Dear readers,
Even if you’re partial to the holiday season, and I am, this particular weekend can take on a prelapsarian feel. For many of us, these are the last days before we’re roped into a monthlong chorus line of celebration, wistfulness and reverence, before our relational identities consume everything else. You find yourself in dens and around tables by virtue of your blood, or someone’s ill-advised marriage. You may not always like who’s there. You may not always like yourself.
So I understand the need to escape. The books I recommend here offer a zip line to glamorous (if tragic) families and fantasy meals, gossip and problems that are (blissfully, crucially) not your own. Should you feel the need to dissociate this season, think back to them. It beats staring into the whorl of a spiral-cut ham and wondering how things might have been different.
—Joumana
I tend to have good instincts about locating the best conversationalist in the room, but this volume, the first installment of the actor Anjelica Huston’s memoirs, has given me another guideline to follow: Look for the person most likely to own an “embroidered Afghan jacket that smelled strongly of goat,” and park yourself next to her for the evening.
Huston — the daughter of the Falstaffian director John Huston and the ballerina turned socialite Ricki Soma — comes by her vivid life stories honestly. They are her birthright. And how fortunate for readers that she’s an easy and graceful storyteller, dashing off memories of passing the musician Moondog on Sixth Avenue “like something ancient from outer space,” or seeing John Steinbeck conscripted to play Santa while staying at her childhood home one holiday.
“Anjel, of course, is pure artist,” Soma wrote to John Huston when their daughter was 6. “Everything comes from intuition, some deep incontrovertible source knows all.” On the evidence of this book, that sensibility has survived into Huston’s adulthood.
Read this memoir for the thrilling, improbable sentences that stop you cold: “I recognized the blonde from the topless pictures in the box in Dad’s bathroom when she made an appearance on set as a mental patient.” Most of all, read it for the sheer pleasure of listening to someone render a memory so tactile you can astrally project yourself there. On Achill Island, she remembers “the black curraghs came in off the Atlantic with their catches of silver mackerel like lost souls on the end of catgut lines of colored feathers.” They gleamed.
Read if you like: the Polo Bar, Halston, Irish skeins
Available from: The usual places, and possibly some less usual ones — as decoration on the shelf at a whiskey bar, say. It’s also worth listening to Huston herself narrating the audiobook.
“Symposium,” by Muriel Spark
Fiction, 1990
Clear your calendar: Muriel Spark is throwing a dinner party, and we’re all invited.
Spark, best known for her novel “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” is rightly revered for sentences that are lean and muscular, without a gram of fat or gristle. So I shouldn’t be surprised that she also wrote one of the most honest accounts of a dinner party I’ve found in fiction. Our hosts are Hurley and Chris, a comfortably bohemian couple in London. They have assembled a precise guest list; they have fretted over the menu, scuttling plans for duck or lobster on cabbage with raspberry vinegar — yes, really — for pheasant in cognac.
They could not have foreseen that one invitee, who was due to drop in after the meal, won’t arrive after all: “She is dying, now, as they speak.”
The death is not a natural one, and Spark delivers her murder mystery to us course by course. The best bits of the novel aren’t the dinner party conversations themselves but the looping, zany back stories of each character that arrive as palate cleansers. There are media-savvy nuns and a mad Scottish uncle. We hear the snippy asides and debriefs, the bets about how long various pledges (to a spouse, to God) will last.
Central to the crime is a puzzling, accelerated engagement that began as a conversation about bruised grapefruits and ended in a marriage that makes everyone uneasy. What could be better Thanksgiving reading?
Read if you like: “Glass Onion,” slugging with Nivea, edible sculptures set in aspic
Available from: New and used-book stores, in a reissue from New Directions or on loan online from the Internet Archive while their offer lasts.
Why don’t you …
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Render yourself unreachable and set aside an hour for William T. Vollmann’s latest essay in Harper’s Magazine?
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Globetrot like Ibn Battuta, by way of Amin Maalouf’s historical masterpiece “Leo Africanus”?
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Learn a new psychiatric demotic, thanks to Rebecca Lee’s story collection “Bobcat”?
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