With “The Searcher,” her eighth book, French is also venturing into a new genre. Though there’s a mystery at its core, “The Searcher” feels almost as much like a Western as a suspense novel. French never picked up a Western until recently, when she read Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” on the recommendation of the journalist and novelist Patrick Anderson. French devoured it and moved on to other dark Westerns, including Charles Portis’s “True Grit” and Patrick deWitt’s “The Sisters Brothers.”
She was fascinated by how morally ambiguous the characters and their actions were. “I love that about Westerns so much, that they don’t try to pretend it can ever be clear,” she said.
If there was one mitigating circumstance about the coronavirus pandemic that first hit Britain in January 2020 it was that the virus struck in the early part of the year, when the northern hemisphere was entering into springtime. The coronavirus spring that followed turned out, in fact, to be a remarkable event, not only because it unfolded against the background of the calamitous disease, but also because it was in Britain the loveliest spring in living memory. It had more hours of sunshine, by a very substantial margin, than any previous recorded spring; indeed, it was sunnier than any previously recorded British summer, except for three. It meant that life in the natural world flourished as never before, just as life in the human world was hitting the buffers.
Now, as we head into the pandemic’s autumn, and with it a second wave of infection and fresh curbs on our lives, there are lessons to be learned from looking back at our initial confinement in March, April and May, and in particular, at the springtime in which it occurred.
My bicycle — a decent gravel bike, which can handle both city streets and country paths — became not only an antidote to claustrophobia, but a way to tap into what I missed emotionally. What I didn’t know, as I took my first rides and felt unused muscles creak back into gear, was how it would make me fall in love with New York, in a way that had eluded me for half a decade.
Most readers are likely to find familiar-sounding advice as they work through the 53 lessons. Epictetus and Saul of Tarsus (Paul, the author of the Epistles that comprise a large part of the Christian New Testament) were contemporaries, and Paul’s travels took him into areas where Stoicism was an active philosophy.
Shut up. Shut up. There’s nobody here.
If you think you hear somebody knocking
On the other side of the words, pay
No attention. It will be only