Culture Wars reviews contemporary fiction along with regular feature coverage of fiction festivals such as Jewish Book Week and prizes like the Orange Prize and Man Booker.

Browse books by title with CW new books archive feature.

The human predicament

Nemesis, by Philip Roth (Jonathan Cape, 2010)

Bucky Cantor is described as having an unbending sense of duty and honour, instilled in him by his now dead grandfather. The novel is in three parts, each corresponding to one of Bucky Cantor’s moral failures – failures in his own view, of course.

This is fact, not fiction (on biography)

Many writers, and examples could easily come from the sci-fi genre, did not have to endure the predicaments present in their characters and their plots in order to write. Furthermore, normalcy, or middle-class bourgeois normalcy, is, these days, predicament enough. Still, each individual’s account, in fiction or real life, is full of drama because it is one’s own.

Life and letters in Manila

Ilustrado, by Miguel Syjuco (Picador, 2010)

The great problem with Syjuco’s novel is Salvador himself, who fails to become the equal of Miguel’s labours. An introductory essay promises a rumbustious figure, possessed of sufficient moral vigour to expose police brutality, but enough impish humour to pen an essay titled ‘It’s Hard to Love a Feminist’.

Where do I fit in?

The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno (Picador 2010)

The novel’s brilliance, and what makes The Great Perhaps stand out from other similar-sounding tales of everyday American life, is its eccentricity. Madeline finds herself following a drifting cloud figure in her car every night; Thisbe wanders the neighbourhood baptising local cats.

Controlled and subtle inner rage

Blood etc, by Gee Williams (Parthian Books, 2008)

The various characters do seem to foster romanticised versions of themselves, and fail miserably in their attempts to realise them. So really, the author is making a statement through her characters about how ordinary people become trapped in socially constructed forms of behaviour.

The omission of Amis

Money, BBC television, May 2010

This adaptation fails to engage with the nature of the novel; where insight and dramatic irony are necessary, jokes and feelings are watered down by what must be a thorough misunderstanding of the entire project.

Defined by vulnerability

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson (Quercus)

For sure, the frame is pitted and buckled – as the genre demands – but overall, its integrity remains. We do not go beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche once urged, but instead luxuriate within its normative parameters. The three bogey-men thrown-up in the course of the story all get their just desserts.

No room for shades of gray

The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Stieg Larsson (Quercus)

In his attempt to emphasise Salander’s vulnerability in the first book much was made of her underdeveloped, girlish body and the apparently endless series of dirty old men driven to distraction by it. Here she keeps the schoolgirl body and vulnerability, but this time PHWOAR! LOOK AT HER KNOCKERS!

Feminism comes triumphantly home

The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, by Stieg Larsson (Quercus)

What motivates this abuse of authority, according to the author, is (male) sado-masochism on the level of the individual, whereas the political reasons are directly intertwined with the pragmatic and soul-less capitalism most Western societies subscribe to at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium.

Booze, porn, sex and debt

Everyone is Henry Miller, by Jason Dunne

In a deconstructed, homogenised world the notion of uniqueness seems absurd, and Dunne implies that this terrible contradiction will wreak more havoc in a future faced with material and moral scarcity.

A troublesome memory

And This Is True, by Emily Mackie (Sceptre, 2010)

Offering a master-class in the construction of a narrative arc, Mackie at times dares to weave in the necessary building blocks of structure explicitly, as when she writes that a ‘character has to develop’ and when Nevis explains that ‘I wanted to know what was real and what was not…the twist, the revelation, the change. The truth. What an excellent dénouement.’

Earthly angel

Angel Time: The Songs Of The Seraphim by Anne Rice (Chatto & Windus)

A dark gothic novel of suspense about assassins and Angels, set in worlds past and present.

The possibility of love

The Pregnant Widow, by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape)

The voice is not the high-octane, clever, boyish excess of his early ‘testosterone novels’; it has matured, his ‘compulsive vividness of style’ has relaxed into an easy-going wisdom. There is still the high laugh-per-page ratio. There is still the finger-clicking rhythm. Still the mode is tragicomic. But there is something different, something significantly different about the author of The Pregnant Widow from that of the lunatic Yellow Dog.

The dark Clerkenwell mist

Avant! Noir, Toynbee Theatre, London

Avant! Noir happily managed a smooth equilibrium of media and styles, music and words and images all melting into each other, suggesting further shapes and colours, stretching the genre without straining it.

Shades of light and dark

Lark and Termite, by Jayne Anne Phillips (Jonathan Cape)

Phillips is able to deliver a powerful and evocative message through four central characters whose close familial bond is described between shifting narrative perspectives of past and present, to illustrate the endurance of close, personal relationships which permeate and surpass the boundaries of place and time.