This is a rare novel, in that hostile landscape policed by cultural studies departments and the 3am stasi on social media, that is temperamentally unafraid of trespass. Andrew O’Hagan goes where his story takes him, deep into the lives of all the communities who live around “the Cally”, the main road that heads north from the capital’s new centre, King’s Cross. The result is a book – it’s hard to resist the word Dickensian – that feels as near an authentic slice of contemporary London life as any packed tube carriage.
The first section of Lisa Ko’s novel follows a Chinese-American artist, Giselle Chin, who in 1996 begins a durational work called Memory Piece: she writes down her memories for seven hours a day, for a year – and at the end she burns the lot. But in Memory Piece, the book, the documenting of life becomes something precious and worth preserving.
Gritty and refreshingly girl-centric, “Memory Piece” is finest as a novel of the analog, reminding, for example, how we once peered at “scrambled cable channels, the premium ones their parents used to subscribe to, and tried to decode body parts” — a time capsule of mixtapes, newspaper collages and Crystal Light.
It documents the last days of people being untrackable, able to disappear, and for this alone lingers in the imagination.
It’s a triple-helixed biography of the main contributors to the counterculture comedy revolution of the post-’60s: “SNL,” the Lampoon and the Second City comedy troupe in all its stage and TV iterations. It’s a tale of Hollywood excess — both budgetary and pharmaceutical — that beggars belief. And, at its essence, it’s the story of a great American bromance, a partnership that was kept alive by one man’s creative discipline before crashing on the rocks of another man’s addictions.
Norwell kept a journal and also painted watercolor portraits of the places he passed through and the things he saw along the way. In his recent and thoroughly delightful new book “A Complex Coast,” readers are treated to both, allowing them to share, through words and imagery, a once-in-a-lifetime adventure by someone who approached his journey with an open mind and heart, and who captured it as it happened with his diary entries and paintbrushes.