It is those who are closest to us, most similar to us, with whom we have the greatest disagreements. Mine is this: I do not think bookselling is an art. I think it is a job. I don’t mean this derogatorily; jobs are just as important to analyze as most art, if not more so. But a job is a material thing, a book is a material thing—a product—and if we are going to analyze material things we should set forth on the basic understanding that, as a job, bookselling is a victim to much the same trappings as any other job: the exploitation of its workforce. Bookselling is not a special case, but it does exist at a (somewhat) interesting crossroad between the “artistic” world of literature and the material world of retail, from which I see, in both directions, roads paved with the broken backs of workers, with no eventual culmination to art.
Is there any doubt that a service entrance designed in 2023 would be very different? Contemporary architects would scoff at the console bracket with its carved garlands, the paneled and studded door, and the fanciful Art Deco pediment. What is the function of all that bric-a-brac? they would ask. Why all the fuss when a flush door with a thin steel frame would do just as well? Why carve words when a ready-made embossed plastic plaque is available? Isn’t it all just a waste of money?
Similar questions were posed a long time ago, in a lecture given in Vienna on January 21, 1910.
True, getting old brings visible signs of physical decline, and may rule out some activities and opportunities. But in other ways, aging can involve growth and improvement—of character, perspective, and overall happiness. In a real sense, we should start looking forward to being old.
Shoot the Moon is a thoughtful, playful novel that ultimately uses the vastness of space to evoke that of each complex and multifaceted human life.
These are book reviews and diary essays written for The London Review of Books between 1983 and 2002. None has previously been anthologized. The pieces are split almost evenly between political topics (Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, the Oklahoma bombing, Nixon and Kennedy, Kim Philby, the radicalism of 1968) and literary, academic and social ones (Tom Wolfe, the Academy Awards, Salman Rushdie, P.G. Wodehouse, spanking, Gore Vidal, Diana Mosley, Isaiah Berlin). These slashing pieces often attracted angry letters, a few of which are printed here. Hitchens’s rebuttals are printed, too. They remind me of Kafka’s injunction, in his diaries, to “use the attacker’s horse for one’s own ride.”
The real shock of the book is not what’s unfamiliar, it is how much of it seems to mirror today’s obsessions and controversies. Yes, some of the treatments and rituals read as unusual to us now, involving goat fat, marrow, bran and bloodletting. Some ingredients, like mercury and arsenic, are toxic in quantity (but were employed nonetheless for skin lightening or other cosmetics) and would not be used commercially today. But other things — how much depilation to engage in; “breast bags,” a.k.a. bras; labiaplasty; lightening the hair and skin; as well as gender transitions for men and women — could and do fill our brains, our conversations and our feeds.