A New Novel I Really Enjoyed

Plus good writing advice, Robert Hughes and Angela Merkle

Hello,

Welcome to Cultural Capital. Last week I loved reading Vincenzo Latronico’s new novel Perfection, recently published by Fitzcarraldo. Latronico is an Italian novelist and I think this is his first book to appear in English (in an excellent translation by Sophie Hughes). The book is slight — just over a hundred pages. You’d easily get through it in an evening. It’s about a hipster millennial couple: aimless, ageing, downwardly mobile, living in Berlin. Frankly, what slight work of contemporary fiction isn’t about downwardly mobile hipsters living in Berlin? The subject matter sounded so hackneyed I almost didn’t read it. I’m glad I did.

The novel has a haunting, melancholy intensity about it. It’s quite scarily illusionless about the atomised, pointless, futile lives of its protagonists. The half-hearted hipster decadence of their lifestyle — working as freelance graphic designers and living out a kind of extended adolescence in a huge, pot plant-filled warehouse apartment in Berlin — already feels like it belongs to a different time. Perhaps it was reading it against the backdrop of the news but the book felt to me as if it was about the very last inhabitants of another era — that end of history moment — slowly realising that the prosperous, optimistic, idealistic world they had grown up in and which they believed would sustain them forever is coming to an end. There are some lovely, bleak passages of description:

They would go for walks on endless summer evenings and freezing winter mornings when the blinding sunlight would reflect off the fresh snow. They would gaze up in awe at the vast and changeable northern sky, so different from the one they had grown up under. They could spend hours roaming the narrow cobbled streets of Schillerkiez, or the linden-lined squares of the grander end of Mitte, marvelling at every little detail: the jungles of tropical plants behind the windows, the geometric pattern of the flagstone pavements.

Latronico is also very good and eerie about the way that if you spend half your life online, as most people do nowadays, then the story of your life, truthfully told, is in great part the story of what you’ve been doing on the internet:

They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them.

Those images would be on the phone that woke them up. An astronaut singing in outer space. A girl riding a wrecking ball. They would light up their pillows as they roused from sleep, and parade, one after the other, beneath their fingertips while they used the bathroom. They would be there in the kitchen on the tablet as Anna and Tom waited for their coffee to brew, then reappear seamlessly on their monitors in the home office. A jealous husband's threats graffitied across the front of a house. Goats teetering on a cliffside or at the edge of a motorway flyover

[. . . ]

They couldn’t have said how much time they spent like that each day. They suspected it was a lot.

It hadn’t always been this way. Something must have changed for them somewhere. They just couldn’t work out what.

They could still remember a time when they only used Facebook to find out what had happened to their school crushes, and when Instagram was little more than an archive of people’s holiday snaps. Since then, they had followed the many evolutions of those websites from their dual perspective as both interface designers and users. They could name every single update – the introduction of likes and notifications, video sharing, picture posting, tagging. But any attempt to draw a connection between those minutiae and the way in which social media had spread through every aspect of their lives was so reductive as to miss the point entirely, like wondering whether it is at the first twig or the third tree that a forest can be said to be on fire.

It evokes what the art critic Robert Hughes (see below) once called “the general drain of concreteness from modern existence—the reign of unassimilated data, in place of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life.”

Think my hand is posed quite elegantly here

Other Things

Orality and Literacy
I’ve also been reading Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy about the ways in which literacy changes the way people think and express themselves, and even how whole societies work. It. Is. Fantastic. The most interesting book I’ve read in ages. Will report back properly in next week’s newsletter. Still planning something on Alex Ross’s Wagnerism but may have to bump it back a week.

How to write
Good writing advice from Steven Pinker. I think everyone who writes well follows all these rules consciously or unconsciously:

Stylish writers, you’ll find typically share a number of practices, including:

• an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary;

• an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze;

• the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs;

• the use of parallel syntax;

• the occasional planned surprise;

• the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement;

• the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.

Robert Hughes on Van Gogh
The art critic Robert Hughes is one of my all-time favourite writers. His collection of art criticism Nothing if Not Critical is up there with The War Against Cliché for me. And his book about the founding of Australia, The Fatal Shore, is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read. I stumbled across this Hughes piece about Van Gogh from the early 2000s. It is exceptionally good:

Perhaps no artist who got as good as Vincent has ever started out so bad. Not just bad, but worthy bad, which is (if anything) worse. Even today, you'd hardly want one as a present, unless it was from someone you didn't want to offend. Those dogged, I-share-your-suffering images of ground-down peasant women and Dutch cloggies grouped around the sacramental potato, done in glum, awkward homage to Jean-François Millet and English social-consciousness painters such as Luke Fildes, all testify that sincerity, on its own, is not an artistic virtue. Gazing at early Van Gogh, at that murky stuff from the mid-1880s, you thirst for some signs of style - and there are none, or none that count.

And this is real criticism, brilliant in its technical confidence, easy breadth of reference and minute aesthetic attentiveness:

Van Gogh's preferred drawing tool was the reed pen. This was simply a piece of dried reed-stem, hollow and shaped to a chisel point. Not very many artists liked to use it. The only Dutch artist who preferred the reed to a quill or metal nib was Rembrandt, and this must have borne its own significance for Van Gogh. The reed was not flexible, like other pens. Nor did it hold a lot of ink, so it would not produce long, sinuous lines. The style it favoured was short, blunt, angular and (in a limited way) calligraphic. In some drawings you can see Van Gogh brilliantly exploiting the limitations of the reed. He draws a tuft of grass, for instance, as five or six springing, more or less parallel strokes. The first one is heavy with ink. The next, less so. By the fourth or fifth, the reed is almost empty and the ink strokes faint. This creates the impression of a round tussock, rendered not as flat pattern, but turned towards the light. Then he dips his reed in the ink bottle, recharges it and begins again, on a different clump of grass. The marks are abstract and yet not: they have a tremendous graphic sufficiency, tiny though they are.

“Tremendous graphic sufficiency” is a superb phrase: compact, authoritative, judiciously admiring. I would kill to be able write like that.

Robert Hughes

Christopher Clark on Angela Merkle
Fascinating sympathetic review of Angela Merkle’s memoir by the historian Christopher Clark in the London Review of Books. Especially useful to have someone with such a broad historical view writing on this book:

. . . I was struck by the 19th-century feel of the narrative. This is a multipolar world, in which states interact in highly unpredictable ways. The EU is present in Merkel’s account only as a legal and constitutional framework. There are no hand-on-heart affirmations of the European idea. Brussels is a place where certain processes happen, but no more than that. On the rare occasions when the Union features as an actor in the narrative, it is usually failing to meet expectations.

‘Being prime minister is a lonely job,’ Margaret Thatcher wrote. ‘It ought to be: you cannot lead from the crowd.’ But if Thatcher was often lonely at home, her vision of the wider world was warmed by allegiance to the US, fondness and admiration for a visionary conservative president, the sense of a common cause among the ‘free nations’ and confidence that the Cold War ended with unconditional victory for America and its Western friends. By contrast, Merkel’s German political world is sociable and crowded, but her portrait of the international scenery is strikingly bleak, a world of narcissistic and unreliable political ‘friends’, capricious enemies and selfish bystanders, a world in which nothing seems to cohere. It is an outlook that resonates lugubriously with the uncertainties of the present. The book may come to be read as a reflection on our pathway out of one world order into another.

Authoritarianism in America
What might authoritarianism look like in America? Interesting (and obviously depressing) piece on “competitive authoritarianism” in The Atlantic:

the United States is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition. In his first weeks back in office, Donald Trump has already moved strongly in this direction. He is attempting to purge the civil service and directing politicized investigations against rivals. He has pardoned violent paramilitary supporters and is seeking to unilaterally seize control over spending from Congress. This is a coordinated effort to dig in, cement power, and weaken rivals.

Interesting Helen Lewis
Always love listening to Helen Lewis. Good to hear her speaking at length on Sam Harris’s podcast.

Poem of the Week: Living in Sin by Adrienne Rich

I had a real Adrienne Rich phase a few years ago. I spent my 28th (or maybe 29th?) birthday wandering around Bloomsbury stopping in parks to read at random from her Collected Poems. This one, about the disappointments of a love affair, is one of my favourites and justly famous.

A woman has left home to join her lover in his romantically grubby apartment. But soon the excitement of “living in sin” comes to seem just as banal as conventional bourgeois domestic life. This is partly because she finds herself tidying up and doing wifely chores, just as if she was married. The one line that has always jarred on me is the one about the “beetle eyes” which seems a bit too cartoonish. But then I suppose a couple of lines before that you have the cat stalking the mouse in a Tom and Jerry-style image. So perhaps I’m not tuned into the poem properly.

The central detail is the milkman’s tramp up the stairs first thing in the morning — a noise that evokes inescapable domesticity. The milkman returns in more symbolic and metaphorical guise in the brilliant last lines:

By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

You can read the full poem online here.