The Night Table: Chicago, Keats, and the ‘Flesh-Eating Bacterium of Political Correctness’

A selection of the best books — and occasional duds — from our recent reading and reviews.“Mount Chicago,” by Adam Levin. Doubleday, 590 pages. Mr. Levin’s third novel, detailing what happens after a sinkhole swallows up a portion of Chicago’s downtown and several thousand of its denizens, is the slimmest that he has published to date. Running to nearly 600 pages of absurdist antics, it is nevertheless the latest representative of the now-familiar massive postmodern novel and serves as an effort to answer that genre’s critics — a retort from the “Infinite Jest” generation against the contrary winds of changing fashions. Is it any good, though? Well, your mileage may vary. Unlike the best of his predecessors, Mr. Levin tends to indulge in high-concept techniques for their own sake. Nevertheless, “Mount Chicago” stands as an ambitious and amusing effort. Jude Russo’s full review, “‘Mount Chicago’ Struggles To Rise Above the Literary Foothills.”“Two Nurses, Smoking,” by David Means. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages. “Two Nurses, Smoking” is David Means’s sixth collection, bringing together several series of interconnected stories published over the last few years. The best of these examine life in Mr. Means’s native west-central Michigan. They are filled with drug-addled monologues, freak weather incidents, and a menagerie of inmates of a mental institution. In the other stories, which are mostly set along the Hudson River, Mr. Means penchant for gimmickry doesn’t detract too much from what is at the least an attractive little volume. “Two Nurses, Smoking” contains several memorably wonderful stories. It leaves the reader with Mr. Means’s own view of the world, where “happiness and unhappiness are of course entwined; life is a helix of the two, and you can’t have one without the other — which is a cliché, of course, but also true.” Nicholas Rowan’s full review, “‘Two Nurses,’ at Its Best, Holds Readers in the Palm of the Great Lakes State.”“Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph,” by Lucasta Miller. Knopf, 370 pages. This is a biography by someone from Keats’s neighborhood. Lucasta Miller grew up in Hampstead, where Keats lived and met his beloved Fanny Brawne. Ms. Miller describes the area — what is almost the same and what has changed. The result is a bifurcation of biography branching out into what generations of biographers have made of the poet and what Ms. Miller now thinks is important. The treatment of Brawne is one of the highlights of this biography. The earliest biographers kept her under wraps, fearing Keats’s intimate letters to her bespoke an improper sexual liaison. Brawne herself was guarded in what she had to say about the poet, which in this case the careful Ms. Miller is at pains to suss out. Carl Rollyson’s full review, “Keats, Then and Now.” “The End of Solitude,” by William Deresiwicz. Henry Holt & Co., 320 pages. William Deresiewicz’s essay collection doubles as a battering ram trained against the cultural idols of the moment. Mr. Deresiewicz, one of whose subjects is his loss of faith, shows himself an iconoclast in fine form. His Baals — social media and elite universities most prominently — have met their polemical match. While much of Mr. Deresiewicz’s ire is aimed at the hunt for prestige, relentless careerism, and box checking that has consumed the academy, he also notes the “flesh-eating bacterium of political correctness,” which have rendered selective private universities devoted to “an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite.” A.R. Hoffman’s full review, “‘The End of Solitude’ Is Sure to Start Fights.”ALSO OF NOTE“Like a Rolling Stone,” by Jann Wenner. Little, Brown, 592 pages. The founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine has graciously documented his sins and crimes in agonizing but educational detail in a new, very long memoir. For the music trivia enthusiast, there’s the torrent of rock and roll’s biggest names — Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen. For the New Journalism historian, there’s Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. For the prurient, there’s sex and drugs and Mr. Wenner’s unapologetic ethic of self-indulgence. “Like a Rolling Stone” is an invaluable, if unpleasant, document of the Me Generation and the capture of the counterculture by the Democratic party.

The Night Table: Chicago, Keats, and the ‘Flesh-Eating Bacterium of Political Correctness’

The Night Table: Chicago, Keats, and the ‘Flesh-Eating Bacterium of Political Correctness’

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