Columbus Day Roundup

–The Australian Financial Review carries the story of a new novel that may be of interest. It is written by Pam Sykes:

…Her latest novel, Wives Like Us, skewers the ultra-rich residents of the Cotswolds, a bucolic protected area of England that, incidentally, includes Gloucestershire and its surrounds. Sykes, 54, moved here 15 years ago from London with husband Toby Rowland, a tech entrepreneur and their daughters, Ursula and Tess. In that time, Sykes saw the area become more and more moneyed – and ever more ripe for the sharp end of her pen.

“I see life as a comedy of manners,” she says in a voice that matches her nickname (her parents, both now deceased, were dress designer Valerie Goad, and Mark Sykes, a financier who was convicted of fraud. They called her Victoria). “I see the joke in everything. I turn everything into a joke, however dreadful it is.” Growing up, she hoovered up the works of Nancy Mitford, Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh, and at the University of Oxford in the late 1980s developed a taste for the American social observers of the time including Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney. “And you know, Jane Austen, of course,” she adds. “I feel I’ve read Pride and Prejudice a million times.”

Sykes has always been a comic writer; her work at Vogue, where she began as an assistant in 1993 (in Britain), deftly married wit with glamour. With Wives Like Us, she took inspiration from her own life in the Cotswolds (where daily challenges include missing peacocks, a problem Sykes herself has contended with)…

The setting comes alive in Sykes’ book, with mentions of Daylesford, the up-market grocer, and other stores. Was she concerned about offending her neighbours, I wonder? Sykes takes a sip of her tea from a gold-lustre cup (she collects them and assures me “You can buy them for under a tenner on eBay”)…

–The website of the University of Minnesota Retirees Association has posted the conclusions of a meeting of its book club on 21 June 2024 at which it discussed Waugh’s novel Scoop. After a summary of the book, the UMRA concluded:

…UMRA Book club members had mixed reactions to the book. Some found it humorous, but many were concerned about the racism and sexism in the writing. Some found it hard to follow the plot, with the two different Boots and large number of characters.

Members also discussed journalistic ethics today, and recent concerns about the Washington Post potentially hiring an editor from England with a history of working on stories that appeared to be based on stolen records…

Here’s a link to the complete posting.

–The New Criterion has a review by David Platzer of an exhibit at the Pompidou Centre in Paris on Surrealism. The article is entitled “Go ask Alice.” Here is an excerpt:

…Surrealism came on the heels of the previous decade’s Dada movement and featured many of the same figures, including AndrĂ© Breton, Surrealism’s pope, famous for his arbitrary excommunications, and Louis Aragon, who eventually became an unrepenting communist but was also a leading poet and the author of the excellent novel AurĂ©lian, of which Evelyn Waugh was a fan

I was surprised that Waugh would have been a fan of anything associated with Surrealism but was unable to find any reference to his expression of admiration for Aragon’s novel. Anyone knowing of such is invited to file a comment as provided below.

–An essay entitled “Lionel Shriver and the Resistance to Satire” is posted on the Action Institute website. This is by Lee Oser. Here is an excerpt:

… [Shriver] mentions in passing two satirists, Evelyn Waugh and John Kennedy Toole. I would note that Waugh and Toole are out of favor in elect circles, their reputations bobbing haplessly amid the rest of the civilizational debris, tossed overboard since the ship of state hoisted its shiny new flags, all signaling virtue. It is (as Shriver knows) countercultural to mention them. My main point is that the God-idea in Waugh and Toole licenses a good deal of play, connecting them, in their literary descent, to Cervantes and Shakespeare. Quixote and Bottom are the common ancestors of Guy Crouchback and Ignatius Reilly. Pearson does not really belong in their comical and physically exuberant company. She is too intellectually severe, too much the acolyte of her admired Dostoevsky. She is always on point.

“Pearson” is a reference to a character in Shriver’s new novel Mania which was recently reviewed in the New York Times and is the main subject of Oser’s article. This is Pearson Converse who teaches low level writing classes at UPenn. According to Oser, the novel is “a fierce satire of the progressive establishment.” The full article is available at this link.

Comments: Mark McGinness kindly sent the following comments about the Pam Sykes novel mentioned above:

I did enjoy your Columbus Day Round Up.
Plum Sykes, the author of “Wives Like Us”, is indeed the granddaughter of Waugh’s friend and biographer, Christopher Sykes.
Her father, Christopher’s son, Mark Sykes, was the subject of one of those eccentric lives that still occasionally appear in the obits pages of the London papers. The Times of 31 May 2022 described Mark as an “art dealer, gambler and wastrel” and in the context of his father’s friendship with Waugh ..”whose novels Mark appeared to regard as life manuals”
All best wishes, Mark McGinness

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