Best Books to Read in October: New Paperbacks from Zadie Smith, Thomas Pynchon and Francis Spufford
Looking for your next read? Here are several brilliant new paperbacks, from a time-travel fantasy novel to an eclectic essay collection. *** Continue reading...
Everything is connected in Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon's noir story about a Lindy Jump detective in Prohibition-era Wisconsin. The improvised bomb connects the fugitive cheese heir, the cheese heir to the feds, and the feds to pro-Nazi leagues in out-of-town bowling alleys. Early 30s Milwaukee is in turn connected to gunpowder central Europe, where paramilitary groups are camped on the Hungarian-Croatian border and guest speakers wax lyrical about "our great fascist future." It's also likely to connect to the present moment, albeit slyly and slyly, with a quiet swing. This final movement is implicit in this happy dance of a book: the point where the past joins hands with the present.
Shadow Ticket is a Pynchon novel - the 88-year-old's first in 12 years. His ninth in total - and so naturally also connects to the man's back catalogue, and its enduring fascination with the conspiracy, chaos and wandering of American pop culture. This is particularly true of his two previous works – Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge – as the story is constructed as a story with red herrings, plot twists and a bunch of stiff dialogue. But classifications, like people, can never be trusted. Pynchon lives in the genre like a hermit crab inside a mollusk shell, periodically emerging from the darkness to remind us that he's there. John Brooks
£9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Buy from Guardian Bookstore
Spafford's fourth work of fiction in a genre work, Nonesuch is a historical fantasy set during World War II, each paragraph brimming with authorial enthusiasm. The novel opens in London, August 1939: war has been declared, but its reality has not yet been felt on the city streets, and Iris Hawkins, an ambitious office worker, walks through the sun-drenched West End in a disheveled dress. Half a disastrous date later, she's taken to a DIY surrealist film club in bohemian Bloomsbury - not her scene at all - and two very fateful introductions: the first to Geoffrey Hill, a creepy BBC TV engineer. and the second to the object of Geoffrey's mindless infatuation, one Lady Lalage Cunningham, an icy aristocratic beauty with fabulous hair and disturbing political sympathies. A sign of chaos. Nonesuch follows the daring Iris from her turbulent summer night through an unfortunate connection to Hampstead, and finally, in a time-traveling plot by "magical fascist lunatics" to assassinate Winston Churchill. This novel is a delightful pastiche of romance, occultism, non-Euclidean geometry and airborne adventure on London's bustling rooftops. It's hard to imagine it coming together as well in any hands other than Spafford's. AK Blakemore
£8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Buy from The Guardian Bookstore
In November 1741, Georg Wilhelm Steller, "theologian, naturalist and curious man", was shipwrecked on an island between Alaska and Russia. There, floating in shallow water, he found a nine-foot-long giant siren, Hydrodamalis gigas, soon to be known as Steller's manatee. After spending the winter eating mostly manatees, the next August Steller and the rest of the survivors of the Great Northern Expedition left the island. Within 30 years, the Steller's manatee was hunted to extinction.
After describing these events, Finnish author Aida Turpinen's first novel follows the lives of other historical figures, each of whom is somehow touched by the manatee, now turned to bones. There's Alaskan governor Hampus Furuhoejelm, in search of a perfect skeleton, and his sister Constance, who finds peace and intellectual independence amid her taxidermy collection. Later, Hilda Olson, a scientific illustrator, and John Grunvall, an expert in bird egg reconstruction, are present, tasked with preparing a manatee for the exhibit.
Turpinen writes in the present tense, moving incessantly from character to character, pulling us forward slowly but firmly. The emotional details are expertly rendered. The result is a book that can be read almost hypnotically. It's very popular in Finland and it's easy to see why. Jesse Greengrass
Ruth, the narrator of Harriet Lane's third novel, Other People's Fun, is consumed by jealousy. Alone, her marriage is over, her daughter is grown and her freelance job is just as boring and low paying, she is the most dangerous character: a neglected middle-aged woman with nothing to lose. He reconnects with his teenage self "and all his violent urges" when he runs into the beautiful, silly and entitled Sookie at a school reunion. Flying under the radar as a student, only getting attention because Sookie lent him her essays, she vividly remembers her own little humiliations, now reinforced by the fact that she can follow her contemporaries' "best lives" on social media when almost none of them remember her.
The best comedy is sharpened by pain, and what Lane points out in his flint-sharp novel is something that has very modern resonance, as the world of haves and have-nots becomes increasingly polarized and toxic. When Ruth gets her revenge, it's as bad as it gets. I'm afraid you will howl with satisfaction. Amanda Craig
Sweet Land Forever is a collection of unpublished short stories and previously uncollected essays. However, like many of these books, it has little to offer the non-diehard fan.
The short stories written during Lee's youth are all severely underdeveloped. Most of them don't even work as illustrations. One focuses on trying to find a place to dump the truck in Manhattan. Another about a temporary change in the way worship is sung in the Methodist Church. A slim piece about the idiosyncratic quirks of a New York movie audience would be classified as a story, but it's more like a newspaper sketch. Young Lee seems to have little understanding of the story.
On the plus side, there's humor and charisma in the voice now. One of the narrators, returning to his hometown in the South, "knows a tall young man whose face belonged to the Wade family, but whose body showed a wide influence of Talbert. He was, of course, Talbert Wade." It may be minor, but it's beautifully done. There are also hints of the iconoclastic fury it tries to get out of, particularly in The Water Tower, where a 12-year-old Mississippi girl mistakenly thinks she's pregnant. Realizing that an unwed mother is ruining the lives of her entire family, she decides the only way to save them is to get rid of her shameful body.
If we look at this book as literature, it is an unqualified failure. But for the light it sheds on Lee's life, it's well worth seeing—and sure to read. As such, it is obliquely appealing, mainly because it exudes repression. It often feels like we're seeing the side of Harper Lee who wasn't exceptional, but represented a generation of women who mostly had noses. In The Cat's Meow (perhaps the strongest story in the collection), Lee writes, "I think a lot of people like me these days have learned the first lesson of life at home: if you don't agree with what you hear, put your tongue between your teeth and bite hard." We feel those aching teeth on every page of this book. In a time of increased censorship, it's useful to remember that a writer matters because Harper Lee came very close to being completely silenced. Sandra Newman
The Dead and the Living covers various odds and ends from the past nine years: speeches, reviews, critiques, and eulogies for departed literary heroes—Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel.
In Notes on Mediating Time—one of three brand new essays in the collection—Smith recalls how the "quiet, dreamy world" of her 1980s childhood gave way, within a generation, to the "now anxious and constant" of social media. If you lived through that transition, you don't have to be very old to feel ancient. When this alienation is combined with the normal anxieties of aging, the cultural interpretation becomes one of self-pity. Smith's identification with string hero Todd Field, a conductor once revered and shunned by the younger crowd, takes on an existential dimension: "Our backs hurt, the kids don't like Bach anymore – and the seas are rising!"
Smith steers a sensible course on the vexing debate surrounding "cultural appropriation" in fiction. There is more to people than their identity - "sometimes we can forget the mystery that lies at the heart of all selfishness". This point is well made in a thoughtful piece about James Baldwin and the art of writing, originally a lecture to creative writing students on Zoom during the pandemic. Smith reminds his students that the essence of Baldwin's brilliance was his ability to process politics through personal experience: he "first surrendered to his consciousness and then reexamined what this might mean for his conscience." This is sound advice, and Smith's stance on the politics of creativity goes beyond reproach, though it is rational—essentially it boils down to a caution against overcorrection and curiosity.
When it comes to actual politics, he's less sure. His New Yorker article on the war in Gaza, published in May 2024, was widely interpreted as unhelpful and seemed to conflate anti-war protesters with anti-Semitism. He has since added his signature to an open letter calling Israel's actions genocidal. The New Yorker piece, reprinted here with a new introduction that describes the protesters as "heroic," is a fascinating work of art: the prose is bitter and heavy on the passive voice—all the more obvious since Smith's writing is usually so crisp and clear. Human Barkat
£10.79 (RRP £11.99) - Buy from The Guardian Bookstore
Impressive success brings its own problems. First published in 1991 and written by Yong Chung with the help of her husband, the Irish-born historian and author John Halliday, Wild Swans has had a global impact that few writers dare to dream of. It tells the story of three generations of women in 20th-century China—Chang's grandmother, her mother, and herself—and has become one of the most popular non-fiction books of all time, selling more than 13 million copies in 37 languages and collecting a handful of awards. Praise for any author would be a challenge to follow. Now, Fly, Wild Swans returns to the story, picking it up after Chang's own departure from China in 1978, revisiting parts of the earlier work in greater detail.
Few can match Chang's ability to bring Chinese history and politics to life through deeply felt personal narrative, and few have shaped Western understanding of China so widely. Nearly 35 years have passed since the book that made his name famous, this story of suffering and success has the air of a final chapter, accounting for both his achievements and the costs of the path he has chosen. Isabel Hilton
After the breakup, the Beatles faced an unprecedented challenge: how to be an ex-Beatle? McCartney was eager to play in front of an audience again, something he hadn't done since The Beatles stopped touring in 1966. But he couldn't do it alone, the spotlight trained on him. So he asked Linda to help him form a new group. This authorized and illustrated oral history, edited by cultural historian Ted Widmer, tells the story of one of the most successful bands of the 1970s and one of the strangest.