Books in the Media: Julian Barnes bids farewell?
This week, the books in non-fiction offer a history of child custody and examine the life of a great musician, while in fiction critics review Julian Barnes’ latest work, possibly for the last time.
Lara Feigel’s Custody: The Secret History of Mothers (William Collins) is a “great roar of a book” stated the Sunday Times’ Kathryn Hughes. Feigel’s latest “tells the enraging history of child custody over the past 200 years. In particular, she traces the special kind of hell that is reserved for women who dare to call out the iniquity of a system that benefits no one, least of all the children”. The book draws on the cases of “politically progressive” Caroline Norton in the 19th century, French writer George Sand, American author Alice Walker and Elizabeth Packard, “who was confined by her husband to a lunatic asylum in 1860”. While the book takes in past cases of custody battles, where it “really bursts into new and terrible life is when Feigel sets out to reveal what goes on in today’s family courts”, a setting with which Feigel is familiar after fighting for custody of her own two children.
Departure(s) (Jonathan Cape), possibly the last work from writer Julian Barnes, is a mix of fiction and non-fiction, the title referring “to the loss of loved ones, declining health and his own ever-closer departure from the world”. The Financial Times’ Max Liu wrote: “Departure(s) interrogates the relationship between life and literature, and is packed with quotes from French writers, including Flaubert. The intermingling of non-fiction and fiction could have been confusing, but Barnes really does know exactly what he is up to and his control of the narrative makes it enthralling and affecting… If this is his last book, he has given his career a triumphant ending.” Cal Revely-Calder and Lucy Thynne at the Telegraph called Departure(s) “one of [Barnes’] best” while the New Statesman’s Anthony Cummins called the book “a teasing meditation on memory and mortality”.
The Financial Times’ Ludovic Hunter-Tilney reviewed journalist Alexander Larman’s Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie (New Modern), a biography of the famous musician that focuses on “the patchy second half of Bowie’s career”. The book begins with Tin Machine, the band Bowie formed in the late 1980s, before exploring other “activities” including BowieNet, “a pioneering internet service provider launched in 1998”. Larman is “good at filleting quotes from published or broadcast interviews” that “provide a decent portrait of Bowie’s working habits: a generous leader, spontaneous and open to ideas in the studio, though insistent, sometimes testily, on doing things his way”. The Telegraph published an extract from the biography. The last line reads: “His legacy would live on, as long as the art form that he had so excelled in lasted.”
Work Horse (4th Estate), the debut novel from former editor of Vogue.com Caroline Porter, is a “diverting read” wrote the Times’ Siobhan Murphy. Set in early 2000s New York, the novel follows Clodagh Harmon, a “lowly assistant” at a fashion magazine and the lengths she will go to to climb the ranks by ingratiating herself to fellow employee, Davis Lawrence. It is “certainly in The Devil Wears Prada territory”, noted Murphy, adding that Porter “brings impeccable insider knowledge to her takedown of the absurdities and indignities that lurked behind those glossy covers in an era when their influences seemed unassailable”. There is a “distinct (although less homicidal) touch of the Tom Ripleys about this tale of success at any price… and Clo’s scheming hits criminal, then dizzyingly paranoid heights,” Murphy concluded.
