Adam Mars-Jones's Blog, page 3

Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir by Greg Bellow – review

Greg Bellow's memoir about his father Saul lacks literary weight

If the real children of great men and women are their deeds (their books, in the case of writers), where does that leave mere flesh and blood? Stranded, with a sense of profound but broken connection. This state is likely to become permanent with the death of the parent, but Greg Bellow got used to it early. His father left the first Mrs Bellow, Anita, when Greg was eight.

Greg Bellow is a retired psychotherapist, someone who has made damage and healing his life's work. He should be well placed to reconcile his father's contradictions, or to reconcile himself to them, though it doesn't work out that way. Therapists don't necessarily understand their own drives, any more than novelists, also traders in insight, necessarily understand theirs.

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The City of Devi by Manil Suri – review

A love triangle, a religio-racial apocalypse and an action thriller jostle for attention in Manil Suri's ambitious new novel

Manil Suri's ambitious new novel brings together an unusual love triangle, a religio-racial Mumbai apocalypse and an action thriller. "Brings together" seems more accurate than "blends", since the elements fight each other more than they get along. The opening is narrated by Sarita, separated from her husband Karun at a time of political crisis and social meltdown. The first thing she does is to buy a pomegranate, at an exorbitant price, and defends her possession of it with a devotion that seems excessive even when it is revealed that she used it in the past (following a tip from The Kama Sutra) to amplify Karun's rather muted sexual interest.

India has been invaded by China, its troops pouring through the northeastern frontier, and then by Pakistan. The UN forced the withdrawal of China (acting in concert with Pakistan all along), but Pakistan stayed put. Then cyber-attacks disabled many institutions, including computer networks, so that mobile phones and the internet packed up. In these circumstances, with nuclear warfare looming, no reaction can be described as normal, but fixation on the powers of fruit is a hard one to share.

The thriller aspect has been well plotted, but its horrific aspects must be downplayed if the romantic triangle is to remain the focus. Set pieces become sketchy and even massacres arouse little reaction. Providential turns of event reliably rescue the main characters, as if this was a romp, though, not a comedy.

Sarita's narrative alternates with contributions from a Muslim man named Ijaz ("Jaz" or "the Jazter"). Jaz too is obsessed with finding Karun, and shadows Sarita across Mumbai, intent on following her clues and getting to him first. He's an ex-lover of Karun's, rejected after he reverted to his previous type and was unfaithful.

Indian homosexuality is enough of a taboo subject that it's bracing to read about Jaz's happy days of cruising in Hyderabad, where he would never know what language his partners might use at the moment of orgasm, quite possibly Urdu or Telegu or a mix of both ("only the techies came in English"). Yet the sexual psychology is always thin. It's not just that Jaz is an amoral predator redeemed by his love for a nice physicist, it's that his amoral predation was accompanied by an unwavering commitment, however frantic the carnal context, to safe sex. Here Manil Suri seems to be backing away, presumably to avoid reinforcing negative stereotypes, from the destructiveness that is just as much a part of homosexuality as of heterosexuality. Snooky, the incongruous lady-boy Muslim (and terrorist fellow-traveller) narrator of Timothy Mo's recent Pure, is a much more complex creation, and much more alive.

Karun is hardly even a sketch for a character. His attraction for Sarita is bound up with "the passivity at the core of his being, his need to be a conduit", but for the reader he seems closer to a blank. When Sarita refers to him as "the third vertex in our triangle", it seems all too accurate. He's part of a design not a drama.

There's a rather self-conscious passage early in the book in which Karun lectures Sarita on the Trimurti, the Hindu trinity of Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma, representing forces of preservation, destruction and creation. It's self-conscious because Karun, who proposes substituting Devi for Brahma, does so in a novel with Devi in its title by an author whose previous novels are The Death of Vishnu and The Age of Shiva. This mechanism serves to neutralise the most interesting element in the book by offering a symbolic resolution, with forces balanced "as evenly as the particles in an atom", a new trinity combining male and female, Muslim and Hindu, gay and straight. Readers of The City of Devi are encouraged to look beyond the sordid details, like queasy museum visitors being reassured by the curator that apparently pornographic sculpture really only represents the harmony of the cosmos.

FictionThrillersIndiaHinduismAdam Mars-Jones
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Noise by David Hendy and The Story of Music by Howard Goodall – review

Two lively books about how sound has shaped us make Adam Mars-Jones wish for a little less static

One theory about the development of our brains is that reliance on hearing played a large part in it, at a time when we were tree-dwellers vulnerable and fearful at night – since sound, needing to be measured over time, requires more processing power than visual information. Neither of these ambitious and complementary books goes back quite so far, though they start from the same recent discovery about the distant past: that prehistoric wall paintings coincide with the spots of maximum resonance within caves. Artistic expression in its earliest visual form was a response to richness experienced through the ears.

Each book is the published accompaniment to a series in another medium, Noise being a commission from Radio 4, while The Story of Music has just finished its run on BBC2. Howard Goodall has form not just as a presenter (with the excellent Big Bangs) but as a composer. If anyone could bring off a survey of music that, while it obviously can't hope to include everything, doesn't exclude any musical style or event in advance, then it has to be him. Even the most rushed whistlestop tour of the subject would have to make time for a halt outside the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in May 1913 for the première of The Rite of Spring, but Goodall manages to find space to discuss another Stravinsky score, Les Noces from 1923, whose soundworld he regards as even more influential.

The idea is to assume no prior knowledge of the subject, but in practice there's some awkwardness. The reader who needs to be told that Benjamin Britten was a "mid-20th-century English composer" is likely to be baffled by the information that Scriabin's Prometheus has affinities with Stravinsky's Firebird. At his best, Goodall has a facility for lively shorthand, as when he describes the three most commonly used chords (tonic, dominant and subdominant) as "music's primary colours", or compares Haydn's "delightfully proportioned amusements" for Prince Esterházy with Capability Brown's garden layouts and Robert Adam's architecture.

When this facility falters the result is a soundbite without teeth. Very little information is conveyed by describing The Threepenny Opera as "a kind of Trainspotting for the late 1920s" – and it hardly illuminates Salome to be told that with this score "in one fell swoop, Strauss had transformed himself from the genteel Kapellmeister of the Austrian Belle Epoque into the Che Guevara of the musical rebels".

The desire to isolate turning points and symbolic moments is understandable, but it needs to be managed tactfully. It's fair enough, though routine, to single out the success of Rhapsody in Blue on record as culturally significant (a million copies sold in 1927), but ridiculous to counterpoint it with Mussolini ordering Boccherini's remains to be repatriated from Madrid to Lucca in the same year, in order to produce this rhetorical flourish: "It may be a cliche but the melting pot of the United States proved, in its domination of 20th-century music, that leaving behind nationalistic distinctions in search of a collective voice was by far the more fruitful choice." The 20th-century material is probably the weakest, just where it needs to hold its own against the competition from Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise.

Goodall's anti-elitism is mainly refreshing, but sometimes he overdoes it. He pillories the surrealistic ballet Parade, for instance – music by Satie, scenario by Cocteau, sets and costumes by Picasso – on the basis of the offensiveness ("How cut off from reality had the arts world become?"), of offering something so frivolous to a Parisian public in May 1917, with the second battle of the Aisne raging only 100 miles away. It's one thing to dislike Parade, and even to say that "music's flirtation with surrealism was short-lived" (though what is Einstein on the Beach but surrealism in music?). But you can't really claim to take the first world war more seriously than those who lived through it. Satie was in his 50s, and Picasso as a Spaniard was exempt from  military service, though his close colleague Braque was badly injured in 1915. Cocteau, though not a combatant, was assigned to the ambulance service, and spent the whole winter of 1915-16 at the front.

Is it elitist to find film music, hailed by Goodall as the vindication of classical music's vitality as a language, by and large disastrous in its empty emoting? When music is reduced to telling audiences what to feel then both film and score are impoverished. The effect is clear enough in the TV programmes on which this book is based. We're so used to music supporting images that the opposite process, of images illuminating music, struggles to get off the ground. Even the last episode of the series, for which archive sources are rich, gave the impression of being a radio programme cluttered with optical interference. Big Bangs, especially the programme devoted to "Bass", showed that a thematic approach suited the medium – and Goodall – much better than a dogged historical survey.

David Hendy's Noise is chronologically arranged, but with a less defined subject, he can interweave themes more freely. In one section he brings together the naturalist John Muir, finding fault with the behaviour of visitors to Yosemite National Park, and the design of the concert hall at Bayreuth, to show that there were simultaneous moves in America and Europe to police people's experience of the sublime, whether in nature or culture.

Hendy quotes a definition of noise by GWC Kaye as "sound out of place" (though it's hardly more than a paraphrase of the description, variously attributed, of dirt as "matter in the wrong place"). The point is that for a sound to be classified as noise there must be someone doing the classifying. A history of noise can only be a social history, and a history of power.

Noise can sometimes destabilise the power structure. To introduce his discussion of audience dynamics at Roman Games, where there was always the possibility that an orchestrated tribute could turn nasty, Hendy finds an exquisite modern parallel: George Osborne being booed at the Olympic stadium while he waited to hand out medals.

One recurring theme is privacy, and the search for quiet. The rich have been moving away from noise since Roman times; Hendy details the process in 18th-century Edinburgh. Of all the devices described in the book (such as the talking drums and the stethoscope), none is simpler than the bell-pull to summon staff, solving as it did the apparently intractable problem with servants. If they were near enough to be useful they were also near enough to see and hear things they shouldn't.

Occasionally the book gives the impression of being a very classy scissors-and-paste job, with material gathered from any number of other writers. Just because something has appeared in a respectable book doesn't make it true. So Hendy passes on from R Murray Schafer's The Soundscape (1994) the information that William Faulkner was haunted for years after the first world war by the sounds ("little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling") emitted by shattered bodies lying around him on the battlefield. Faulkner wasn't exactly a soldier for truth on any subject, but he did nothing but lie about his supposed war experiences, claiming for instance to have suffered a head injury that made necessary the fitting of a silver plate. You can't even call this sort of tale-spinning embroidery, since embroidery requires a backing cloth, and the war had ended before Faulkner finished his training.

In his discussion of radio, Hendy describes an experiment carried out at Harvard in the 1930s, in which the subjects were divided into two groups – one reading a text, the other hearing it read: "Those who had read the piece were more critical and questioning about the material; those who had heard it over the loudspeakers were more inclined to believe everything that had been broadcast." Since the book was first devised for broadcast, this suggests a delightful recursive process: listeners to Noise nodding their assent while Hendy's voice on the radio tells them, persuasively, how persuasive radio voices are.

The 30 sections of the book are all of the same length, which suggests they correspond quite closely to the scripts. The print version would have benefited from the material being developed more ambitiously: the short span of the sections prevents arguments from being made with the sharpness and sweep of which Hendy is obviously capable. Radio is an extraordinary and intimate medium, but its writers and performers must always keep in mind that very few listeners give their attention undivided, in the way that readers must. On the wall of every talk-radio studio hangs an invisible sign that says "Remember they're probably chopping vegetables".

• Adam Mars-Jones's novel Cedilla is published by Faber. To order Noise and The Story of Music for £12.79 and £16 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

MusicAdam Mars-Jones
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Noise by David Hendy and The Story of Music by Howard Goodall – review

Adam Mars-Jones on two lively books about how music has shaped us

One theory about the development of our brains is that reliance on hearing played a large part in it, at a time when we were tree-dwellers vulnerable and fearful at night – since sound, needing to be measured over time, requires more processing power than visual information. Neither of these ambitious and complementary books goes back quite so far, though they start from the same recent discovery about the distant past: that prehistoric wall paintings coincide with the spots of maximum resonance within caves. Artistic expression in its earliest visual form was a response to richness experienced through the ears.

Each book is the published accompaniment to a series in another medium, Noise being a commission from Radio 4, while The Story of Music has just finished its run on BBC2. Howard Goodall has form not just as a presenter (with the excellent Big Bangs) but as a composer. If anyone could bring off a survey of music that, while it obviously can't hope to include everything, doesn't exclude any musical style or event in advance, then it has to be him. Even the most rushed whistlestop tour of the subject would have to make time for a halt outside the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in May 1913 for the première of The Rite of Spring, but Goodall manages to find space to discuss another Stravinsky score, Les Noces from 1923, whose soundworld he regards as even more influential.

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Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw – review

Tash Aw's tale of five migrant workers carving out lives in a modernising Shanghai is the stuff of a hit TV miniseries

At one point in Tash Aw's fine new novel about what people call "the new China" a young woman is trying to photograph herself on her mobile phone in a park in Guangzhou, hoping to enliven her internet dating profile with an image that doesn't make her look like an immigrant factory worker (which she is). An old man who sells tickets for the rowing boats on the lake offers to take the picture for her. He looks uncertainly at her phone. She wonders if he understands how to work it. Then he says: "This phone is so old. My grandson had one just like this three years ago when he was still in middle school." This is the world of the book, where traditional societies seem to have leapfrogged their way into a modernity without signposts, where the past isn't solid enough to build on but too substantial to be ignored.

The five main characters, three men and two women, all come to Shanghai (by some definitions the world's largest city) from Malaysia, though their backgrounds range from old money to rural deprivation. As a title, Five Star Billionaire is close to brash, and the book's storyline could persuasively be pitched to a producer in search of a blockbuster miniseries, but the reading experience it offers is coolly engrossing – with elements of frustrating evasion – rather than propulsive. Tash Aw doesn't exactly kill plot momentum or the emotional impact of the situations he creates, but he certainly keeps them in check. Narrative hints are often indirect, like clues in a detective story, as when a passing reference to a character having written an article deploring the architecture of Gaudí suggests that a conversation almost a hundred pages earlier wasn't in fact spontaneous.

It's possible to reach the book's final stretch without being sure that this is a story of revenge. If it is, then revenge is being eaten very cold indeed, from the chiller cabinet if not the freezer.

Three of the characters are connected by past events, while the other two, despite similar humble backgrounds, have highly contrasting encounters with Shanghai. Phoebe the factory worker reinvents herself as the manager of an upmarket beauty spa thanks to an appropriated identity card, while Gary the manufactured pop star falls from grace when a drunken outburst in a bar, captured on a mobile phone, punctures his angelic image.

Implosion of this sort is a permanent possibility, in a sense the proper response to Shanghai. Phoebe's roommate Yanyan simply vegetates after losing her job, and the property developer Justin Lim, designated as the family fixer because he's reliable and can hold his drink, has his health break down in a way that has clear existential overtones. Even Phoebe, when she looks down on the city at last from a penthouse apartment, is as much frightened as thrilled. Yes, she can see Shanghai. But Shanghai can see her. She and Gary both feel like fakes, not cheap market-stall knock-offs but the sort of high-grade counterfeit that has its own lesser exclusiveness. Their falsity has become part of their true selves.

The book teems with advice, slogans, formulas for success. Chapters have headings such as "Choose the Right Moment to Launch Yourself" or the more Confucian "A Strong Fighting Spirit Swallows Mountains and Rivers". Phoebe reads self-help books with titles such as Sophistify Yourself or indeed Secrets of a Five Star Billionaire. She makes a list to help her navigate western-style meals ("1 Soup (+ bread). 2 Fish (flat knife). 3 Meat. 4 Cheese. 5 Dessert. 6 Coffee"). Preparing for a date, she decides to "Dress for Sex-Cess", following the advice of one book, while Yanyan, reading from another, tells her that beauty comes from inner confidence. It's never clear, either to the characters or the reader, whether the breakthrough moment comes when people manage to strike a balance between conflicting codes, or when instinct overrides them altogether.

The book is full of missed connections. When Phoebe was a factory worker, for instance, she had a poster of Gary on her wall. After his disgrace he strikes up an internet friendship with her, incognito. She helps him survive emotionally, and gives him the confidence to reinvent himself – though his transformation in a few months from showbiz puppet to singer-songwriter is the only unconvincing strand in the book. He feels she knows the real him, and wants to have no secrets. Can't their counterpointed lives be brought into some sort of harmony?

One of the book's techniques is to describe something from two sides, but with a delay. So Gary's comeback concert in a tiny bohemian venue is described from his point of view, and then 60 pages later as experienced by someone in the audience. The accounts aren't dramatically different, but the delay prevents them from coalescing into a single impression. They're notes that refuse to become a chord, in a way that is characteristic of the book's seductive if slightly perverse preference for the muted and the unresolved, even when portraying the seething life of a city that is more like "a whole continent, with a heart as deep and unknown as the forests of the Amazon and as vast and wild as the deserts of Africa".

But there's never a moment that describes Phoebe's online friendship with the unrecognised Gary from her point of view. I have to admit that I started inventing plot on my own account to explain this absence of what had promised to be the heart of the book. Had Yanyan hacked into Phoebe's email, for instance? But the second shoe never dropped, whether it would have proved to be a fake – high-end or low – or even the real thing.

FictionChinaAsia PacificAdam Mars-Jones
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The Blind Man's Garden by Nadeem Aslam – review

Though rich in language and symbolism, Nadeem Aslam's novel shies away from its own contradictions

In Nadeem Aslam's memorable 2008 novel The Wasted Vigil, set in Afghanistan, beauty and pain were intimately entwined, impossible to keep apart. The various incompatibles in his new book The Blind Man's Garden don't surrender their separateness so magically. There are awkward gaps and residues despite the author's great gifts of imagination.

The novel starts in late 2001 and takes place largely in Pakistan, though some sections are again set in Afghanistan, newly invaded. Elderly Rohan, eventually the blind man of the title, his vision gradually dimming, founded an Islamic school called Ardent Spirit with his wife Sofia. After her death he was forced out as the school became intolerant, a virtual nursery of jihad, but continues to live in the house that he built on the same site.

The main characters of The Wasted Vigil were non-natives, a Briton, an American and a Russian (partial roll call of the nationalities that have meddled in Afghanistan). There are no such mediating figures in the new novel, and they are missed. No doubt imperialistic reading habits die hard, the easy expectation of having otherness served up on a plate, but it's not just that. For Nadeem Aslam to communicate the richness and depth of his characters' culture, he must keep touching in the background they take for granted, in passages that float free of their points of view. He informs us for instance that orphaned children are likely to be sought out and asked to say prayers, since they belong to a category of being whose requests Allah never ignores, and that the Angel of Death is said to have no ears, to prevent him from hearing anyone's pleas. When there's a reference to mountains near Peshawar being "higher than the Alps placed onto the Pyrenees", the European frame of reference is jarring.

Before the main characters are properly introduced a minor figure administers a distracting overdose of symbolism. A "bird pardoner" sets up snares in the trees of Rohan's garden, trapping the birds in nooses of steel wire. He plans to sell them in the town, since freed birds say prayers on behalf of those who buy their freedom. He doesn't come back, though, at the promised time, and the trees are full of suffering birds.

Another minor character is a mendicant who goes around wrapped in hundreds of chains. The idea is that each link represents a prayer, and disappears as Allah grants it. The book also contains a ruby that appears without explanation, just in time to ransom a prisoner from a warlord, though the warlord, taking offence at a lack of respect during the ransoming process, pulverises the jewel and uses it as an instrument of torture instead.

For most of the book Aslam's command of detail is absolute, but there are some strange failures early on. A page-long description of dozens of horses bursting out of the ground (they had been buried alive by Rohan's great-grandfather to prevent them being taken by rebels during the Indian Mutiny) is visually incoherent, and even some modern details seem very unreal – such as streams with dozens of beards floating in them, shaved off by fleeing al-Qaida militants.

All of this seems to suggest the winsome irrationality of magical realism. In time, magical realism may be seen as a self-imposed variant of orientalism, complicit in the exotic expectations of outsiders. We are given to understand that when it comes to certain countries, certain cultures, the truth is incredible and, conversely, the unbelievable must be true. This isn't at all what Nadeem Aslam wants to do, which is (at a guess) to dissolve the false opposition between reason and wonder, and the presence of these elements is all the more puzzling.

The book has a plot that converges a number of times on the action-adventure thriller, though containing more pain than the genre allows. Unprotected by the gorgeousness of Aslam's language, the story is potentially novelettish or TV movie-like: two foster brothers (Rohan's son and a boy raised with him) in love with the same woman run away to war. The details here are infinitely more convincing – though I don't know for a fact that a .22 bullet, used to replace the fuse in a van's headlights, will overheat and be fired into the driver's leg after about 15 miles.

The balance between these grim adventures and the life of the family waiting in anguish just about holds, though Rohan's daughter Yasmin is an oddly sketchy presence, introduced late and never emerging as a character in her own right. This is unfortunate since the marginalisation of women, as demonstrated by "a framed family tree that displays only the names of the males", is a theme of this novel as well as its predecessor.

Though Rohan represents devout but enlightened Islam, there are contradictions in him that the book skips over. Sofia told him she had lost her belief before she died, and he is supposed to have withheld her medication so as to force her to reconsider, such was his fear of her damnation. Students from Ardent Spirit patrol the graveyard, preventing women from visiting their dead relatives (something they have decided is forbidden), but we're not given Rohan's reaction to this as he exercises his own uncontested visiting rights. In the quarrel over the school he had been promised that there would be no militant teaching, but that was because he was regarded as an infidel and therefore someone to whom promises could be broken. It isn't clear whether he objects to this principle or just to being classified as an infidel. At moments like these The Blind Man's Garden seems not so much to embrace pain, as The Wasted Vigil did so powerfully, as to shy away from discomfort.

FictionPakistanIslamal-QaidaAfghanistanReligionAdam Mars-Jones
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Django Unchained: tackling Lincoln-era America on film

Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is morally comfortable; everyone is a victim or monster. But what I'd really like to see is Spike Lee's Lincoln

Quentin Tarantino may take the low road (trashy vitality, pastiche of already disreputable genres) and Steven Spielberg the high road – moral seriousness, historical scruple – but they have both arrived in the same territory this year, the subject of slavery in American history. Is the national shame better staged in good taste or bad, as solemn struggle or sanguinary panto? Perhaps taste is a misleading consideration, unimportant compared with a shared tendency to make things easy for an audience.

At the beginning of Django Unchained, the recaptured runaway slave Django (Jamie Foxx) is freed by the German Dr King Schultz, for selfish reasons. Schultz (guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Unexpected Lessons in Love by Bernardine Bishop – review

Disfigurement, 'female troubles', later-life sex – it may not sound a promising mix, but Bishop's novel offers rich pleasures

This is a vibrant and even welcoming novel, though it's substantially concerned with last things. Only the title lets it down, being a sort of kaftan, something designed to fit everyone that suits no one. The section titles, "Gut Feeling" and "Shit Scared", strike an entirely different note, and perhaps it's just that the publisher has lost nerve. The important thing is that the writer hasn't.

Cecilia is in her 60s, a cancer survivor living with a colostomy and an unhealed wound where the cancer was, where the radiotherapy did its drastic work. As one disconcerting sentence puts it, "She could not help wondering what had happened to her vagina." Even so she hasn't altogether ruled out the resumption of a sex life. Advertisers talk about the USP, the Unique Selling Point. This is a book with four powerful anti-SPs – mortality, disfigurement, "female troubles" and sex in later life. All the more impressive that it offers such a rich range of pleasures.

Cecilia has made a friend at the colostomy clinic, Helen, with whom she can exchange both technical tips and informed grumbles. The friendship would be a weak device if it wasn't so strongly developed. The women are well matched, Cecilia a retired psychotherapist (Bishop's own status), Helen a novelist with a block. By temperament and professional reflex Cecilia considers the broadest possible picture, which makes her generous and far-seeing but leaves her vulnerable to the residue of egotism that can't be sieved out by the mind working on itself. Helen has her raffish and unscrupulous side but is also capable of engineering her own breakthroughs of insight, and of looking at her blindnesses square on. She is much more of a voyeur than Cecilia. This has the compensation of tempting her less to intervene.

Much of the action of the novel follows the arrival in Cecilia's family, and soon in her keeping, of an abandoned baby, Cephas. The pathos of the set-up is so obvious that only a brilliantly realised baby could transcend it. Luckily Cephas is a fully drawn character, on a par with any baby in literature. His first encounter with Cecilia's cat, Thor, is particularly memorable.

Cephas's psychotic mother, Leda, destabilises almost everyone she meets. At first she seems almost an embodied plot mechanism, but as the book goes on Bishop explores her psychology more and more deeply, following her from the unbearableness of delusion to the unbearableness of recovery. The effortlessness with which every corner of the novel is filled out is reminiscent of Penelope Fitzgerald. It is never a bad thing to be reminded of Penelope Fitzgerald.

One of the book's triumphs is a sidelong portrait of Cecilia's good but quiet marriage, asymmetrical but not unbalanced. It's the sort of relationship that would seem to outsiders to have been left on a back burner for so many years it must have boiled dry long since. Fluidly contrasted with it is the marriage of Leda's parents, which seems to be a bad though quiet one, with no detectable overlap of personality, until it is bruised into life by the strains imposed by their daughter's recovery.

Bernardine Bishop's irony is unusual in type, because it is infused with warmth (most modern irony is cold, or smug, or both). Even the characters who might seem to invite it escape skewering. Leda's unbending father, for instance, is embittered because he left the army with only the rank of major, and also because of the poor prospects of grandchildren, since "Bruce is as queer as a coot and Jane is off her head". It's mentioned only in passing that Bruce, following his father into the military, has made colonel. Outranked by his gay son! Bishop has the grace to leave as an incidental piece of psychological comedy something that others would be tempted to turn into a big revelation, if not a TV series.

A characteristic piece of dialogue in the book goes like this. "'My word,' said Helen to Cecilia, 'that will be a dramatic event.'

'It might be. I hope it will be very tame.'"

The ability to build tension, to move towards the big scene, is a significant and routinely admired part of the novelist's craft. More valuable is the ability, shown a number of times in Unexpected Lessons in Love, to make anti-climax sing. There's plenty of drama here (at one point Cecilia's son becomes the main item in the news), though it never moves predictably. It's not simply underplayed but syncopated in the handling.

Much that passes for tame has really only been drowned out by brasher, more self-important voices. It seems silly to say that Cecilia's recessive husband, Tim, has a big moment in the book (it's on page 143), when all it amounts to is putting some food in front of her at a moment of crisis, though she says she's not hungry, and then, when she says, absent-mindedly, "I meant to have some salad with this", bringing her back to the business in hand with the words "Too bad." I can't help that. It's a big moment just the same.

Leda's faded, careworn mother takes refuge in her garden in the early mornings, admiring the spiders' webs and above all the snails, not just "the large, established ones who had survived several winters" but "the smaller, excited ones whose first summer it was". It's a special kind of novelist that can respond to the excitement of a snail.

FictionAdam Mars-Jones
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The Letters of TS Eliot: Volume 4, 1928-1929 – review

Old Possum reveals his weaselly side in a volume of letters that concentrates on TS Eliot's work at the Criterion magazine

In this fourth volume of collected letters, the limitations of the project show up clearly. TS Eliot's correspondence documents his life but rarely expresses it. He reliably transcribes some aspect of what he thinks, but the form doesn't spark new thoughts in him as it does in other writers – not necessarily companionable ones – such as Beckett, Larkin or Joyce.

By this stage of his life, temperamental resistance was intensified by professional circumstance. Eliot was a director of a publishing house (Faber & Gwyer, which became Faber & Faber during the period covered by this volume) and editor of a literary monthly, the Criterion. It follows that much of his correspondence has to do with soliciting or refusing submissions and is generically similar to the business exchanges of other publishing professionals, those who were not independently creative, let alone on course for a Nobel prize.

Prudence and even caginess were good business practice. Eliot never rejects a manuscript without asking to see future work and never refuses a speaking engagement without hoping to be asked again. Many of the letters here would be neutral documents even if they hadn't been written by someone who took refuge in neutrality of manner. There are welcome glints of dry and donnish humour and a single moment (22 May 1928) that may amount to outright mockery. Returning a poem called Listen! Listen! (the title is clearly relevant) to one R Ellsworth Larsson, he points out the danger of making the eye "do duty for the ear" and recommends his own practice of reciting verses aloud "to the accompaniment of a small drum". Of course, it's possible that he really did so, but wouldn't it have become part of the myth if he had? More likely that he gave in for once to irresistible impulse and took the piss out of a no-hoper.

When Herbert Read, an important contributor to the Criterion, complained about a certain indefiniteness in the magazine's objectives, Eliot replied that, on the contrary, his positions were so definite as to require tactful blurring in the interests of breadth of appeal to readers and contributors alike.

Those positions were spelled out in the essay collection For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) as classicism, royalism and Anglo-Catholicism. Responding to a reviewer who had referred to his having been received into the Anglo-Catholic church, Eliot pointed out that there was no such entity existent to receive him or anyone. This is presumably why he set such store by his first confession, which also took place in 1928 (he had been confirmed earlier). Confession is a dispensable part of Anglicanism, less so for its Catholic tendency.

The letters are fully and helpfully annotated, though The Seagull isn't usually attributed to Ibsen, as it is on page 666. It becomes possible to correlate private communications with editorial comment in the Criterion. The lack of overlap is sometimes disconcerting.

As an editor, Eliot deferentially commissioned a pamphlet about censorship ("it would be a document of the first importance") from Lord Brentford, who as home secretary had weighed in against The Well of Loneliness. In subsequent negotiations, he gave Brentford real help in securing US publication under the best terms. Yet he didn't hesitate to tear the home secretary's public statements to shreds: "We fear that Lord Brentford, like many other people, has ceased to be a human being – that is to say, has ceased to think independently – because he has been a Statesman … When [he] convinces us that he really knows what the words mean when he talks glibly of books 'debauching the young', or 'corrupting', we may be inclined to give him the attention that we would give to any serious undergraduate."

Of course, Eliot was only doing what editors do, stirring up controversy. The surprise is the relish with which it is done, how gleefully Old Possum turns weasel.

If he could dish it out, then he could also take it. His reaction to a savage review of For Lancelot Andrewes by an old friend, Conrad Aiken – "you may be right" – is astonishingly mild. Aiken being right would mean Eliot showing a "thin and vinegarish hostility towards the modern world" and sounding a note of "withered dogmatism". Yet there seems nothing forced about the response. Being savaged seems to put a spring in his step, to judge by the jaunty tone of the rest of the letter: "No, these are not dull subjects: Theology, Bridge and Detective Fiction are not dull."

Discrepancy between private and Criterion opinion is sometimes instructive. Eliot expressed private regret ("it is a great loss") on the death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who had been a contributor, but there is something jarring about writing in the magazine: "Of your charity pray for the soul of Hugo von Hofmannsthal…" If this is a religious publication, why single out a particular soul for prayer? If a cultural one, why the concern with a soul rather than a life's work?

When Thomas Hardy died, his body was buried in Westminster Abbey, his heart in Dorchester. Writing to his mother, Eliot objected: "Why not divide him joint from joint, and spot him about the country? I think that if one is buried at all one should decently be buried all in one place." In the pages of the Criterion, his complaint acquires a perverse anti-Catholic tinge, with a reference to Hardy being "dismembered in a fashion intolerable in any society which is not given over to idolatry of relics and fetishes". Perverse not only because Hardy was no Catholic but because relics are displayed rather than buried. But perhaps Eliot thought it politic to emphasise aspects of Roman belief that repelled him.

The oddest feature of the book is the way Vivienne Eliot's letters to friends cut across the rest. Strictly speaking, they don't belong here, being neither to nor from Eliot, but in their absence there would be no discussion of a marriage in the process of disintegration.

Vivienne Eliot is, if not the elephant in the room of biographical studies about her husband, then certainly the parrot whose cage is routinely covered with a cloth. After Michael Hastings's 1984 play, Tom and Viv, the second wife, the late Valerie Eliot, claimed the copyright of all Vivienne's papers, a questionable legal manoeuvre and a remarkable assertion of control. From then on, hers was the hand that sometimes chose to raise the cloth.

The sound that emerges is less a squawk than a forlorn piping. Vivienne's letters are slightly twitchy and sometimes almost pitifully direct. She won't go to a party in November 1928 because "I have no dress – am ugly & have rough hands". Reading the book, it seems incredible that two people with so little ability to communicate could imagine themselves a couple.

The Eliots moved house more than once during the period covered here. Various premises were too big, too small, too expensive or had unmanageable stairs. It's hard not to feel that they were seeking a topological solution to problems that were not topological. It didn't work, anyway, and 68 Clarence Gate Gardens was the last address they shared. This volume of correspondence may show one aspect of their difficulties: it's not that TS Eliot is poor company, exactly – he's hardly company at all and seems to prefer it that way.

TS EliotAutobiography and memoirBiographyPublishingAdam Mars-Jones
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On Helwig Street: A Memoir by Richard Russo – review

Richard Russo's memoir about life with his mother does little to endear him to the reader

As this memoir recounts, Richard Russo was raised by his mother Jean on Helwig Street in Gloversville, a small town in upstate New York. His father was a drinker and gambler who lived locally but contributed little or nothing to the boy's upkeep. Russo senior would sometimes try to make a scene when Jean returned home from a date. He was so easily distracted by a round of drinks or a hand of cards that sometimes the best he could do was shouting up at her windows in the middle of the night.

Richard chose to study in Arizona rather than nearer home, and part of his thinking may have been to strike out on his own. His mother, though, quit her job and came with him, confident that she would be able to make her way. It was 1967. They drove west in an underpowered car, not sharing the driving. Russo had only recently got his licence and his mother had never learned.

This mixture of enterprise and helplessness was characteristic. The Jean he knew in his childhood was lively, hard-working and devoted to him. She liked male company and attracted it. Though she made a great show of independence, it seems likely that she was hoping to meet someone who would allow her to cling just a little. In the meantime she clung to her son, to "Ricko-Mio", to her rock.

Arizona worked out for him – he became an academic and teacher, he married a local woman from a family as large as his was small. It didn't work out for Jean. She managed to drive back east on a temporary driver's licence, but never really settled. When she was away from Gloversville it represented safety, but if ever she moved back there she felt trapped.

Russo had more contact with his father once he grew up. Russo Sr regretted that he hadn't been more available to his son, claiming that Jean's instability made it impossible. Naturally, this version of the past minimised the impact of his own vices.

A loyal and supportive son who has no way of knowing that there are aspects of his mother's predicament he can hardly be expected to cope with – in fiction, this would be a fertile starting point. In a memoir it proves hard to manage. If Jean's behaviour wasn't under her control then there's nothing to be learned from it, and no virtue in recounting the repetitive crises.

She had a phobia about yellow, so that if her preferred brand of tissues was only available in that colour she would be transfixed with repulsion in the supermarket. With this information on page 22, rather than 222, the book would announce itself as a case history of some description.

Anyone who writes a memoir about a dead parent needs to be aware of an element of taking revenge, though it's likely to be better hidden from the writer than the reader. Here the reaction of release after so many years of taking responsibility is understandable, but not attractive. Richard Russo acknowledges that it was Jean's faith in him that allowed him to believe in himself, but his portrait of her is belittling. About his own achievements, on the other hand, he's rather solemn: "In Tucson I would become a man, a husband, a scholar, a father, and a writer."

His mother had political opinions (she wanted George W Bush indicted for crimes against humanity) but they're only mentioned when an episode of dementia – caused by the excess salt in frozen dinners – deprives her of them. Early in her son's marriage she talked to him as if Barbara wasn't there, but some sort of relationship must have developed between the women over time, or else Barbara was foolish to accept the role of carer, bathing and dressing her when it became necessary.

Early in the marriage they wondered if the day would ever come that they would have their own space back. The description of this crisis finds Russo at his folksiest: "Eventually, that day did come, along with a great many others, and somehow there was still an 'us' for my wife and me to protect and cherish. Indeed, over time our trials would appear to illustrate the old saw that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

When he can't remember whether his mother might not have asked if he minded her tagging along to Arizona in 1967, the tone becomes positively preachy: "That I honestly can't recall something so important seems right, somehow. The mechanism of human destiny – that intricate weave of chance and fate and free will, as distinctly individual as a fingerprint – is surely meant to remain life's central mystery…" Plus, it would be harder to characterise her as a burden if she had asked him.

Jean loved books, and gave her son a sense of their value, even if he disparages her taste for wish-fulfilment. This is a potentially touching moment, before it turns into an aria of self-praise: "Though I'd outgrown her books, they had a hand in shaping the kind of writer I'd eventually become – one who, unlike many university-trained writers, didn't consider plot a dirty word, who paid attention to audience and pacing, who had little tolerance for literary pretension." The egotism would be easier to accept in a more accomplished book. Good writing is no guarantee of truthfulness, but it manages its deceptions and self-deceptions resourcefully.

Jean's ashes were scattered on a beach in Maine by Richard Russo and his family – he calls it an "interment", though that can't be the right word when nothing is buried. His daughters spoke, then Russo read what he describes as the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the sun". Still too early, perhaps, to be claiming the title of scholar, if you think a sonnet can have 24 lines, though his mother would have given him the benefit of the doubt.

Autobiography and memoirAdam Mars-Jones
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