You’d likely recognize the image of a person in a sleek gown of silk velvet, languidly playing with a long strand of pearls around her neck (and possibly clutching a rose between her teeth), as an early icon of sexually-emancipated modern womanhood. Who among us can’t identify strewn rose petals, piles of silk pillows, a tiger skin by the fire, and slinky lingerie as the trappings of a classic seduction scene? Consider the many disaster scenarios—a snow storm, a rock slide—that trap lovers together to justify lots of long, heated kisses and caresses pressed against palms, necks, and breasts. How many times you have watched a whirling partnered dance end in a quiet clinch in a corner? Or embraces by heroes whose show of force in the moment explains why the heroine finally succumbs to the temptation?
Every cliché has its origin story. Many of the over-familiar visual signposts of the modern romance began with an eccentric middle-aged British sex novelist with flaming red hair and a fondness for cats. During the 1920s, while Prohibition roared, Elinor Glyn (1864-1943) created the mold for how the modern love scene looked. Glyn invented, and then literally staged, these and many other familiar scenes. Her dozens of “trashy” bestsellers drove the romance novel in a more explicitly erotic direction, adding the special sauce that would make it the 20th century’s bestselling genre. Later, on movie sets, she taught the founders of the Hollywood movie colony that they could make the display of sex tasteful—just acceptable enough to the moralists—by making it glamorous. Madame Glyn (as she insisted on being called when she came to Los Angeles) personally styled Hollywood’s first sirens and Don Juans, teaching them how to walk, dress, talk, make love, and—most importantly—manage the attention that they courted and feared in equal measure.
"So what kind of mysteries are these?" Sawyer asked.
"I don't know," said Fischer. "Like, Agatha Christie puzzle mysteries."
"I'll be honest with you," Sawyer said, speaking in the blunt mode he says was typical of Hollywood types of the era. "I read a few of those when I was younger and they bored the shit out of me and I won't write them for you."
"Then what will you write?" Fischer said.
"I want to write 'The Maltese Falcon,'" he said, thinking of the 1930 Dashiell Hammett novel that became one of Humphrey Bogart's most iconic films.
As his former wife once told him, Paul is not “good at life.”
Paul — “The Great Man Theory,” a wickedly insightful novel about modern America, doesn’t give him a last name — certainly has little in his life to show for his 46 years. He is divorced and forced to move in with his mother, his 11-year-old daughter pays little attention to him, and his teaching position at a local college has been knocked down a notch, so he is forced to take a night job as a driver in the gig economy that he disdains.
The first sentence of Emmanuel Carrère’s novel “Yoga” outlines the whole book, so I give nothing away by saying that it is about trying to write what Carrère calls “a subtle little book on yoga,” an effort derailed, over the course of four years, by terrorism, the refugee crisis, the loss of his editor and a “melancholic depression” so deep that he is committed to a psychiatric hospital. Yet it is also a book about yoga, about the ways in which meditation means, to borrow a phrase from Lenin, as Carrère does, “working with the available material.”