Over the years, ambling through flea markets, I have retrieved a number of arcane items familiar from my mother’s long-ago kitchen, now likely candidates for museum collections. My most triumphant find was her heavy iron meat grinder, color of pewter, a complicated affair suggesting a miniature tuba, whose bottom was screwed onto a table or counter. At the top was a funnel, and then the works, concealed in a bulbous arrangement. The funnel mouth was a flat circle punctured by holes. I watched entranced as my mother put a handful of chopped meat or pieces of cooked liver into the funnel, turned the wooden handle round and round, and lo, the meat emerged from the holes transformed into long strings, something like the locks of Medusa or today’s hair extensions, which fell into a waiting bowl. I have this relic displayed on a shelf. I don’t use it when I make a meatloaf but instead toss the ingredients into a bowl and plunge my hands in to mix them. Feeling the ingredients merging, under the agitation of my fingers, into a satisfying consistency, is a great pleasure, comparable to repotting plants and plunging my fingers into the soil to turn it up like a manual Roto-Rooter.
The matter of consistency, in all its possible meanings, has intrigued me ever since I read Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), a collection of five essays on literature that he intended to present at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. The literary topics he considers are Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity. The sixth was to be Consistency, but Calvino died before he could complete it or deliver the lectures. The five existing essays are tours de force of imaginative thinking, laced with examples and infused with his mellow wisdom. What, I wondered, would he have done with Consistency, a slippery word with several meanings?
Sure, you could say that the process is rewarding — but it’s equal parts excruciating. You divulge your insecurities, every character flaw and body part you’d rather will away. You exhibit your fears in high-definition. You’re held to a standard nothing short of judicial: the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Then you field questions from some schmuck who knows nothing about you, except for all of your childhood traumas.
But it’s not therapy. Far from it.
“Write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man.” This was the challenge the influential science-fiction editor John Campbell famously issued his authors in the 1940s. It was aimed at producing aliens as fully formed as the interstellar human travelers who encounter them. Isaac Asimov thought the best example was a creature named Tweel from Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” a story from 1934 that preceded the dictum. But the instruction also has the feel of a riddle, and neither Campbell nor Asimov considered its most obvious answer: a woman.
When journalist Lisa Taddeo set out to write a portrait of desire in contemporary America—a book originally intended to follow in the footsteps of Gay Talese’s 1981 bestseller, Thy Neighbor’s Wife—some of the first people she interviewed were men. In the prologue to Three Women, the book she ultimately published, she describes these men’s stories of lusts and peccadilloes as reminding her of the entrees you order from a Chinese restaurant menu again and again. They were tasty, but samey, kung pao chicken in a cardboard container. The stories of the women she interviewed, on the other hand, were another order of delicacy: once-in-a-lifetime meals served under a summer moon, or multilayered Michelin Guide–level culinary extravaganzas.
No other novelist writing in Britain could dramatise this nonagenarian love story with greater verve and tenderness, while never forgetting that this is a resplendently comedic form. Jacobson gives his characters alternating chapters until their accidental union, each setting fragments of the complex past against the present.
Nicholls is increasingly making his name as one of our leading screenwriters – his adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series was one of the best things on telly in recent years – but here he proves that he can still pull off that most rare and coveted of literary feats: a popular novel of serious merit, a bestseller that will also endure.
TV is personal. And, what’s hard for a critic is that most people in America watch it and would die defending their favorite characters. While her pieces are smart, and certainly exude the New Yorker’s cerebral palate, Nussbaum writes for the fans, no matter what type of television is their jam.
“Real fanhood,” she commiserates, “is at its purest level, love.”