Stay in the Sun all Day

The answer to the riddle of our family, and maybe yours, is to be outside all day as much as possible. Here are some defenses against the sun that make it possible to remain outside without drowning under sunscreen or courting second degree burns. (Take it from someone who had such burns several times as a kid!)

Let’s start with hats, of course. But hats and toddlers, what a nightmare! To borrow from J.M. Barrie, two is the beginning of the end. Once children can remove hats, they will. If you’re disposed to be staunch but have been undermined by the flimsy grip the hats maintain on those wee skulls, may I introduce the life saving bonnet invented by mom Colette Palamar.

Palamar left an academic path in environmental philosophy to start a career both solving problems (hats that stay put) and creating problems (she likes to make what she calls “creepy dolls”). When I saw she once dressed for Halloween like Talky Tina from The Twilight Zone, it suggested that she too appreciates the inherent camp of the bonnets, despite the lack of overt irony in the brand.

Why we are obsessed: The USA-made bonnets are so tough to remove that babies and toddlers quickly learn to forget they are there. The brims fold back when indoors or in shade, so they can stay put for hours. The design also allows for the brim to stand at attention when needed—all without any material that is prone to deformation when packed. No plastic at all! And available in a selection of 100% organic prints like bunnies (you can request custom pairings for the reversible design).

Also! The hats also work like horse blinkers to help little ones focus on breastfeeding in lively environments. (Much better than laying those dreary breastfeeding shrouds over oneself and baby.)

As for beach days: You’re going to want technical fabric to do as much of your UV filtering for you as possible. (In this domain I’ve resigned myself to fully synthetic options.) Luckily, for children’s swimwear, high coverage options in the form of long sleeves and pants in UV-blocking fabrics have made their way into the mainstream. The Wirecutter testers are partial to the durability of Hannah Anderson, for example. But I find the dorky medical-grade brands like Coolibar typically have a higher level of craftsmanship. We have done various versions of this full coverage kids bathing suit for years. There’s attention to detail, as with the flap that prevents you from pinching the kid’s skin when zipping up. My kids have preferred this model to two-piece styles: no waist band; no sunburn where the shirt rides up; no pulling a tight high neck over a growing noggin.

As for dry land, we focus on woven long-sleeve shirts with high necks or collars; below knee lengths; and billowy cuts. These can be hard to find with only nonsynthetic, organic fabrics—so many organic children’s apparel is clingy knitwear that acts like a 1950s steam cabinet in summer—but a small number of organic-focused brands do serve.

My favorite in our rotation right now is this organic cotton poplin shirt with matching shorts from illustrator-run brand Mini Rodini. Probably the single children’s brand we’ve bought the most over the years because unlike most organic-focused kids brands, they have a bright, cheerful aesthetic that my kids prefer to the muted earth tones so popular in sustainable brands. Dôen also does lovely organic high coverage options for summer. Ample opportunities for mama-daughter matching. We’re also partial to the healthy childrenswear brand Risu Risu, founded by mum of six Camille Fleck (jealous!). All the garments are made in Spain in organic materials. Fleck has spoken about how it was hard to access organic fabrics in small quantities; one outcome is that she produces her own organic jersey in Spain. Their site is a wonderland of choice for midi or maxi lengths, long sleeves, and high necks in lightweight fabrics. Not directly sun-relevant, but we have many of their 100% cotton leggings and their sweet kimono jackets. (It’s exceedingly hard to find organic cotton leggings that aren’t adulterated with elastic thread.) They also have a store in Paris.

Even I haven’t found the heart to make my children wear Asian-lady-style outer-space villain UV visors and gloves, so—alas!—there is still a need for sunscreen. The checklist we’ve built starts with a non-nano mineral blocker. Then, I want them as scentless as possible, and as kind as can be to sensitive and eczema-prone skin. I also require products to work for me, too, so that there’s no double packing. Here’s our current product list, the result of years of tinkering.

Face/Hands/Neck: Suntegrity 5 in 1 SPF 30. EWG rating 1. I had stinging reactions to probably dozens of sunscreens over the years before finally finding this one over a decade ago. It’s lightly tinted, which works 95% to mask the white cast. That helps with kids once they are capable of self-consciousness!

Lips: Attitude Tinted Lip Balm SPF 15. EWG Verified. It has no taste, thank god. Also may satisfy a kid begging for “lipstick”! (Can you tell we’re entering the tween years?)

Body: Thinkkids SPF30. The Suntegrity product works for the body theoretically, but it is pricey for large areas, and the tint makes worse marks on bathing suits than the white zinc. EWG rating 1. Make sure to buy the linked item, since some of the very similar looking products from the same brand smell bad. Also, the claims that this item contains “clear zinc” notwithstanding, all non nano zinc brands I’ve ever tried leave a white cast, and this one is no different.

Of course the only way I validate my research is to see if my kids freckle and burn or not. Whether these products are secretly providing less protection against long term damage than advertised is beyond me. A porcelain-skinned friend did recently upset my equilibrium by suggesting that adults at least should move to modern UV filters, like Mexoryl—worth a try?

Olivier Sarkozy bought Mary-Kate Olsen’s 1953 Cartier engagement ring for $81,250 at Sotheby’s. It was reported only that the ring had belonged to a “Tennessee collector.” Olsen was 27 years old. It was 2014! One can assume she sized the ring a half a size larger than her finger, given that the diamond often swung to the side. The ring felt like a riposte to tacky Hollywood excess—I’ve never really believed that anyone wants to wear a million dollars on their person.

For some reason, this is the image I remember most associated with the ring—blurry, transfixing! It was, on arrival, one of those rings you never really forget. Iconic. Weirdly bulbous. Never really seen again. (It has not been reported if she returned the ring after filing for divorce. Their marriage was one of many pandemic casualties. “Olsen decided to end things when Sarkozy invited his ex-wife, Charlotte Bernard, to move into their $5 million Bridgehampton home.”) But I often think of it fondly.

Read more

• The artist Elizabeth Englander is auctioning off three lipstick tubes to help raise funds for her temple, the Brooklyn Zen Center. “I turned some of my old lipstick tubes into miniature icons, replacing the lipsticks with cast brass Buddhas. I was in between bodies of work and wanting to make something that I could offer as gifts. I was thinking a lot about Tina Turner at the time, and wondering how she reconciled her unapologetically glamorous, sexy, and powerful stage persona with her liberative Buddhist practice. Tina was a dedicated Nichiren practitioner who chanted until she had the strength to free herself from an abusive relationship, and then chanted for hours before performing, praying for her audience…” The auction is here. This is what I want for my birthday, which is June 20th.

• Two Sundays now, I’ve seen Nick Cave in a (discrete) back pew at St Bartholomew the Great in London. The church has a bar, and hot coffee on the way out. My husband’s single male friends frequent, for whatever reason. (Their sins, actually.) I like it because you can walk to St. John’s around the corner and snag one of those non-reserved tables afterwards.

  

• Next time I’m in the South of France, I’m running to Thermes de Molting-les-Bains. One of those put mud all over your body places. Not fancy.

• Feeling like shit? Why not take a deep reading program in upstate New York. “We gather in person, away from screens and metrics, to engage with great books.” I don’t think it’s a cult. The programs are seven days for five individuals, and you must apply. They offer transport and housing free of charge. I want to read more about this place actually. It feels akin to the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Current courses here. Better yourself!

  

Read more

The JUNE book club pick is The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams. A lyrical and vicious campus novel by a rising star—is there anything better? (Actually, I prefer the Guardian’s description of the book, a “twisted love story from a cult writer….written with a singular brand of Ballardian ferocity.”)

• Zoom on Sunday, June 28th at noon NYC time. RSVP here.

• In-person meet-up in North London on Monday, June 15th at 6PM local time. Once I know how many people might come, I can pick a place! RSVP here. I’ve never done this in London, so I really don’t have a sense of the community here.

The JULY book club pick is Nebraska by Monica Datta. This is a major American (immigrant) novel. I’ve told everyone who will listen it’s going to win the Pulitzer. Mark my fucking words! (It’s our generation’s The Executioner’s Song. Does that mean anything to anyone anymore?)

• New York City meet up at the Magician on Monday, July 27th here. If anyone wants extra credit, also read The Hill. It’s a prison novel summer! You might also want to read Thieving Sun, Monica’s first book… I’m ready to talk about all three.

SUBSCRIBER ONLY: The AUGUST book club pick is a double header: Truth and Beauty and Autobiography of a Face. An autobiography of an ugly writer and a memoir about being friends with her. You’ll see, it’s crazy! I’ll try to throw another event at my house in Connecticut, like last summer.

Read more

I have read every piece of media about the Park Slope Food Co-op since I moved to New York. 17,000 New Yorkers volunteer their time to keep the co-op running. “It says it is the largest and oldest member-owned and -operated grocery store in the world, founded in 1973.” They have been fighting about whether to sell, more or less, tahini. Last week, they put it to a vote. The Times has a brief dry explainer. (The result: they voted affirmatively to adhere to BDS guidelines.) Marella Gayla, a New Yorker editor and Co-op member, wrote a very funny summation of the meeting for the website. “It had a quality that you can only find on a nearly seven-thousand-person Zoom call, which is to say that it was baroquely inefficient, searingly passive-aggressive, riven with procedural manipulations, and occasionally inspiring. We’d gathered to vote on…a proposal to stop selling Israeli products, including peanut-butter puffs and a certain variety of bell pepper.” NY1 interviewed members in a short segment. New York City news at its finest!

Read more

• I would like to recommend purchasing a handwoven rush mat, or entire floor (£225.00 per sqm + VAT). A company in England harvests English Bullrush each summer—you can commission them to execute. I’ve only ever seen it in the houses of English people who are great, non-fussy hosts who read books. (Once, I stayed alone in a house with just such flooring and the host, who was out of town, insisted that I drink as much wine as I wanted. After I left, he called me and said he was disappointed, he thought I was capable of much more drinking than that! I had tried very hard to exercise restraint—one bottle per day.)

• Phoebe Philo’s husband, Max Wigram, owns a small pub with a great restaurant and five bedrooms in Somerset. The couple has a second home nearby. The concept is simple. “Low ceilings, wooden bar, open fire.” You can make reservations here. I wonder that this isn’t more of a destination for Americans. I assume it will be soon. (You can follow Max on Instagram.)

  

• It’s impossible to get a sense of the inventory at Atelier Bomba from the internet. A woman has to fly to Rome—or catch a glimpse of dresses out of the corner of her eye on Instagram stories. Ashley Helvey, my friend from Marseille and a staunch anti-influencer, posted these Hanging Rock-esque white gowns and I almost booked a flight. (You could try to email: boutique@atelierbomba.com.) I noticed that Ashley ate here on her travels.

  

Read more

• The last full-time museum taxidermist in America often sleeps at work for weeks at a time. (He has to adjust the dead animals as the glue sets.) What a great profile idea, and what a man! “By the time he was a teenager, he was sewing his own clothes, learning to tan leather and taking backpacking trips in the Sierras with his dogs while wearing a full buckskin suit of his own creation.” I typically hate the videos on the Times stories, but this one actually has use value instead of authors staring into middle distance. (Also, this correction cracked me up: “He arrives there at 4:30 a.m.; he does not leave his house at that time.”)

• This post about Au Petit Bar made me miss Paris. A good Instagram to follow if you’re Euro side this Summer. (Here’s the hotel I’d stay at in Rome, if that was on my itinerary.)

• Like clockwork, summer is upon us, which means we get to see what’s going on at… The Row Amagansett. (Sorry.) The news: They’ve added some Beni Rugs, courtesy of Michael Bargo, their go-to designer. Last year, I’m embarrassed to admit I jumped at reporting their stocking Dune Suncare. Listen, someone has to care, and that person might as well be me.

• “I am begging you to read Terry Pratchett.” My husband certainly agrees with this headline, even if he would find various points the author employs to make her point rather inane. (“I worry that the persistent unfilmability of most of Pratchett’s work will mean that he fades out of public consciousness.” Really?)

• It’s actually kind of amusing how many mainstream magazines are begging us to get into Terry Pratchett. Remember this Times piece from last year?

• Prada now has an in-house mixologist. “Savage’s job is to devise drinks lists and cocktail recipes for Prada events and stores across the world.” I’m very curious as to why this article was in Elite Traveler? (What the hell is Elite Traveler?)

Read more

Sorry, but I’ve never looked at a woman wearing Pleats Please and thought “Chic!” It’s somewhere on the dumpy axis between airport-functional and millennial accountant. It’s so thin… However, one only has to see one photo of Tina Chow to covet Fortuny. (Covet being the operative word. Price upon request is really going out of style.) The difference in quality is clear in photos, and in drape. I’ve avoided the pleated style completely, not wanting the budget option nor the premium.

Read more

Read more

• My husband, though tolerant of my enthusiasm generally, drew the line at seeing Romeo and Juliet in London last week at The Harold Pinter Theatre. He had many reasons for this. (“The problem with even high school productions is they don’t use swords.”) As predicted by the media, I was impressed by the wildly contemporary Juliet, played by Sadie Sink, 24. After the production, my friend Rosa Lyster gently nudged me on the tube, and sure enough, there was darling Romeo reading Pale Fire and making unsubtle eye contact with all the women clutching programs. Unfortunately I was wearing my stupid fan scarf. Not how I thought middle age would look on me, but here we are.

• Speaking of contemporaneity, I thought this roundup of “important aesthetic enhancements” by Patrik Sandberg was a must read. It’s so important to vaguely know what’s going on. (I disagree that Harry Nuriev is important, just for the record.)

  

• Romeo + Juliet director Baz Luhrmann has designed an Art Deco train carriage on the British Pullman. There’s a cocktail bar and a private chef, and it costs £17,500 to book it for a single day trip for twelve guests. That you can only travel within the UK (Oxford, York, Chatsworth, Bath), I suppose, is beside the point. (They have a special vertical for marriage proposals.) Speaking of Baz, I’m still thinking about the costumes in The Great Gatsby. Miuccia’s greatest work?

• Sofia Coppola’s publicist Bumble Ward e-mailed me a link to Nina Stibbe’s Diary on Substack. “I have been howling with laughter at this.” Could not agree more. So fun. (“S fed up with new bloke: this morning e.g. he clacked the toast tongs at her boobs, and made a honking noise. RD was livid hearing this.”)

  

Read more

• Surrender Dorothy—the hippest secondhand shop in New York right now—has sourced a grail: The irreverent Kenzo dress worn by Isabelle Adjani at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981. Polkadots and stripes. (Maybe the sunglasses make the outfit? I often think of Anne Slater’s blue-tinted Lucite glasses. She bought 36 pairs.)

  

• My dear friend Aurel Schmidt did an interview about her ass. Commission her to draw your pet.

  

Read more

The rumor in England is that this short story in The Drift is a thinly-veiled admission of an affair with Nick Laird, a.k.a. Mr. Zadie Smith. Who is to say. There’s certainly something pathetic about the protagonist (“if only she could afford pedicures”), and the details are vaguely reminiscent of the scenario as we might imagine it (although the professions have been switched to Hollywood):

“My wife,” he’d said that first night, after the opening, when they sat in the hotel bar, his arm heavy on Marie’s shoulders. The pause after those two words gave them the heft of a full sentence. “My wife and I have been married too long to not be honest with each other.” After that, his voice smoothed out. They’d married young, they loved each other with a placid adherence uncommon in their industry (he was a screenwriter, his wife’s frequent collaborator), so they would never divorce, but both marriage and life could become, for certain years or decades, exercises in endurance: of tedium, or of everything being perfectly good, even great.

In the short story, “Zadie Smith” asks her husband to text her a photo of the narrator, and rather wins the exchange: “When his phone buzzed a few minutes later, he’d reported, ‘She says, very Gen-Z.’ A damning verdict, though he’d insisted it wasn’t.” I will admit I felt like they—Zadie and Nick—were capable of playing games when they both named their books with the same title (Feel Free), damning his to SEO hell. Or maybe publicity heaven? His was, after all, an unsellable poetry book anyway.

All I’ll say is Zadie Smith does seem to be having fun lately, singing on a Dev Hynes album, claiming she doesn’t read books by men, and… letting her husband have affairs with middling writers? Why not.

Bad Book, Good Book

It feels ridiculous to recommend a Pulitzer Prize winning book, but to make up for it, I’ll trash one of the nominees first. I had read that a book about a creative writing professor at Princeton whose two sons killed themselves had won. (I somehow knew the author grew up in China.) In my haste to buy it on Kindle before I lost service on the subway, I bought Bibliophobia via one-click. It begins with a Chinese woman in the psych ward (“It wasn’t a surprise that I ended up in the hospital”) who is having trouble completing a book that she needs to write to secure tenure. Expected! But the tone immediately set me on edge. Also the premise revealed itself to be unbelievably stupid. (She loves books so much it’s killing her?) I realized at the end of chapter one I was reading the wrong book, and the book was very bad. Don’t believe me, read on:

Imagine taking the time to write this self-congratulatory slop. Like I literally can’t imagine bothering to write this down. It’s somehow the equivalent of saying in an interview that you read the backs of cereal boxes as a child.

Anyway, I got a refund from Amazon, and bought the correct book: Things in Nature Merely Grow. I’m pleased to announce it’s a perfect book about an unbelievable, unimaginable tragedy. (Your son kills himself at 16, his younger brother inexplicably—or explicably, the book takes pains to ask direct questions—kills himself six years later.) The boys themselves are fascinating creatures. Sure, brilliant, funny, wise, but also remote and silly. Even special. Here she is talking to her eldest son Vincent, who killed himself first:

Read more

I went to a third tier all-girls’ school in New York. (The school is the only bumper sticker on my car, since technically I don’t hold any other degrees, something I remember whenever I have to check off “high school graduate” at the doctor’s office.) Besides automatic expulsion for anyone who lit a match and school-sanctioned hazing against any non-Senior who took the shortcut across the main green on the way to class, one of the silliest rules was that you could not give away school merch at the end of the year. Ostensibly because they didn’t want the townspeople wearing it? This wouldn’t seem like such a big deal except there was no event on campus for which we did not make merch. I had quiz team T-shirts, a T-shirt to commemorate the time I fed the homeless, a T-shirt for my hallway, a T-shirt for the senior play (I played Devil #3), a T-shirt for my class (‘09), a T-shirt for every sport (we were required to play three), etc. Now they have an online store. How times change!

I will always love obscure high school merch, and not-so-obscure college merch. In college, Elizabeth Gumport and I swapped our hauls—my Emma Willard for her Dalton. A generic Harvard sweatshirt is nice, a la Princess Diana, but I treasure my Celtics-Lampoon hoodie, which a guy mailed to me. I used to have a Harvard Advocate sweatshirt, but I lost it. It’s rather a departure from the norm that Phillips Academy Andover sells so much merchandise online.

Speaking of, I’ve been meaning to pick up a copy of this post-Oxbridge novel.

Links

• “You’re famously one of the most successful assistants in fashion history.” Great piece of Phoebe Philo lore. I had never heard of “ragga” before; I didn’t know her husband went to Eton; or that she started in painting at CSM. I clicked through on all the shopping links to old Chloé outfits, and came across this great high-end second-hand website. (They have this eskimo coat costume that I once used to illustrate an article on winter. Imagine doing cocaine in this!)

  

• Norwegian shorts. For men who are sick of Patagonia.

• What Should a Facelift Cost? “Over the past five years, the price of gold has soared by nearly 140 percent, and the price of a Chanel classic flap bag has nearly doubled. But those are nothing compared to the cost of a facelift from one of the leading purveyors, which has jumped by 400 percent as measured in Kris Jenner time.” $500,000 to be exact.

  

• Sophie Raseman—Gift Guide’s favorite parent blogger—recommends Manon Balberg, a toy store in Corsica. I like the simple mobiles. There’s an anti-complexity movement happening in the children’s space that will endure. I suppose this fits into the discourse: “The Era of the Tiger Mom is Over. Enter the Beta Mom.” (“Bs are fine...she isn’t stressed by getting her kids into the right college.”)

  

• There’s a Wallace Shawn retrospective at Metrograph. A national treasure. “There are many, many roads that could lead one to Wallace Shawn—be it Andre Gregory’s incredulous dinner companion in My Dinner with André, the indelible voice of Rex the dinosaur in Toy Story, or Blair Waldorf’s charming stepfather in Gossip Girl…” I would argue that The Designated Mourner is a must-see, screening this Friday! (“In an unnamed Western country riven by civil war sometime in the near future, the ruling crypto-fascist oligarchy has labeled all intellectuals as potential subversives.”)

  

• Actress Hari Nef was on the host committee for the New York City Ballet Spring Gala. Two tags stood out to me: Jimena Brows and the custom couturier Miss Claire Sullivan. (You’ll remember Addison Rae in that puffy white bra by the brand; she has dressed a lot of celebs since her days in Vaquera.) I realized I have no idea what Timothée actually said about the ballet, so I looked it up: “I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this any more.’” Fair?

Guide to Prague

The only editorial guideline on Gift Guide is that I post 120 times a year—so the math works out to $1/post, the cost of a cup of coffee in New York City in 2009, the year I moved there—which means there is no rule against unsolicited submissions. Not that I want to open the floodgates! But I received a blog post about Prague from longtime reader Michal Martínek, who “recently packed up and moved back to his hometown of Prague after 25 years living in Los Angeles and working in high-end retail.” Enjoy!

• The Man in Seat 61, a meticulous and fun site by a former British Rail employee, lets you research and book train travel on the European continent and beyond. It’s good for practical info like connections and ticket prices, as well as for dreaming up off-the-beaten-track, slow-travel itineraries. Use Prague as your central starting point and play with going in all directions.

Read more

Claudia is a PhD student in the English department at Columbia, where she studies 20th century psychoanalytic literature (including the exciting genre of “patient memoir”). She’s written for us a roving guide to 2 crime series. If you like what you read, you can follow her detective genre Substack here:

The Body in the Library

By Claudia Grigg Edo

Fake Crime Girl by Claudia Grigg Edo

I am in the last year of a PhD program, which means I should be finishing my dissertation, which means I am trying to do everything but. I have found, or been found by, two completely underrated book series in the “detective” genre. (No, I didn’t think I liked crime novels either, but hear me out.) These are perfect if you are trying to avoid anything in your life because they are gripping, beautifully written short books in a long series. Travis McGee has 21 books, Nero Wolfe has 47!

Travis McGee

The Travis McGee series is by John D. MacDonald. He went to Wharton and Harvard Business School before his loving, perspicacious wife was like, “you should just write.” She had clearly seen (and hopefully been the beneficiary of) John D.’s romantic cowboy streak. The hero of his novels was going to be called Dallas McGee, but became “Travis” when JFK was shot in Dallas.

Travis is a big (6’4’’ and broad), sexy beach bum1 with leathery skin scarred by mishap and sandy romps. Think bulked Matthew McConaughey in ’70s Fort Lauderdale, on a boobytrapped houseboat he won in a poker game.McGee is, crucially, not a detective but a “salvage consultant,” i.e. if someone took something from you, he helps you get it back but he keeps half for himself.

The books were written from the 1960s to 1985. Trav is a perennial bachelor but nevertheless struggles to leave behind the mores of the 1950s. He sleeps with a lot of beautiful women, but only when he’s really in love. Often the relationship is a sort of sexual rehabilitation program; he finds a distressed woman on his travels and coaxes her out of her frigidity. Soon she’s tanned and fishing off the side of the boat, with sandy knees and sexual preferences. And, just like a James Bond film ends with a dead girlfriend, a Travis McGee book usually ends with a gently mutual decision that the no-strings-attached houseboat fling just can’t last, for both their sakes. She is released back into the wild.

John D. brings his Harvard MBA to these Florida romps. This book has lists. You become familiar with the resources being pumped in and out of the South East, the demographic trends, the many different bureaucratic minefields for a romantic libertarian like Travis, who avoids owning a credit card and having his address registered. You might accidentally learn how to operate a 22-foot T-Craft (“with twin Chrysler-Volvo inboard, outboards, 120 horsepower each”). Boys love these books. Boys have been blogging about them since blogs looked like this:

But—I’m telling the Gift Guide girls—the books are a truly delightful trip into a certain kind of male fantasy and male panic. (The fantasies and panics of a guy who knows certain promises are empty, but is also very scared of the emptiness of not promising anything.) They are beautifully plotted with a perfect recurring cast of houseboat neighbors, including the Alabama Tiger who hosts “the longest floating house-party in the world” aboard the ‘Bama Girl. And my favourite, Meyer, a hairy, semi-retired economist (and Travis’s bff) who lives on the John Maynard Keynes. Most importantly, these books are written like a dash of syrup in an Old Fashioned—cold and shockingly good—at a Key Largo beachside bar with a radio playing only commercials. Or something like that, I’ve never been there.

There used to be a yearly John D. MacDonald Conference in Sarasota!! I bought a poster for my room on eBay and I dream of a resurrected conference, and dropping my PhD research and delivering a paper titled “Why is Travis so Big?” or “Sandy Toes and In the Throes.” (Maybe I’d wear a chic white linen set or a silk robe in psychedelic or animal print?) This future Florida pilgrimage would involve a sad visit to the waterside home of John D. MacDonald at 1430 Point Crisp Rd on Siesta Key, Sarasota, which used to look like this:

And now looks like this:

It would also include a trip to Slip F-18 Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale where Travis’s boat The Busted Flush2 was docked. When you tell people you want to go to Fort Lauderdale they seem nonplussed. (Miami—lots of recommendations. Key West—“don’t miss Hemingway’s house.” Fort Lauderdale stumps even the gifted recommender, but I only have optimistic associations.)

Years ago, a friend in LA was sharing an apartment with a woman who met her boyfriend on Instagram. They were long distance, so they sent each other cute things in the mail to pass the time apart. Finally, she left the city and drove across the country to live with him in Fort Lauderdale. I moved into her room, and there was one memento left from their courtship. A Walgreens print-your-own-mug he had sent her with a photo of him sniffing the underwear she had sent him. I’m pretty sure that object disproves Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism. Ergo Fort Lauderdale is clearly a center of romance.

Nero Wolfe

So, I became addicted to the Travis McGee series. Like all addicts, I thought this glut (21 books) would last me forever. And, like all addicts, I ran out.

I tried a lot of substitutes. I read everything by Dashiell Hammett (the only great one is Red Harvest). Raymond Chandler, of course (too familiar, too wry). Seichō Matsumoto (the detective is often several steps behind the reader—I’m too impatient for this). I read Dorothy Sayers’ In a Lonely Place (don’t like it when the murderer is the narrator, sorry), several Agatha Christies (nostalgia), some Ross MacDonald (the name got me hopeful, but no).

I complained about my Travis McGee problem to everyone I met, which only had the effect of getting other people hooked. Finally, god bless him, friend and writer Andrew Martin (check out his latest novel Down Time) told me about another long detective series, recommended to him by writer David Gates (of the amazing novel Jernigan). The Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout. 47 books!! They’re set in New York, starting in the 1930s. I’m on #17 and we’re in the late 40s now, but—like in the Sims on cheat mode—our main characters never age.

In the first book, Fer-de-Lance (which is also the only dud so far, skip it), Nero Wolfe is introduced as “huge.” What the hell, I asked my boyfriend, is the male crime writer’s obsession with the size of his hero? Travis McGee is enormous. I’ve never read any of the Jack Reacher books but I know he is 6’5’’. (I watched a clip from the show where they conveyed this by panning slowly up his body like he was Mount Rushmore.) Anyway, it turned out I was wrong, Nero Wolfe is not hugely tall but tremendously fat. He is a detective who never leaves the house, so the books are narrated by his charming and motivated run-around man, Archie Goodwin (6 feet tall).

Archie goes out into the world and then comes back home to Wolfe’s brownstone on West 35th Street and recounts what (murder, intrigue) went on. You’d think the book would be interested in unreliable narration, but Archie always gives a perfect account, to Wolfe and to us. The site of instability in these books is not the action but Nero Wolfe’s response. Firstly, Wolfe is a genius, but a lazy genius—he can only be roused into solving a murder by pride, financial necessity, or the promise of either good food or a rare orchid for his collection.3 Secondly, he’s temperamental and prone to what Archie calls a “relapse.”4 Finally, even when he is working, he keeps cards close to chest until, Poirot style, he has everyone gathered around his desk, and sparks fly.

Archie—an energetic, high-dopamine guy, perpetually in his early thirties, on a high-protein, high-fat diet from the live-in Swiss chef—is Wolfe’s impatient cattle-prod but also his most tender reader. When Wolfe has his eyes open, Archie knows he isn’t listening. Narrowed eyes mean he’s interested. When his lips move in and out, like a soundless whistle (or suckling) it means he’s really on to something, and Archie’s heart speeds up. “That was about the only time I ever got excited, when Wolfe’s lips were moving like that.”

The books are not exactly homoerotic. Homophilic? Archie perceives and protects Wolfe’s desires and bodily comforts. Nero Wolfe’s great loves are food and orchids. He is terrified of women. He specifically believes that women are incapable of domesticity. The idea of a woman in the kitchen horrifies him.

In part, these are books about just how much infrastructure you need to compensate for the absence of women. You need ten thousand orchids in a greenhouse conversion on the top floor of your brownstone, and a gardener who sleeps with them. You need a personal chef making eggs au beurre noire on bone china for breakfast and roast pheasant for dinner, a large library, a superlatively comfortable custom-made office chair, yellow silk sheets, yellow silk pajamas, six quarts of beer a day, and a handsome live-in male assistant to be entertained and irritated by. But still, women are always appearing, as clients, as witnesses or suspects, accidentally summoned.5

Because of Wolfe’s exorbitant fees, these women are mostly the daughters and wives of men who made their millions in mining, sewage, newspapers, gelatin. There are a couple of self-made women—a consummate radio host and New York’s best party planner, both victims of blackmail. The 1940s weren’t a great fashion decade, but we hear a lot about their sports coats, veils and ankles. The evening scene sounds great. Dinner at the fictional Rusterman’s (on 49th somewhere between Park and Fifth), drinks at the Flamingo Room or the Hotel Churchill’s Resort Room. These were the days (nights) of phoning ahead to the bar to see if your suspect/love interest is there. Imagine!

New York City Nero Wolfe Fan Club

Read more

• I’ve got very into wordy rings and bracelets in heavy gold. Aurora Lopez Mejia’s “talismans” in particular. A Buddhist from Guadalajara, she insists on collaborations—you can’t just purchase, I don’t think. You’re supposed to list your “concerns and longings.” Email: auroralmejia@gmail.com to book a consultation. Her instagram is here.

• The best review of Ben Lerner’s Transcription was in Artforum of all places. Written by (of all people!) Gemma Sieff, whose debut novel, Dear Charlie, will be published by FSG next year. I read an early draft of the novel. I can’t describe it any other way than the first novel that everyone hopes first novels will be but they just never are. (Maybe because most people are forced to publish them in their twenties.) Speaking of debut novels by Gen X women, The Hill was “superb”—to quote James Wood. Written by Harriet Clark, who must be 46 years old? I like this trend.

Read more

• How do you buy the Withnail and I Coat? From the costume designer who made the original of course! If you really enjoy the film—and who doesn’t, anyone can crib a personality just from watching it—a hilarious bit of anti-tourism is driving by Uncle Monty’s cabin, Crow Crag. I did this by accident. It was pointed out to me by all the men in the car. (“Sleddale Hall sits on quite a steep slope with some aptly named hills behind it: Bleak Hill and Willy Winder.”)

• “Stealth Wealth Is Over. Niche Riche Is In.” Trend piece by Marisa Meltzer about the popularity of brands with Interesting goods and “small retail footprints.” Galerie Estrada, Shiprock, Thank You Have a Good Day, etc. I’m here for any store where you can get the attention you deserve while shopping, and any item of clothing that other people might struggle to source.

  

• “If we’re so sad, why are we still spending.” A humdinger of an article by Hanna Horvath about what it feels like in America right now vis a vis spending. (“The experience of financial scarcity reduces effective IQ by roughly 13 points.”) I learned a lot of new vocabulary. I think this piece helped explain my own behaviors to me (“multi-job normalization” for instance). Recently, I put myself on a very strict budget and adjusted payroll; if I want more money, I have to email my accountant and ask for more. It’s a good way to grab back control when very few things we buy provide the serotonin boost we were promised!

• Like Joan Didion before her, novelist Madeline Cash stars in a GAP ad. This makes me like GAP! Nothing else they’ve done so far has moved me at all, although I did enjoy the (somewhat premature!) Zac Posen profile in the New Yorker. “Prodigy syndrome” is the stuff of novels. (Also the concept of “the family loft.”) Someone send me a GAP sweatshirt.

  

Read more

Read more

Lev’s Substack diary about writing—which I read religiously but he seems to be stopping because it “isn’t popular”!—had an interesting segue this week about the current state of the publishing industry:

Dark if true. I read another interesting Substack piece on the state of publishing (by someone I’d never heard of). He's looking at the most popular books in the industry, and what that actually means.

“The first [observation] is just how ephemeral books are. Relatively speaking, books are these stable shrines of meaning in a sea of ever-faster churning content. Even so, it is remarkable to reflect on what was a “giant book” at the time and see its influence fade so quickly. The second observation is the remarkable growth of the fiction market over the last ten years. 10,000-20,000 hardcover copies could still be a book that dominated conversation, visibility and influence back in 2016. Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends sold less than 10,000 hardcover copies in its first year (less than 20,000 hardcovers total) while being one of the most important novels of 2017….If the hot novels of each year of the decade are ephemeral, most of nonfiction is especially ephemeral.”

I find it fascinating to think about the trad publishing industry just because of how little I interact with it. I don’t want to say I despise it, but I definitely hold it in contempt. With a few exceptions. I read Sally Rooney1 and Amor Towles2 and Emma Cline and Ann Patchett3, because they’re serious people doing serious things, but I get lost after that.4 (I like the short stories or non-fiction dalliances by several big writers on this list better than their actual novels, so I’ll exclude them.) There is a heartening thesis in this piece: A big novel doesn’t necessarily have a long tail in the public’s imagination. You can be everywhere and not change anyone’s life. Reading it is kind of like walking down memory lane and remembering all the books I staunchly ignore each year. Maybe that will be a fun experience for you as well…

Transcription

Both of these essays stuck out to me because I clocked, as I read, that the new Ben Lerner is noticeably short (130 pages) and weirdly popular. It’s also AMAZING. A must-read. Rare for (what I would describe, in my circle, as) an extremely popular book. I usually don’t bother recommending anything that’s all over instagram, but in this case—much like Flesh—I was relieved to see that a book was getting attention that deserved attention. I’m not a massive Ben Lerner fan or even a reluctant one. (I think my hatred of pot smoking clouded that book set in Spain. I will now buy The Topeka School, which I had skipped, even if I loved this profile timed to it.)

I will be re-reading Transcription.

I had read it was about technology, a topic I’m not interested in fiction being about. It’s true that the plot hinges on a broken iPhone. The narrator goes to interview his aging mentor unequipped, and, embarrassed, lies about recording their interview. At first, you think Lerner is high on his own supply: You read a long rambling (albeit philosophically interesting) conversation with the aging scholar. This goes on for many pages. It reminded me of Cusk’s “strange conversations with strangers” bit. (Unfortunately, I prefer her ramblings to his.) But then the book takes off. It has some of the most expert plotting I can remember. The unrecorded conversation—and later, the lie that it was transcribed—serves as the drama of the novel. Which I love. I prefer a bougie book. And it certainly is one. The chapters are named after hotels; there’s a “I’m rich and my child has an eating disorder” subplot that thrills; a poorly thought through eulogy is an entire section of the book; there’s an Ivy League love story; “wine-stained beige cushions” and subscriptions to The Song Cave.

None of this quite explains why I love the novel so much. I think there’s a delicacy to Lerner’s writing, in particular about the fragility of human relations, that really moves me. There’s a lot of tension between people in his books—tension they’re often trying and failing to overcome. He does the conversations around petty frustrations and minor betrayals better than anyone. Here it’s between fathers and sons and parents and their children and mentors and students. It’s everyday stuff.

Don’t skip it!

Our next book club is a NEW CAMPUS NOVEL // Zoom for US // June pub meetup in London

Read more

If you aren’t familiar with the Wooster group, I would start by reading this profile of Eliza…

Read more

Ottessa Moshfegh has announced her separation from her husband on Substack Notes. Classily, she links to his account of events.

Read more