An Innocent Millionaire

The obituary of Stephen Vizinczey led me to the film of his first novel, In Praise of Older Women. That, in turn, led me to this 1983 novel about a young man's adventurous life and search for sunken treasure in the Bahamas. It is a big novel in terms of length, scope, and cast of characters, but it feels very intimate. It has humor, pathos, and a Balzac-like roster of rogues. Usually it is death to a novel when the writer tries to show off; but Vizinczey writes with such apparent ease and evident skill that it's not showing off: He's just that good.

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In the early '80s I was taken with National Review and, especially, the personality of William F. Buckley, Jr. I went so far as to sneak in to a paid speech he gave to businessmen at a luxury hotel, then quoted from that speech in my own little right-wing college newsletter. Looking back, I think the attraction was more about going against the tide than any deep conviction about, say, supply-side economics. I also have come to think that the Helsinki Accords, achieved under Gerald Ford, had as much to do with the end of the Soviet Union as Buckley's sainted Ronald Reagan. But let that pass. This volume, published shortly after Buckley's death in 2008, collects pieces from his magazine's Notes & Asides column, including points of language, humor, and other miscellany broadly under the heading "fun." (Although obituaries and stinging complaints are featured, too.) I experienced a pang of nostalgia reading through these entries, also some melancholy that the movement Buckley launched has been dissolved into a toxic stew of Know-Nothingism.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

Published in 2014, Peter Pomerantsev's investigation into the rot in Russian business and government is a cautionary tale. Using interviews with filmmakers, gangsters, and prostitutes as his entry points, the author unveils a devastating portrait of a corrupt, sick society with a mere wisp of democratic covering. For example, the mechanism used by gangsters to take over Moscow real estate for room to build their new towers can be quite direct: burn the old buildings down, sometimes with people still in them. The first half of the title is about where the United States is in 2021; whether the "everything" of the second half happens is an open question – just.

Blow Your House Down

I found out about Pat Barker watching Stanley and Iris, a 1990 film starring Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro based on her novel Union Street. Blow Your House Down is her second novel, published in 1984, and follows a group of prostitutes in a bleak northern English city. As a portrait of what women living on the edge have to endure, it is excellent. The dialogue and situations strike home. Usually I prefer a novel to intensify day-to-day experiences, not merely recount them, but these women have intensity enough for several novels.