This bloody-minded serial killer fantasist and antisocial social climber would become Patricia Highsmith's best known and best loved creation. She published five Ripley novels in all from 1955 to 1991, the last a few years before her death. Since his debut, her all-American psychopath has inspired six screen adaptations, a play by Phyllis Nagy, and a musical staging. That legacy is a testament to Ripley's complicated appeal – amoral, unassuming and audacious — and Highsmith's scalpel-sharp writing. There's something irresistible about an unapologetic grifter, who seizes the chance at a better life by stealing someone else's. The text is rich enough to handle wildly different interpretations that feel true to the original and brilliant in their own right.
Last winter, I flew to Minneapolis to hear a funk quartet play at a bar. The weather was miserable: hard-frozen snowbanks in every gutter, skating-rink sidewalks, roads so ripped up by rock salt and plow blades that I had to return my first rental car, because it shook like a leaf if I took it above thirty. I had come to see the band Derecho (since rechristened the Derecho Rhythm Section), the newest project of Alan Sparhawk, who for three decades fronted the seminal indie-rock band Low, which he co-founded with his wife, Mimi Parker.
Sparhawk had grown his hair out during the pandemic, and the red-blond mane was still shaggy past his shoulders. He wore work boots, a black T-shirt, brown overalls, and a black beanie that came off as the room warmed up. As in Low, he plays guitar and sings lead. Cyrus Sparhawk, his and Parker’s nineteen-year-old son, plays bass and writes much of the music. On this icy night, the Sparhawk boys—abetted by Al Church and Izzy Cruz on percussion—served up two piping-hot sets of Roy Ayers, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Childish Gambino covers, alongside a handful of original compositions.
The flight from Istanbul to London took about four hours. Leaving the Balkans behind, my body traveled at a speed of 400 miles an hour over the Great Hungarian Plain, the snowy mountain passes of the Alps, the forests of southwest Germany, the Rhine and the Low Countries. Through the blurry windowpane I watched the continent slide by, its greens and browns smeared together like a spill of paint. Mountain ranges passed in minutes, great rivers in seconds. I tried to spot landmarks — Had I walked through that woodland? Had I crossed a bridge down there? — but none of it seemed remotely real. As the plane touched down in London, I had the sense that somehow, something had gone extremely wrong.
Nicholls is superb on the landscape of this beautiful part of the world. The novel describes two seductions: the first is the mutual, if awkward and bumbling, romance between Michael and Marnie; the second traces Marnie’s reluctant acknowledgment of the sublimity of the countryside. As the pair make their way through the hills and valleys, and Marnie’s self-imposed deadline passes, we find ourselves inhabiting first one, then the other’s perspective, our sympathies tugged in alternate directions. We see how each stands in the way of a shared happy ending and how infuriating this is, how senseless. The reader becomes so invested in the outcome of this unspectacular, everyday, cagoule-clad romance that it makes the whole world shimmer with a kind of secret possibility, as if such narratives are everywhere, just out of sight.
Some fiction is both story and testimonial — a bearing witness to lessons that must not be forgotten. Haunting and elegiac, “The Stone Home” is fearless in its clear-eyed recounting. It asks readers to consider our own secret histories, to allow hard truths to be heard and, in so doing, to never let such barbarity happen again.
As I read Stacey Levine’s new novel “Mice 1961” — which is not about small, intelligent rodents but about two young sisters and their live-in housekeeper — I laughed aloud many times. It was a startled, delighted laughter produced not by commonplace tricks of humor but something singular to Levine’s writing: a brilliant chemistry of alienation and familiarity I’ve never seen anywhere else.
“We are other,” runs the epigraph from Beckett, “no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.” But Rushdie’s triumph is not to be other: despite his terrible injuries and the threat he still lives under, he remains incorrigibly himself, as passionate as ever about art and free speech as “the essence of our humanity”. At one point he quotes Martin Amis: “When you publish a book, you either get away with it, or you don’t.” He has more than got away with this one. It’s scary but heartwarming, a story of hatred defeated by love. There’s even room for a few jokes. Before the stabbing he was horribly overweight; after hospital and rehab, he finds he has lost 55 pounds, though it’s “not a diet plan to be recommended”.
Most birders have origin stories, the tales they tell of how birds, for whatever reason, moved from background to foreground in their lives. Novelist Amy Tan’s journey, catalogued in her delightful new nonfiction book “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” began with a sketchbook and a pencil.
But what, I wonder now, is the end-game here? What if caring is sometimes simply, in essence, waiting for the sick person to die? What does it mean for care, the carer and the sick person when the intended goal is death? Can the carer still then be considered a “good carer”?
These are the questions posed by Marianne Brooker’s insightful and important new memoir, Intervals. For Brooker, “the practices of care go on and on,” to death and “even … after someone has died.”