Bob Woodward, Fear

- I’ve always found the Bob Woodward books I’ve read rather tedious and hard-going. His prose is anything but fluent. But this one is a riveting read because it’s mainly conversations between the players in a madhouse (via subsequent interviews recorded with permission). And they hold nothing back. It’s war. 

- ‘Fear’ is not a good title. ‘Mayhem’, ‘Madhouse’, ‘Dysfunction’, ‘Chaos’, would have been far better. They mean a lot more, and are far more accurate and powerful descriptions of the essence of Trump and the cause of the constant frustrations of his staff. 

- The book is a collection of fascinating and detailed snippets and conversations about all sorts of things that went on in Trump’s White House after the election. McMaster’s job interview with Trump and Bannon is a classic! (86ff)

- Chapter 14 on Lebanon/Hezbollah/Iran v Israel/Saudi Arabia is enlightening and frightening at the same time.

- Chapter 17 on trade is about profound ignorance versus facts and expertise. Guess which side Trump is on.

- What surprises me is that there were a number of reasonably competent, intelligent and cool-headed members of Trump’s White House staff amidst the caravan of fools and toadies. National Security and Trade officials in particular were always trying to contain Trump’s worst impulses, eg, Gary Cohn, H.R.McMaster, James Mattis, Rob Porter. Even Steve Bannon, for God’s sake, sometimes comes across as one of the wiser heads. (Even though Bannon’s shtick is seeing ‘enemies’ everywhere, China in particular).

- Trump’s tweets infuriate every one of them. He’s uncontrollable. But they’re his ‘megaphone to his base’ as Hope Hicks described it. He needs Twitter, unfiltered. 

- ‘It’s all bullshit’ is a favourite Trump phrase. That's how he constantly describes the rules-based international democratic order that has brought stability, security and prosperity for decades. ‘Trade deficits are growing the US economy’ Cohn asserted. ‘I don’t want to hear that’ Trump said. ‘It’s all bullshit!’

- ‘He’s a fucking moron’, Tillerson said after one particularly crazy meeting. ‘He’s an idiot’ said Kelly. ‘You’re a fucking liar’ thought John Dowd, Trump’s lawyer for the Mueller investigation.

- But sometimes Trump gets it right - On Afghanistan, Trump told Porter, ‘It’s a disaster there. It’s never going to be a functioning democracy. We ought to just exit completely’.

- The major reason this book works as a riveting story is that Woodward brings all the main players alive. They are characters in a novel. You feel all their frustrations.

- It is impossible to imagine Trump having another four year term in office. Madness would no doubt descend to  utter calamity. 

Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth

- This is a very angry little book, clearly written with a ferocious intelligence. It is superb, and deserves to be very widely read in these noxious, unravelling times.

- It's and excellent examination of the destruction of mature, fact-based political debate in modern Western countries, particularly in the US. Trump is a symptom not a cause.

- The details provided on Russian interference in US politics, not just in the 2016 election, are shocking.

- Explores the roots of our current malaise going back to the 60’s. The chapter headings tell it all: The Decline and Fall of Reason; The New Culture Wars; 'Moi' and the Rise of Subjectivity; The Vanishing of Reality; The Co-opting of Language; Filters, Silos and Tribes; Attention Deficit; 'The Firehose of Falsehood': Propaganda and Fake News; The Schadenfreude of the Trolls'. 

- As you would expect from the brilliant former NYT books editor, the essay is dotted with literary allusions. Reflecting on Trump’s White House she quotes a character from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: ‘...a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all round assholery.’

- The Epilogue takes us back to the US Constitution and to Jefferson and Washington and their speeches articulating warnings for future generations. Truths more relevant than ever.

Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends.

        
- This is Rooney's first book. It is magnificent. Just as good as her second, Normal People. This review in the Literary Review captures it for me: 'Explores the collective, socially mediated nature of personal affection - we can't help but see people through the prism of their interaction with others...Rendered here with rare skill and subtlety.' 
- (Rooney loves the description ‘normal people’ by the way. eg ‘...a genius hidden among normal people’. It crops up regularly).
- Frances’ affair with the married Nick is so well captured in all its emotional complexity and nuance. The texts and emails between them are utterly real, even excruciatingly so. 
- I loved the character of Bobbi, Frances' friend and former lover. She has a ferocious and formidable intelligence. 
- There are mildly annoying idiosyncrasies. Every time Frances and Nick have sex it always ends with the word ‘Afterwards...’ Every time.
 - Another irritation is the constant referring to characters as ‘drunk’. Young people’s inability to be measured in their alcohol intake seems to be a thing in contemporary fiction. They are never ‘slightly inebriated’ or ‘tipsy’. After just a couple of glasses they are ‘drunk’. 
- Frances never eats. NEVER! She forgets or ‘isn’t hungry’. This should not be a constant thing. (293: ‘My legs were trembling and I hadn’t eaten a whole meal in days’.)
- Frances’ non-reply to Nick's wife Melissa’s long letter castigating her about the affair is a real disappointment and a narrative weakness. It's an excellent letter and demands a reply but never gets one. There is a rather confronting phone call between them much later in the book however, which is good and narratively necessary.  
- Nice appropriate ending. 

Patrick de Witt, French Exit

- By the end I was utterly in love with this book. At the start, in Manhattan, I wondered whether there was much going on here. It’s a bit micro in focus. Idiosyncratic characters with little to say, at least initially. Malcolm’s mother Frances has yet to emerge as sympathetic and pivotal. 

- However, in Paris a great deal of charm kicks in, with some French natives adding zest, eg, Dr Touche and the wine merchant Jean-Charles.  

- The writing is exquisite, with sharp and dazzling dialogue. This is the essence of the book. Here's an example: 

'You don't believe in the supernatural? asked Mme Reynard. 
'What is there to believe in? Fear and guilt and sorrow; such motivations as these will bring us to the very strangest and most obscure places in our minds. I have no faith in this story'. 
'Your faith isn't required', Frances pointed out.

And another: 'The world changes, my friends, as the weather changes. Our motivations, our dreams and agitations, our fears change, too. But wine? Wine is immovable. On hearing good news, what do we do? We reach for wine. And when we hear bad news? Wine again.'

- The interactions between the characters have an old world charm to them, a world weariness that is so attractive in the glorious Paris setting. And the alcohol is a massive crutch. Enormous amounts of it drunk day and night by the whole desperate group. 

- Malcolm’s story of desertion and loneliness at boarding school signifies the general emptiness of all their lives, but most importantly his mother’s. It's expertly done and lifts the story to another, serious, level. 

- The ending is just right. Powerful, sad, and full of significance. Life emerging out of death.

Germaine Greer, On Rape

- Greer has written a thoughtful and measured essay on rape and all the difficult issues surrounding it.
- The issue of consent is the most difficult and controversial. While Greer recognises the sensitivities around defining it, she doesn’t flinch in dissecting the real legal and sexual behaviour issues it raises. She refuses to acquiesce in the 'presumption that the issue of consent is not problematical'. She rejects contemporary slogans such as 'No means no and yes means yes' and 'Consent is not the absence of no but the presence of yes' and so forth.
- She presents a lot of global data and statistics that underwrite her questions and concerns about how various societies and institutions currently navigate this legally fraught terrain. Her views are well researched and grounded. 
- Fearlessly she never descends to the black and white entrenched views that refuse to engage in nuance or subtlety, or recognise the murkiness and lack of clarity surrounding almost every instance of the offence. 
- Her perspective is mature, evidenced here: 'Women in search of romance are coming to grief at the hands of men who are after conquest. When they meet with casual brutality they are deeply humiliated and traumatised. If they look for redress they will certainly be further harassed and intruded upon, and their cause is all too likely to fail, leaving them further injured and demoralised'. 
- And provocative, evidenced here: 'If non-consensual sex is, as seems obvious to me, commoner than deep communion between male and female, we must make an attempt to stem its deadening spread. But how?'
- An enlightening read. 

Sally Rooney, Normal People

- What an amazing novel this is. An utterly absorbing and captivating read by a 27 year old young woman. I can't recommend it enough.
- It's a very contemporary love story. The intricacies and subtleties of the complex relationship between the young millennials Marianne and Connell from a country town in the west of Ireland are superbly captured. And the interplay with their school and university friends provides a rich portrayal of a country in the grip of recession and austerity. 
- The narrative leaves no reflection, emotion, or action unexplained - it comes a few pages later, mostly after the event. The reader is never stranded, which is immensely satisfying. We follow the couple and their friends over a four year period, dipping in every few months or so.
- There’s something immature about Marianne and Connell - Connell in particular. Their relationship difficulties come from an inability to clearly communicate and articulate their feelings, although they are both highly intelligent and scholarship winning students. Their relationship is constantly on and off. A boy from the working class and a girl from a rich family. But they share deep social anxieties bordering on depression.
- There is a strong hint of child abuse in both families. Domestic violence is a thread, particularly for Marianne. It slowly becomes evident that violence is a defining dimension of her. She attracts it, she wants it, she seems to need it. ‘...the evil part of herself’. ‘Marianne is a masochist and Connell is simply too nice a guy to hit a woman’. 
- I was expecting a different, more tragic and shocking ending such as a suicide. But on reflection what Rooney does is more thoughtful and right.   
- In a recent review in the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz reflects on a 'curious feeling that Rooney wasn't always sure where she was going but that she trusted herself to find out'. And this captures the essence of Rooney's bare and honest writing style: 'She writes with a rare, thrilling confidence, in a lucid and exacting style uncluttered with the sort of steroidal imagery and strobe flashes of figurative language that so many dutifully literate novelists employ'. 

This piece in the Guardian captures the extraordinary enthusiasm of critics for Rooney: 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/01/sally-rooney-normal-people-man-booker-prize-2018-longlist