New books

I Hope This Finds You Well, Cloistered, The Morning After the Revolution and more

After a long period of being unable to read so much as an Instagram post caption, I cannot stop reading. Long may it last! Here is a roundup of all the books I read recently - good, bad and average.

I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue

This book is about an American office worker who is driven so mad by her awful colleagues that she sends them emails with insults typed out in white lettering. When busted, she is placed on an HR training course but is accidentally afforded access to the entire office’s emails and DMs. I loved the premise of this but it reads in places slightly childishly, like YA - just one example is our heroine “flashes back on” memories, a phrase I find meaningless, thin and annoying. And her past trauma, (because there’s always a past trauma), is neither dramatic nor convincing. Still, this is definitely entertaining.

Cloistered by Catherine Coldstream

I have mentioned this nun-memoir before and I am happy to repeat that it was excellent. It documents Catherine’s 12 years in a priory in the north of England. Any memoir that pulls back the curtain and shows you behind the scenes of an unseeable or unknowable place is totally fascinating and this is very well done. A book that can spend thousands of words describing how much a person is in love with Jesus and still be gripping is quite something. There is a scene where a visiting bishop rests his hands (innocently!) in his lap and Catherine is obsessed and horrified by the idea that his hands might be in some sort of connection with his penis through the material, it’s one of the most tense scenes I’ve ever read. There are shades of The Beach towards the end when things get a bit culty and mad. Top stuff.

Same As It Ever Was by Clare Lombardo

Julia is a woman in her fifties looking back on a moment of crisis in her marriage, twenty years previously. The marriage survived and she is now navigating late middle age with her husband and two children. Lombardo has many things to say about the pressures and stresses of being married with small children that resonated hard with me. But I had trouble pressing on through it, there was a critical loss of momentum half way through. Her daughter, Alma - inexplicably also called “Ollie” - is also off-puttingly rude and unpleasant to her mother who, rather than giving her a clip round the ear, (metaphorically-speaking), is helplessly fawning. Perhaps I’m just lucky that Kitty isn’t like that but I just found myself constantly thinking give that girl a ticking-off! Still, I am very pleased that gentle family dramas like this still get published and I will definitely finish it at some point.

Mona of the Manor by Amistead Maupin

Maupin wrote Tales of the City, a series of novels that documented gay life in San Francisco as it was - creative and colourful and cheerful - rather than how it was feared to be: Satanic. The novels were ground-breaking if not very literary. Mona at the Manor is a sort of follow-on from this, set in 1993 between London and Gloucestershire. It is an unspeakably terrible book. There are gross Dick Van Dyke accents, very dodgy words - “mulatto”!! - and Maupin thinks you “catch AIDS”. I mean, I’m not a scientist, but don’t you contract HIV, which may later develop into AIDS? Staggeringly lazy and bad. Half-way through, there is a cameo from George Michael on Hampstead Heath that is such a gross invasion of privacy that it made me snap the book shut in anger. Yes, I know you can’t libel the dead but this is execrably poor taste. Do not buy this. Read The Line of Beauty instead and watch Angels in America - still fresh and visually stunning after all these years. Or seek out any of Matt Cain’s gentle and thoughtful novels about modern gay life. His latest is One Love.

The Morning After the Revolution by Nellie Bowles

Bowles is one of those journalists who goes running towards the sound of police sirens. In the white heat of the social justice movement from 2018 through 2020 and trickling out beyond, Bowles documented BLM, defund the police, Antifa and other anti-capitalist movements for The New York Times, all the while slowly coming to the conclusion that none of it quite added up.

I’m sure some on the harder left would criticise this book for being skewed but I found that it got me sympathising more with why dismantling capitalism and defunding the police did - still do - seem to some like urgent acts. Bowles is deft at distilling complex (bordering on boring) theories while relating them to what happens in actual, real life.

My only thought on the events of the early 2020s is what the backlash is going to look like. All generations seek to rebel against the one above. But it’s less about their parents, I find, and more about their bosses: sad, loser 30-somethings who still think they are cool and relevant. From what I have seen of Generation Alpha - the oldest are now turning 14 - they are hardcore unsympathetic and have keen bullshit detectors. I know that they will place a high value on anonymity but beyond that, who knows what the hell they will get up to. If it turns out bad, we’ve only got ourselves to blame. 

The Complications by Emmett Rensin

After a psychotic break in his twenties, the journalist Emmett Rensin was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and then later as “schizoaffective”. The Complications - subtitle “On Going Insane In America” - is Rensin trying to make sense of all this.

First of all, Rensin gives zero fucks about what you think you ought to label those with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. He unapologetically uses the words “insane”, “head-cases”, “mad” and “lunatics”.

He reserves “mentally ill” or “mentally unwell” for those he calls “strivers”, that is the shivering middle classes who cannot cope with life and therefore declare themselves “mental unwell” because they are anxious or depressed. He has said on a podcast that he intended to be sympathetic to people in distress but in print he is absolutely scathing about these people: “Everywhere otherwise well-functioning and successful professionals were attesting to crippling anxiety; otherwise-comfortable people told us they were struggling - always struggling - with depression.” He thinks virtue-signalling about exactly how to refer to madness is “cheap and common”. Give us access to the right medication at a reasonable price, he says, give us subsidised homes and jobs.

Rensin’s thorough rinsing-out of his life, his condition, his paranoid states, his thoughts about what ought to be done about it all, results in a dazzling book. He gives us a ringside seat into his state of mind when he sat all night in his living room with a knife in his hand, weighing up whether or not he ought to stab his room mate, who he believed was spying on him with hidden cameras. He describes how he came to believe that his apartment was in fact a ship. He experiences a terrifying “command hallucination”: it is “like the sincere and audible voice of God: Crash your car right now and die”. He tussles endlessly with the morality of it: is a person who has murdered another during a psychotic break less “bad” than someone who murdered another because they were angry?

He takes us through his tedious daily rounds of medication, what each pill does for him and what may happen if he doesn’t take them. He tries to untangle himself from his condition: is he difficult and blunt because he is “mad” or is it because he is Emmett Rensin? Is it both? I loved this book so much that I can’t really do it justice here. All I can say is please go and read it.

I do take on board, though, that this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Adrian Gill used to tell me that I was very suburban, which I think was intended to be a sort of affectionate insult - and it’s true I am very suburban and very straight. And so, to me, chaotic people are pretty irresistible. I’m sure Rensin would find me a repulsive, suburban “striver” in my fascination with this lurid subject, but I can take that.

How about you? Any books - brand new if possible - you read recently that you can recommend to the group? Please leave a comment in the box below.