Scheherazade has earned her rest, but she remains booked and busy, obsessively renamed and reclaimed. She is dusted off and wheeled out wherever the “magic of storytelling” is conjured, irresistible to any writer trafficking in “wonder” or “enchantment.” Her ghost floats through the work of Dave Eggers, Colum McCann, and Salman Rushdie in strenuous if harmless homage. But she has also been claimed by new constituencies and put to unsavory new uses. The narrator of “The Arabian Nights” must find herself bewildered at being name-checked in Karl Rove’s “Scheherazade Strategy,” as well as in articles about brand management, serialized content, mastering the attention economy—the unwitting inspiration, and occasional face, of the shifty and shifting tangle of alibis that goes by “storytelling.”
Do we dare define it? “Storytelling”—as presently, promiscuously deployed—comprises fiction (but also nonfiction). It is the realm of playful fantasy (but also the very mortar of identity and community); it traps (and liberates); it defines (and obscures). Perhaps the most reliable marker is that little halo it has taken to holding above its own head, its insistent aura of piety. Storytelling is what will save the kingdom; we are all Scheherazade now.
Patrick deWitt, a droll satirist with a pointed taste for the bizarre, made his name with novels full of clever literary hijinks, including “Undermajordomo Minor” and “The Sisters Brothers.” His last book, “French Exit” (2018), was a loopy mother-son “tragedy of manners” that channeled both Noël Coward and Wes Anderson.
In his new novel, “The Librarianist,” a quirky, affectionate portrait of an introverted loner who makes some surprising connections late in life, DeWitt tames the outlandishness without sacrificing his offbeat humor. His bemused sense of compassion for his characters recalls Anne Tyler, with whom he shares a soft spot for misfits, along with a firm conviction that even supposedly ordinary people lead extraordinary lives.
The journalist in wartime enjoys an enviable image: a hard-bitten idealist filing pages from the front lines, interpreting the chaos of battle for the audience at home. During the Second World War, expectations of thrill and reward attracted ambitious Western journalists to the Soviet Union. From the first shots, Nazi Germany’s invasion of the U.S.S.R. in June 1941 was clearly going to be a historical turning point. The reporters who ended up with a posting to Moscow would surely enjoy a privileged view of the clash.
Alan Philps’s “The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War” documents the lives of those British, American and Australian journalists. In his telling, the principal risks they faced were not bullets but boredom. Far from accompanying the Red Army during its battles against the fascist invaders, the correspondents instead spent almost all of their time confined to Moscow’s Metropol Hotel, a czarist-era hot spot for playboys’ galas and trysts that became a wartime gilded cage. By filing censored stories while playing the role of adventurous journalist, they contributed to a propaganda operation in which Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union sought to manage Western public opinion.
Writing a book about James Garfield is no easy task. The 20th president who served the second shortest amount of time in the White House is popularly known more for his assassination than what he did in office.
But in “President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier,” C.W. Goodyear admirably remedies that with a book that demonstrates the long shadow Garfield's life and legacy has left our country.