Confucius. The “Novel Writing” skit from the 1973 Python album Matching Tie & Handkerchief fits right into that subgenre.

Eric Idle and Michael Palin play announcers calling what sounds like a cricket match but turns out to be a radio broadcast of Thomas Hardy writing The Return of the Native in front of a “very good crowd … on this very pleasant July morning.” The crowd murmurs along as Hardy starts, stops, and starts again, to the announcers’ growing agitation. (Graham Chapman, popping in for some color, grumbles that “It looks like Tess of the D’Urbervilles all over.”) While giving the anxiety to any writer imagining writing under such conditions (“it looks like he’s going for the sentence!”), the skit does at least imagine a world where canonic authors and their decision to, say, start a novel with a definite article, are treated with at least the same amount of breathless hyperbole as a cricketer.

 

8 — All the Greatest Philosophers Were Boozers

Sure, everybody knows most of the words to “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” the cheery number from the crucifixion scene at the end of the Pythons’ organized religion satire Life of Brian. That one is so popular, in fact, that when the HMS Sheffield was critically damaged during the Falklands War, British sailors sang it on deck while waiting for rescue. However, the real Pythonians make it a point of pride to known the even catchier “Philosopher’s Song” from the beloved “Bruces” concert sketch, by heart. It’s educational, after all, teaching that not only could “David Hume outconsume Freidrich Hagel” but that “Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could drink you under the table” and “John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, on half a pint of shandy got particularly ill.”

 

9 — There is No Ninth Thing

 

10 — The Difference Between an Anagram and a Spoonerism

The most memorable skit in Episode 30 of Flying Circus is a classic roundelay of Pythonian word-play. After the titular character (Idle) in “The Man Who Speaks in Anagrams” answers a few standard-issue questions on a TV talk show like “what’s your name?” (“Hamrag, Hamrag Yatlerot”), he starts talking about the anagram versions of Shakespeare plays that he’s working on (“The Mating of the Wersh,” “Thamle”) only to have it pointed out that one of his lines isn’t actually an anagram but a spoonerism. If you had to go and look that up right now, you wouldn’t be the first or the last. See? You learned something.

 

 

Chris Barsanti is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. His work has appeared in Film Journal International, The Virginia Quarterly Review, PopMatters, The Millions, Playboy, and The Chicago Tribune. He co-wrote, with the estimable Brian Cogan and Jeff Massey, the Monty Python FAQ, and has been known to say “Ni!” when perturbed. Find him at chrisbarsanti.net.

 

 

 

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Women are often urged to run from aging: you could stock a bookstore entirely with volumes promising that a particular diet, exercise routine, skin care regimen, dermatological procedure, or attitude will help readers outpace the passage of time. In the piercingly intelligent and bracingly honest memoir The Middlepause: On Life After Youth, Marina Benjamin, on the brink of fifty, resolves not to run but to take stock and wrestle with the meaning of aging instead.

”I am all hard angles, sagging pouches, and knobby joints,” the author observes at the outset. “I am past ripe, like those blowsy summer blossoms on the turn, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t aggrieved by these changes.” Her mournfulness is compounded by the emergency hysterectomy that catapults her into menopause, a process that typically spans years; as a result, Benjamin feels “ambushed” by middle age, beset with dread as her milestone birthday approaches.

Hoping to find wisdom in books, however, she discovers that apart from the grimly cheerful self-help genre, not much has been written about what is lost and gained as women grow older. The Middlepause feels wholly original, with Benjamin seeking guidance from science, psychology, and literature and from her own experience caring for elderly parents and parenting an adolescent daughter. Most notably, in chapters titled after parts of the body — “Skin,” “Muscle,” “Heart,” “Guts” — she insists on mapping the physical effects of aging with forensic attentiveness.

For instance, Benjamin — author of two previous memoirs, Rocket Dreams and Last Days in Babylon — writes of the different ways, in middle age, that she steps in front of a mirror. Sometimes she examines herself for “signs of decay . . . scanning for general puffiness, haggard-looking eyes, drooping lids, fine lines, deep furrows, burst capillaries, and whiskery hairs.” Other times she approaches the mirror as “a supplicant, determined to intercede against the weight of the evidence.” She continues, “I adjust the light, force a smile, and tell myself that all is not lost, that with some good moisturizer and foundation I can be fixed up to look almost as good as before.” Finally, she is an accountant, carefully tracking losses and gains: “a graying temple for a softer curve of the cheek, a new wrinkle for a better haircut.” She is aware, however, that “the ledgers cannot be balanced forever: in a year or two they’re going to register a net loss.”

This is not as bleak as it might sound. After a lifetime of pressure to make herself attractive to others, Benjamin, once she comes to terms with an unpleasant sense of having been demoted, feels an unexpected liberation. Walking around her London neighborhood, she experiences “a dawning sense of relief at having been recategorized among the nonvisible.” I was reminded here of a wonderful essay by novelist Sarah Yaw, “Midlife Woman Loves Being Invisible to Men,” in which Yaw describes her “huge relief” that strangers passing her on the street no longer exhort her to smile. Benjamin also begins to discern invisibility’s flip side. “In consequence of being seen differently, you begin to see differently in turn,” she notes, with the “unanticipated freedom of being able to look — and not just to look, but to stare and ogle and glare.” For a writer with Benjamin’s remarkable powers of observation, this is surely a gift.

Reading the French author Colette, known for her sensuality, Benjamin is inspired to consider additional benefits of aging. The autobiographical novel Break of Day, written when Colette was in her fifties, finds the protagonist, also named Colette, swearing off love and living alone in a cottage, happily tending to her garden and her pets. “Colette seems to be suggesting that renunciation is not to be equated with self-denial,” Benjamin writes, “but with an unburdening or unfettering that allows the spirit to soar.”

By the end of The Middlepause, Benjamin’s spirit is also soaring. She’s on the other side of fifty. She struggles with chronic sciatic pain, and she’s suffered the losses of her father and of a dear friend who dies young. But like Colette, she has renounced things that she once considered important — youthful ambition, sexual conquest, other people’s opinions of her. “Gradually, I am shedding ballast and gaining buoyancy,” she writes. She adds, “I suspect, looking ahead, that sixty will not represent the enormous hurdle that fifty has thrown in my path, that I have broken the back of my fear of moving forward.” If we’re lucky, Benjamin will write another memoir to tell us all about it.

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