Tennis geeks, stupid aristocrats, family cruelty and fashion terrorists

A.k.a. the books I read in January. So far it’s been an excellent year for travel and reading. Of course the two are connected, and not just because they keep one sane while sitting in airports. 

Books and travel occupy the same headspace, a kind of voluptuous solitude. Think of a novel as a parallel universe in which the characters are as real as you are, and the author gets to be Fate. Or a time machine in which months, years, centuries transpire in the time it takes you to finish a book. 

It took me three weeks to finish Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, which covers 30 years in the life of its protagonist. The atmosphere is so vivid you want to put on a thick sweater, the characters so life-like you expect to run into them on the street (and punch some of them in the face). You could probably speed-read Great Expectations, but you’d miss the experience of having lived in 18th-century London.

Before heading to the Australian Open I read my favorite literary tennis writer, David Foster Wallace. Nabokov and Martin Amis have written passages on tennis, but Wallace not only set his masterpiece in a tennis academy, he wrote about the game with an obsessive geek passion that almost makes your head explode. In his essay collection Consider the Lobster, a review of retired tennis star Tracy Austin’s autobiography turns into a meditation on why great sports champions make such bland, banal pronouncements.

Tina Fey’s Bossypants is as funny as a 30 Rock episode; Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding very engaging if a bit too sweet for my mood. I’ve been stocking up on P.G. Wodehouse’s books, and I zipped through a best-of-Wodehouse anthology before I realized I should save his stories for when I need cheering up. 

For instance, while reading Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn. It is the fourth in his Patrick Melrose series, but each novel can be read alone. (I haven’t read the first three.) Patrick Melrose, of a very old and once fabulously wealthy family, is a 40-year-old lawyer who has been assigned to disinherit himself. His ailing mother, who lives in a retirement home, has fallen under the spell of a New Age “shaman” and has signed over her house in France to his foundation. With the casual cruelty of people who want to be good, she strips her son of the last of his fortune. 

Brilliantly vicious, Mother’s Milk is the tale of a man trying not to pass the family poison down to his young sons. Much has been made of the autobiographical content of the Melrose books  the St. Aubyns have been aristocrats since the Norman Conquest (the books turn reviewers into society columnists)  but it’s the prose that you can’t stop reading though it flays you alive. 

I had to stop every hundred pages or so to recover my faith in humanity by reading Wodehouse’s Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen. Like St. Aubyn, Wodehouse writes about rich people, but nothing really bad happens in his universe. No matter what silliness the aristocrats perpetrate, their servants are there to save the day. 

(Newsflash: The previous Melrose novels are hard to find but my contact at National Book Store says a one-volume omnibus including the recently-published final novel At Last will soon be available.)

Unlike many novels by Fil-Americans, Alex Gilvarry’s From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant does not have a plucky exotic naif fleeing his miserable island home to build a new life in the land of the free, blah, blah, blah. Freedom is the last thing Boyet Hernandez finds in post-9/11 America when the financier of his start-up fashion house is arrested for links to terror groups. 

Designer Boyet is thrown into a cell in Guantanamo, where he writes everything he can remember of his life in America from the time he landed at JFK in 2002 to the night agents of Homeland Security broke down his door and hauled him away without telling him the charges. From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant is a strange mix of fashion and politics held together by humor and a deep understanding of the world we live in now. A hilarious novel about what the War on Terror has wrought  it’s about time.