“Where did that stuff come from?” Ted asked.
“The pharmacy,” I said.
“No, I mean, where did it come from?”
At the time, I could barely pronounce the names of medications, let alone hold forth on their provenance. “I’ll have to get back to you,” I told Ted. He was discharged before I could. But, in the years that followed, I often thought about his question. Every day, I administer medicines whose origins are a mystery to me. I occasionally meet a patient for whom I have no effective treatment to offer, and Ted’s inquiry starts to seem existential. Where do drugs come from, and how can we get more of them?
Like everyone I spoke to the night before our papal audience, when, minus Jimmy Fallon, the American contingent gathered for dinner, I’d initially thought that my invitation—which was sent by e-mail—was spam. “Right,” I said to the screen of my laptop. “Nice try, Russia.” I didn’t click on the attachment until Stephen Colbert assured me that it was legitimate, and that the Pope really did want to meet with comics and humorists from around the world in three days’ time, and at six-forty-five in the morning. The invitation made it sound like there’d be a dialogue, as if the Pope had questions or needed to ask us a favor, something along the lines of “Do you think you could maybe give the pedophilia stuff a rest?”
Yōko Ogawa’s novel “Mina’s Matchbox,” in a magnificent translation by Stephen B. Snyder, demonstrates the abiding comfort of fiction that envisions childhood as a time of discovery — without the elevated stakes of being a grown-up.
The “edge of the alphabet” is not primarily geographical but psychic, and her characters experience the world as a series of vivid mysteries, filled with half-apprehended connotations and meanings. From the narrative’s shadows, a querulous storyteller, Thora Pattern, emerges periodically to demonstrate how they are being manipulated and how little they are able to force their lives to cohere.
Hope I Get Old Before I Die is another triumph for Hepworth. Part whizz-bang storytelling, part social history, part forensic examination of an understudied phenomenon, the book is destined to become the go-to text on a subject we never thought we’d have to survey. David Hepworth is himself a case study in what he writes about here: life’s creative autumn. He produced his breakthrough book, 1971: Never a Dull Moment (2016), in his mid-sixties. In the eight years since, he has unleashed a further seven titles, each as insightful as the last. And all the while sporting an unfeasible mop of flowing curls.