This week's releases reviewed
Cheever: A Life
Blake Bailey
Picador, £12.99
It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive biography than this weighty book, which, at almost 700 pages, paints an absorbing, if at times somewhat repulsive, portrait of the writer who came to be known by so many as the American Chekhov. With warmth and wry humour, Bailey traces the rise of the young Cheever from humble beginnings as an adolescent misfit through years of alcoholism and financial uncertainty as a sporadic contributor to the New Yorkermagazine to his final emergence as a Pulitzer Prize-winning titan of US literature. Cheever's tender, disquieting depictions of American suburbia struck a chord with readers around the globe, transforming the setting into, as John Updike put it, "a terrain we can recognise within ourselves, whether we are or have been". Yet behind a gregarious public persona Cheever was an intensely lonely man whose hunger for homosexual intimacy consumed his private thoughts and writings for many years. Dan Sheehan
JG Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries
Edited by Lavinia Greacen
Cork University Press, £19.95
Reading JG Farrell's diaries feels like a poignant privilege, because the writer died so young, swept off a rock on Bantry Bay at 44. Though his novels Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapurand The Singapore Gripreveal a ferocious writing talent, this book illuminates the complicated man behind the work: shy, arrogant, charming; full of self-doubt yet aware of his brilliance. His letters unmask the constant struggle between art and commerce, and his world view is tempered by misfortune; he never really recovers from being partially crippled by polio, which partly explains why he cannot fully commit to love, though his depression also isolates him. However, he finds grace in his love for film, travel, Joyce, friends and the search for meaning, however painful: "Anything is worthwhile which allows us a greater understanding." This collection will remind you why. Siobhán Kane
Muriel Spark: The Biography
Martin Stannard
Phoenix, £10.99
In a rare interview in 1999, the 81-year-old Muriel Spark, dazzling in eyeliner, powder and pink lipstick, breezily told her interviewer that life begins at 60. She meant it. Her biographer Martin Stannard deftly unfolds the compelling life story of the novelist: her working-class upbringing in Edinburgh and disastrous early marriage in Rhodesia, the subsequent move to wartime London, where ruthless ambition and a ferocious work ethic propelled her to literary stardom, and Spark's conversion to Catholicism and self-imposed exile from Britain. Stannard is particularly strong on Spark as a novelist and on the intrigues of the American and British publishing worlds. But as official biographer he fails to probe his subject's personal life, and the book is replete with silences. Spark's neurotic control of her public image and at times outrageous treatment of friends are recounted but never censured, while the absent presence of her son, Robin, whom Spark rejected throughout her life, haunts the text, demanding answers. Suzanne Lynch
1989: The Year That Changed the World
Michael Meyer
Pocket Books, £8.99
The fall of the Berlin Wall has become the symbol of the fall of communism, but Michael Meyer believes it is dangerous to maintain that all the credit for that cataclysmic event goes to the US and its allies. Western resoluteness was a factor, but what happened within Eastern Europe itself was much more important. Meyer, who was Newsweek's correspondent for Germany and Eastern Europe from 1988 to 1992, saw at first hand – even participated in – the events that brought the shaky communist edifice crumbling down. The true hero of the story of the end of communism is Mikhail Gorbachev – and that is not to downplay the importance of people such as Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and, most of all in Meyer's mind, Miklos Nemeth, prime minister of Hungary. Events did not follow a steady progression but were governed by "the logic of human messiness". What was intended to be managed reform became something approaching chaos. Meyer conveys all the drama in this engaging story. Brian Maye
A Week in December
Sebastian Faulks
Vintage. £7.99
In this novel Sebastian Faulks skilfully weaves a pattern of the lives of seven major characters in London during the week before Christmas 2007 – the date is something of a watershed in modern history. An unscrupulous hedge-fund manager's fundamentalist capitalism drives him to the biggest trade of his life while a young Muslim's growing religious fundamentalism fuels his determination to punish the sins of secular western society. The lives of the other characters – a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV, a young Polish footballer dreaming of stardom, an underemployed lawyer and an embittered book reviewer – are all connected by the Circle Line train running beneath the city, driven by a young woman whose relationship with the world is being eroded by her increasing emotional investment in an online virtual reality. Full of dark humour and clear insights, this story gives pause for thought on the complex connections of modern urban society. Claire Looby
