Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Didion is one of those rare writers who challenges you as much at the gut level as she does intellectually. And in the case of PLAY IT AS IT LAYS, I think it would be more interesting, more fulfilling, to feel it in the stomach, rather than to simply process it in the head. It is indeed 'a ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s', as the blurb promises, and its unflinching portrayal of West Coast culture might even make Snoop Dogg and his homies blanch; but to limit it to being a sociological commentary on sex, drugs and movie-making, Hollywood style, would be to limit its greatness. What makes this a work of utter brilliance is how Didion can evoke such profound and precise emotional responses from her readers.

Maria Wyeth is a failed Hollywood actor. Alone in a world full of people, she is estranged not just from her husband, but from her young daughter, her lovers, her friends. She is adrift in space and in time. Maria's alienation becomes ours from the moment the book begins. Characters float in, then slip out of the narrative before we can grasp them--before we're ready to let them go. In short, brisk scenes that are almost cinematic in style and structure we are shunted between city and desert, past and present, and left in the end in some strange nowhere. This, I think, is the real success of this work. Like Maria, we are not granted the privilege of knowing or understanding her world; the only way we engage with it is by feeling it. And, like Maria, we are benumbed by it, so we can only really feel what cuts to the bone.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Thankfully, Ian McEwan appears to have resurrected himself from the posturing and artifice of SATURDAY. Set in the Sixties in still stiff England, when lust and anger were barely acknowledged, let alone allowed full and free expression, his most recent work, ON CHESIL BEACH, traces the first night spent between newly weds Florence and Edward in a hotel on the Dorset coast. Fear and restraint, revulsion and desire play in almost wordless counterpoint as the two virgins negotiate their wedding night: silences betray more than people’s chatter. What makes this novella particularly disturbing is that, try as you might to maintain a readerly distance, you can’t simply linger in the role of listener or voyeur; you are forcefully, and somewhat insidiously, sucked in to become part of the (in)action. And, remarkably, this is wrought in a dispassionate and acutely crafted manner--high McEwan style, as it were.

Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf

CONGENIAL SPIRITS: THE SELECTED LETTERS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF has remained by my bedside for 11 years now. Whether she writes on writing or love, politics or household crises, Woolf is warm, original and sharp as a tack. But it isn’t just her wit, her wisdom and her acuity that make her exceptional. It is also that she is vulnerable and crazy. What could make for a better correspondent?

With the single exception of my present partner, this volume of her letters is about the finest bedtime experience I’ve ever had. And for those less of the flesh, I’ll put it this way: This collection is for me what the bible probably is for others: nightly enrichment. Virginia Woolf is the man--and I know she'd love me for saying that.