You can’t write a novel the night before dying. Not even one of the very short novels that I write. I could make them shorter, but it still wouldn’t work. The novel requires an accumulation of time, a succession of different days: without that, it isn’t a novel. What has been written one day must be affirmed the next, not by going back to correct it (which is futile) but by pressing on, supplying the sense that was lacking by advancing resolutely. This seems magical, but in fact it’s how everything works; living, for a start. In this respect, which is fundamental, the novel defeats the law of diminishing returns, reformulating it and turning it to advantage.
Perhaps people still plot road trips in the way my friends and I did in the 1980s, but I doubt it. We used to game everything out beforehand, laying in supplies in the manner of the ancient explorers. Music, food, places to stop: Everything had to be pre-assembled via mixtape, ballpoint pen and map. Entire books were dedicated to the process, a genre made obsolete by technology. It’s a tradition that goes back to the earliest American travel journals, like “The Journals of Lewis and Clark” or Francis Parkman’s “The Oregon Trail,” reports from trappers and surveyors determined to show people what it’s like out there.
Recently, while preparing for a trip down Interstate 95, the most dreaded American road, I picked up “Blue Highways,” the autobiographical tale of a trip taken by William Least Heat-Moon in 1978. The author, having lost his job and wife, packed a van he calls Ghost Dancing and set off from Columbia, Mo., to circumnavigate the nation, “a long (equivalent to half of the circumference of the earth), circular trip over the back roads of the United States.” He called the book “Blue Highways” because that was the color, on the old maps, of the roads he followed, the secondaries made obsolete by the construction of the interstate.
“A culture of lying, the outrageous failures of our political system, Westminster being so corrupt, so chaotic ... ” Max Porter is talking about public life in the UK today, about which he finds almost everything “revolting”. Porter’s debut, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, a novella-cum-prose poem about a bereaved dad bringing up two boys, based on the death of his father when he was six, was one of the stand-out books of 2015. He was hailed as “a writer bursting with originality”, but he was reluctant to write a second novel without feeling the same sense of urgency. Now, four years later, this despair at the state of the nation, combined with his “obsessive” fears for the environment, has sent him back to his desk for Lanny, an inventive take on the “missing child” narrative and a meditation on Englishness, made strange by the otherworldliness that distinguished his earlier novel.
Porter didn’t want “just to write angry stuff about tabloid poisoning”, a straightforward anti-Brexit or eco-crisis novel. “This isn’t stuff I want to write about explicitly.” Instead, he hoped “to have a kind of philosophical reckoning” with all these issues. “The question was ‘How do I write about England?’”
The food we eat is constantly evolving and our culture codified within that. You may wince when you read it in an overly sentimental blog, but at a population level Mary’s heartfelt tale of being taught a Victoria sponge at her grandmother’s apron strings (and even the story of Sam and Lucy’s tour of Thailand) is documentation of that evolution.
Strip a recipe of its context and you strip it of everything that it can teach you. And at the end of everything, all you’re left with is an empty plate.
I’m not interested in the men I sleep with, my friend Meg tells me. They simply allow me to feel the largeness of what I need to feel.
The man in the picture has dark eyes and powerful hands and a slow smile and a bodybuilder’s physique that is at once gorgeous and grotesque. In two of the most candid photos he is naked, hipbones jutting just above the bottom of the picture frame, staring commandingly down at the camera.
On an internet occupied by as many finger-wagging “grammar Nazis” as slovenly texters who prefer emoji to verbal displays of emotion, the Oxford comma has become a cause célèbre. This is especially true on dating apps, where many users have deemed the punctuation mark something they “can’t live without”—a designation that’s put it in the same lofty category as cheese, the beach, and Game of Thrones.