Erica Wagner » Journalism

Review of Nemesis by Philip Roth

ericawagner — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 16:09:26 +0000

About halfway through Philip Roth’s quietly riveting new novel, its protagonist finds himself in the Poconos, far—it would seem—from the polio epidemic that is scouring the streets of Newark in the roasting summer of 1944. Bucky Cantor is 23 years old, a phys-ed teacher and—until this point in the novel—playground director for two schools, Chancellor Avenue School and the newly opened Weequahic High. But Weequahic has a very different mood this summer than the one evoked so notoriously in Portnoy’s Complaint; Roth has passed through the spectrum from sex to death.

Polio is no phantom. Early on in the tale, two boys, including Alan Michaels, a beloved 12-year-old star of classroom and ball field, are killed by the disease, and children and parents are rightly fearful of this epidemic, its cause then still unknown, a vaccine as yet undiscovered. “It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.”

Read the rest in Moment Magazine…

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis

ericawagner — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 13:27:26 +0000

At first you think: That’s a nice conceit. “They had made a movie about us,” Bret Easton Ellis’s new book begins, and of course, they did, allowing us at least an early glimpse of the genius of Robert Downey Jr. The movie, it should go without saying, is the film version of “Less Than Zero,” Ellis’s headline-grabbing 1985 debut. Neither the book nor the movie is named, but titles aren’t necessary, for here are the old familiar names: Blair, Julian, Trent — and Clay, the narrator of that novel and this one, “Imperial Bedrooms,” which takes up their stories a quarter of a century on. So there’s a neat, postmodern, self-referential beginning, with Clay, the cool observer of his own actions and feelings — or lack of them — observing himself being observed, an acknowledgment that his version of the story may be only one of many.

So what happened to all these people? Fair enough for their maker to be curious as to their fates. You could make a cynical argument that sequels are written for the most venal of reasons, to continue a franchise or revive interest in a flagging brand, and that’s no doubt true if you’re talking about, say, “Star Wars.” But when authors create memorable characters it’s usually because they can’t help themselves. Imaginary people become lodged in the creator’s consciousness; it can be hard to get them to leave…

An interview with Sir Tom Stoppard at the London Library

ericawagner — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 10:35:40 +0000

It is perfectly appropriate that, before we finally find each other in the staff dining room, Sir Tom Stoppard and I both spend a good ten minutes lost in the mazy corridors of the London Library. Appropriate because it must be said that while the place’s geography has always been splendidly mysterious (“like the Tardis”, says one eminent member; “like Hogwarts”, says another), now that Phase Two of the most significant redevelopment in more than a century is within a hair’s breadth of completion, the new terrain adds an extra element of challenge. But up stairs and down stairs, here we are at last – with Sir Tom telling me that he has all the time in the world to talk about the London Library, a place he clearly adores.

His presidency is no sinecure; the library holds a special meaning for him. “It’s quite simple,” he says to me. “In April 1967 my first professional play in London opened” – that play was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – “and immediately took me off the poverty line. I don’t know what the first thing I did was – I probably bought my wife a present – but certainly the second thing I did was get myself a subscription to the library. My membership was my first expensive treat – well, it seemed expensive, it was probably £80, in those days. [Inez Lynn, the Librarian, notes the figure would have been, in fact, 14 guineas. Those were the days…] And I’m quite soft-boiled, you know; I am very receptive to the idea of continuity back into history. I hang on to things that don’t change. The idea of handling a book that was among the first 500 books that the library ever possessed, the idea of passing through doorways through which passed extraordinary people a century and more ago – you simply can’t put a value on those things.”

read the rest…

An interview with Rose Tremain

admin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:21:54 +0000

William Golding nicked Rose Tremain’s suitcase. Yes, really. “It was a British Council tour I did with Richard to Lisbon” — Richard Holmes, that is, biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, author most recently of The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, and Tremain’s partner — “it was an amazing group of people, and it included William Golding — one of the last tours he did before he died. We had identical suitcases, and at the airport he took mine, which caused a deal of ructions. I never got to see what was in his,” she says, laughing at the memory and arching an eyebrow. “Richard had to handle it. He’s such a diplomat. ‘Sir Bill … I think you’ve got Rose’s underwear . . .’ ”

We’re in the pretty, pale sitting room of Tremain’s house on the outskirts of Norwich; beyond the tall windows the garden looks lush, even in February. It’s an elegant setting, and so matches its owner. Listening to her low and lovely voice, it would be hard to believe, if you didn’t know better, that this self-possessed woman contained such multitudes — and indeed, such violence of emotion and imagination.

An interview with Philip Roth

admin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:33:03 +0000

When Philip Roth pokes his head around the conference room door of the New York office of his literary agency, he looks familiar to me — but not because his photograph gazes out from the jackets of his books. I grew up on the Upper West Side of this city, where Roth keeps an apartment these days for when the winter weather at his Connecticut home becomes too severe. He appears familiar because — his tall frame a little stooped, his look a little anxious — he looks, at first, like any number of the older guys you see trundling up Broadway, heading into the Fairway supermarket and peering into boxes of eggs. But then, after the obligatory handshaking and hellos, he settles into a chair, straightens his spine, fixes his dark eyes on me and all thoughts of Fairway are banished from my mind. I tell him I’m glad to meet him; that I get a feeling giving interviews isn’t his favourite occupation. “I have worse things to do,” he says, but I am not convinced.

This is How by M. J. Hyland

admin — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:41:04 +0000

M. J. Hyland goes to great lengths to disguise the depth and richness of her art. Her third novel, “This Is How,” begins — as did her previous two — in the first person, in the present tense, right in the middle of what would appear to be a very ordinary day. “I put my bags down on the doorstep and knock three times. I don’t bang hard like a copper, but it’s not as though I’m ashamed to be knocking either.” Not so different from the opening of her impressive debut, “How the Light Gets In” (“In less than two hours this airplane will land at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. It’s lunchtime. My window shutter is open, the sky is vast and blue and the earth is brown and flat”), or the Man Booker finalist “Carry Me Down” (“It is January, a dark Sunday in winter, and I sit with my mother and father at the kitchen table. My father sits with his back to the table, his feet pressed against the wall, a book in his lap”). She makes it look so simple, with her words of one syllable, with a style almost entirely devoid of affect; but there is nothing simplistic about her achievement. “This Is How” is an unflinching, absorbing, morally complex portrait of one life gone suddenly and terribly awry.

An interview with Margaret Atwood

admin — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 10:36:10 +0000

Worried about swine flu? Think it might, just possibly, be The Beginning of the End? Think there’s a government cover-up? Well, stop that now. Margaret Atwood says so. “Governments do say, let’s not cause a panic, because the panic will be worse than the actual thing. And nine times out of ten, or 999 times out of 1,000, let us hope they are right. So you’re not going to have a Black Death, great mortality kind of thing unless it’s a set of particular circumstances, and the swine flu is not it. The avian flu wasn’t it. Sars wasn’t it. Aids isn’t it either — it’s too slow. The only kind of thing that would do that would be a mutation of the Ebola or Marburg viruses, something like that. This isn’t the big one.”

I turned to Neil and said: ‘Hey, look. We missed the whole thing!’

admin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:44:25 +0000

“When I was at summer camp they divided the campers into two groups,” Buzz Aldrin recalls. We are high up in a New York hotel — the city is one stop on a world tour to promote his new book, its publication tied to the 40th anniversary of first Moon landing. “It was called Trout Lake Camp. There were the Ts and the Ls, and they competed. And at the end, one team won: and they ate chicken and the other group ate beans.” He looks slightly rueful, despite the upright, West Point posture that hasn’t left him even at the age of nearly 80. “That’s not a good example,” he says, although to my mind it is, since I’ve asked him as politely as I can what the difference is between what it might have been to be the first man on the Moon, and to have been the second. Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin — he changed his name by deed poll to simply Buzz some years ago; it was the name his sister called him, a childish mispronunciation of “brother” — climbed out of the lunar module 14 minutes after Neil Armstrong made his one small step. Maybe because I too went to an American summer camp, I can vouch for the humilation of that end-of-year ritual. It’s one of the very few times during the course of our two-hour talk when Aldrin veers in the rough direction of the personal.

How US was nearly pipped to first moon rock samples

admin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:37:19 +0000

How many missions were going to the Moon in mid-July, 1969? Apollo 11, of course. But there was another mission, a Russian one, which the Soviet Union hoped would capture the banner of lunar glory; especially if the Apollo mission failed. The story of Luna 15 is not a secret — but it is not well known, either. And in that story there was a role to play for Britain’s own astronomical crown jewel: the great radio telescope, now known as the Lovell Telescope, at Jodrell Bank.

An extraordinary trip up the coast of Baffin Island

admin — Sat, 09 May 2009 10:49:32 +0000

Just off the coast of Devon Island, the Zodiac is pitching and heaving. Shannon Fowler, five-foot-nothing in her socks, is in command. She is not, of course, wearing only socks, but rubber boots too, as we all are, and a survival suit.

The ten of us have lifejackets. The sea is clear turquoise, a surreally tropical colour given that the water temperature is a neat 0C.

Despite the team of Russian sailors standing up to their waists in the stuff, there’s no guarantee that our Zodiacs will be able to run ashore. Things were fine five minutes ago, when we left the ship; but that’s Baffin Bay for you.

hereSee the photographs of Dennis Minty, our remarkable photographer.