Everett, who is sixty-seven, deploys negative hyperbole with abandon, especially when describing the capacities of his own mind. He has published two dozen novels, four collections of short stories, six collections of poetry, and one book for children, all of which he summarily casts off as “shit.” “I’m pretty sure everything I’m writing is shit,” he told me the first time we met. “I’m just trying to make the best shit I can.” After a few meetings, he seemed worried that his shit would become mine, too. “You don’t have to read all this shit,” he said. And: “Do you always get the shit assignments?”
Everett is American literature’s philosopher king—and its sharpest satirist. The significant insignificance of language has long been a preoccupation of his fiction, which plumbs the failures of storytelling to capture (or enhance) the experience of life. In “Dr. No,” a gonzo spy thriller from 2022, a scholar who specializes in “nothing” learns his most important lesson from his one-legged dog: “What Trigo had taught me was that pure meaning did not exist, never did and never would.” Other protagonists, among them a Derrida-obsessed baby, a philandering painter, and a down-and-out gambler, take for granted that meaning-making is a dance of false promises and willful delusions. Everett himself compares it to a con: “Because we want language to mean something, it means everything.”
Unfortunately, owing to the fast, cheap and chaotic nature of Taiwan’s music industry at the time, documentation is patchy. Recordings almost never included liner notes and rarely listed musical credits beyond the name of the singer. For many of those singers, no biographies exist.
So while social media has given us a sudden profusion of songs and videos, it has at the same time given us almost zero historical context in which to place them. But as more and more people look into these questions, they are finding some surprising answers.
The Hunter is undeniably a slow burner, and this is one of its strengths (as long as the reader is forewarned not to expect a conventional crime novel). French ratchets up the tension in increments, until the reader realises, along with Cal, that the plan has escaped Johnny’s control to a point where every possible outcome must entail terrible damage. By the end, these characters have taken on such solidity that, long after finishing it, I often catch myself wondering how they’re doing – a testament to the author’s mastery of her craft.
In his delightful 2021 memoir White Spines, he recounted how he couldn’t rest until he’d collected all the B-format Picadors published between 1972 and 2000, and now, in Shadow Lines, he focuses on hunting out, detectorist-style, those secondhand paperbacks within whose pages their erstwhile owners have left some inconsequential thing that, to him, is gold dust.
But this isn’t a nostalgia-laden book about a forgotten city. It feels full of life and urgency; it’s concerned with London “as it is now”. If you were to pick up London Feeds Itself in 30 years’ time, it would probably read like a time capsule from the 2020s, and the city would probably look quite different. You would hope, though, that at least some of the restaurants, bakeries and delis that Nunn’s book compels you to hunt down today would still be there, still bringing communities together, still feeding people.
As soon as we (explicitly or implicitly) put comparative values on different lives, she concludes, the results tend to feel either “cruelly unequal” or “brutally standardised”. The Price of Life forces us to some very uncomfortable questions about whether we can do better.
If you’re in need of a cathartic read that distills the anger and exhaustion of America’s overburdened mothers and wives, this is not the book for you. Instead, Davis offers a tour — part history, part sociology, part memoir — of the mucky middle where many women find themselves stuck, bogged down by sexist expectations, economic and practical constraints, and competing desires.