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The novel is, to a large extent, about the fictions woven around great wealth in America. And the main premise of these fictions is that of the self-made man. And I used the word deliberately.
Hernan Diaz talks about his new novel, “Trust,” which is told in four parts, each one changing the reader’s perception of all that has come before.
Louis Le Prince has just disappeared months before. And all of a sudden, here’s Thomas Edison, who’s got a reputation as someone who’s not entirely ethical, announcing what sounds a lot like Louis Le Prince’s invention.
Paul Fischer talks about “The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures,” the story of a French inventor, Thomas Edison, a true crime mystery, and a history of early movie technology. Plus, my colleagues Greg Cowles and Liz Egan will be here to tell me what they’ve been reading.
This is the Book Review podcast. It’s May 6. I’m John Williams. [MUSIC STOPS]
Hernan Diaz is here. His first novel, “In the Distance,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. That book reimagined, or re-reimagined, the American Western. His new novel, “Trust,” is about New York City and the financial world and the 20th century. And it unspools in quite a creative way. Hernan, thanks for being here to talk about it.
Oh, thank you, John. My pleasure.
So two promises up front. We’ll walk listeners through this slowly. It’s a complicated story. And of course, in modern parlance, no spoilers, because there’s a lot you discover as you read this book. And we will only give people the outlines so they can discover the rest for themselves.
So the first thing to say is that you open this book, and you see the nice title page with your name on it, “Trust,” by Hernan Diaz. And I was expecting that. And then I turned two more pages, and I see another title page. Tell me about the first quarter or so of this book, what form it takes. And kind of describe it for what it is, if you will, as it exists in the book. What is this?
Sure. I should say— I like what you said about your experience of opening the book. I love the physical act of reading and how the body is involved in the act of reading. A lot of care went into the first thing you actually see when you open the book, which is a table of contents.
So what you encounter is four different texts, four documents, four books. They’re almost standalone in themselves. And this is already a clue. I was hoping the reader would become a textual detective as they enter the book.
So the table of contents is the first clue. So the first book— answering now directly your question— that you encounter is called “Bonds.” And it’s a novel by a fictional novelist called Harold Vanner. And it narrates the ascent of this American tycoon, probably one of the richest men in the whole world, and his relationship with his wife.
And it’s written in this very specific tone that echoes back to Edith Wharton and Henry James, although the book was written in the ‘30s. And this sort of slightly decadent tone was interesting to me. And it’s also a book very much about New York, about marriage, and of course about money and the myths woven around a great fortune.
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more vivid cipher, if that’s not an oxymoron, than the character in this first book. It is his ascent. He’s described as someone who doesn’t take pleasure in the luxuries afforded by money. But he also doesn’t see it, finance, as a rewarding game, like bridge or chess, like you think he might— maybe it’s just a way for him to use his brain. What is Vanner’s take, this fictional writer, what is his take on who this person is and what his life meant?
That’s a wonderful question because what is an enigma for Harold Vanner is also an enigma for me. I was interested in the almost abstract quality of so many American fortunes that are not tied to goods or services, fortunes that are purely mathematical and speculative.
So in a way, the way in which Vanner sees this tycoon, whose name is Benjamin Rask, is as almost an aesthete of money. It’s an end in itself. It’s money for money’s sake, to paraphrase that dictum of art for art’s sake. And it’s an intellectual exercise.
There’s something also positively monkish and austere about this character. As you said, he’s not interested in all the luxuries that his fortune may afford him. He is interested in, to quote the book, the “incestuous genealogies” of money begetting money begetting money begetting money and how capital can be “force-fed its own body” to create more wealth and grow.
Yeah, that’s one of my favorite paragraphs in the book. Tell us briefly, and then I want to talk— because I want to avoid too many particulars, I do want to talk more about some of the themes of the book in general and some of the influences on it. But first, just discuss briefly, and as much as you’re comfortable sharing, what the other three documents in the book do— whether it’s specific or just generally, what you’re interested in in terms of their perspective on the original material.
The other three books— as you said at the opening, the whole book is one big spoiler. It’s very hard to talk about one thing without giving another thing away. But I will say this. The second book is very different from the first. It’s a memoir written by a real-life, in the world of the book of course, by a real-life tycoon.
And I will give this away, because I think it’s fun. We realize as we read this memoir that it is written to debunk the novel. So we have the real person on whom the fictional tycoon in the opening novel was based. And here is he, himself, in his own voice, to give readers the truth of his own story.
And it’s written in— I read a lot of memoirs written by, quote-unquote, “great men” of the period. And it’s written in a very blustery tone, very self-assured. And what I discovered while researching for this part of the novel is that all these memoirs written by these great men, financiers, presidents, captains of industry and so forth, is their absolute certainty that the accounts of their virtuous lives deserve to be heard.
And that is something that I wanted to convey in this part. I should also mention that it was written during the Trump presidency. So in reality, there was also a model for this voice.
A model for bluster—
A model for bluster indeed.
—to say the least. And then the third and fourth books, I think, are briefer and maybe shouldn’t be spoiled as much. But let’s say that they offer two other perspectives, so now we’ve gotten four different voices.
Exactly. The third and fourth books are, to my mind, the most important books in the whole book because, as we were discussing at the beginning of our conversation, the novel is to a large extent about the fictions woven around great wealth in America. And the main premise of these fictions is that of the self-made man. And I used the word deliberately.
But the truth is that these men stand on the shoulders of multitudes, silenced multitudes. And “Trust” wants to re-examine these myths and, in the process, give voice to those who were erased from these narratives. And I find that women have completely been deleted from these narratives of wealth and capital. In historical accounts, in fictional accounts, there simply are not women.
So the third and fourth books are narrated by women. The third book is narrated by the daughter of an Italian immigrant who lives in Brooklyn, not too far away from my home, and starts working as a secretary in Wall Street. And she is also a sleuth of sorts, piecing together the different aspects of the story.
And in the fourth book, we finally hear from the wife of the tycoon firsthand. It’s her personal journal. It’s a very intimate text. It’s very different in tone from the rest of the book, and it contains many revelations that I can’t discuss right now.
OK, I don’t think we’ve spoiled too much. There’s plenty still to learn. But now let’s zoom back and talk about— because I also want to note— maybe you don’t even think— whether you want me to or not, I want to note for listeners that we’re talking about this in a very jigsaw puzzle kind of way. The pleasures of the book are the fact that each of these individual pieces read like a dream. So I will just note that for the reader. So when you zoom out to the theme of finance, I’m curious about what sparked your interest in that subject, both in real life and then also as a subject for your fiction.
I think the answer is twofold. Firstly, I became interested in, let’s call it the gravitational pull that great fortunes have, their ability to reshape, distort and even realign the world and the reality around themselves. This is something I think we see very clearly nowadays. It seems almost as if the ultimate luxury good is reality itself.
That is the ultimate proof of a great fortune. Is it able to purchase a certain notion of reality and impose it onto others? Again, I think this is— perhaps unintentionally at the outset of the writing process— but I think this is something that we see today and that the novel deals with.
On the other hand, although wealth and money are so essential in the American narrative about itself as a nation and occupy this almost transcendental place in our culture, I was rather surprised to see that there are precious few novels that deal with money itself. Sure, there are many novels that deal with class— we were talking about Henry James and Edith Wharton a moment ago— or with exploitation, or with excess and luxury and privilege, many examples of that, but very few examples of novels dealing with money and the process of accumulation of a great fortune.
It seems almost as if this is a bit of a taboo. It certainly was a taboo for Edith Wharton and Henry James. They speak overtly of how unspoken this was.
But the thing that Wharton and James maybe wouldn’t have seen quite as starkly, and which you also seem interested in in the book explicitly is this transition from, let’s say, fortunes built from industry and other things to finance as its own wealth-generating sphere. From the evidence of the book, do you think that— not that it’s the only such story of course, because you have the world wars and technology and all kinds of other things. But I wonder if you see that progression, for lack of a better word, of finance as one of the profound stories of the 20th century?
I do see that progression. Of course, it starts to a certain degree during the Gilded Age, although I think that was more industry driven. It was steel. It was oil. It was shipping.
But researching the novel, it was interesting to see how cyclical crashes are in American history. So it seems in a way that this is embedded in the way in which the financial system is set up. Another interesting thing that I found reading and learning, because I come from a comp lit background. So you can imagine that learning about markets and monetary history was a steep curve for me.
But there was an interesting continuity between the way in which markets were viewed in the ‘20s during the big economic expansion of those years and the way in which fiscal conservatives think of the market even today, this idea of as little regulation as possible, small state, big business, no intervention, then also looking beyond our borders, this idea of exceptionalism but not being afraid of having tariffs whenever needed. Lower taxes, of course.
So all this to say that this playbook that we see coming up with— I don’t know— Harding and Coolidge in the ‘20s, reflects very much what I was reading in the newspapers during the Trump administration. And it also reflects what happened in the ‘80s with Ronald Reagan and the whole Milton Friedman school of economics. So I think there is an interesting line that goes from the 1920s to the 2020s. It’s not a coincidence that these thinkers called themselves conservative because it is extremely consistent and almost impervious to the other changes in reality you mentioned, such as— I don’t know— technology.
The research that you did for the novel makes it clear that you can write and talk about finance well. But let’s get you back on your firmest ground of comp lit.
Thank you so much.
Because, let’s be honest, it’s more comfortable for me too. So it’s selfish a little bit.
Our reviewer writes of you that “he has the whole literary past at his fingertips.” And whether you think that’s true or not, what were some of the developments in your taste or discoveries of writers you made starting when you were younger that has influenced you, whether you think those influences show up on the page or not?
I think the unavoidable name here is the Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis Borges. And I even wrote a whole book about him. So he’s someone I care about very much. And he was a master of fictions within fictions and playing with genre and context and different canons and messing with literary borders of any kind. So I would say he is certainly a major influence.
We already talked about turn of the century literature, such as Henry James and Edith Wharton. They were very important. In the process of writing this novel, I also read quite a bit of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, who I think wrote very lucidly about finance, perhaps most lucidly in the American canon. Their books are very central to me in that regard.
I should also say that the last section of the book is a love letter to literary modernism, which is something that has shaped me very profoundly. We see there are many references, overt or tacit, to such writers as Jean Rhys or Virginia Woolf, even Wittgenstein, who is an important writer for me. I think I put all my influences on the table here.
I was going to say, you certainly gave people a sense of the breadth of the book, because all of those things somehow are in this book and fit comfortably together.
If I may interject also very briefly, there was very intentionally— in the progression of these four sort of sections that compose the book, there was very intentionally a journey from the last years of realism all the way into high modernism. And that is a formal progression that the readers may see there. But also, in the third book, the narrator, I thought of her as a new journalist. So it’s a completely different tone.
The other thing that strikes me between this book and your first novel is that you’re obviously interested in American myths, and whether or not it’s exploring them or redefining them or looking at them from different angles. Is that something that you feel explicitly inside yourself? Or is that incidental to some of the subjects you’ve been interested in writing about?
A little bit of both. It’s not that I go out searching for fossilized, ossified moments in American literature or in its consciousness, to use a word I dislike. I don’t go after them. But when they present themselves to me, I become fascinated with them. So I do see a certain continuity between both books. Although they’re immensely different formally, in terms of content, in terms of breadth, in terms of scope, everything. They’re just radically different books.
The conquest of the West was not just a mere adventure. It was very much aligned with the capitalist machine that was starting to churn around those years. And that very machine is what we see in “Trust,” now completely oiled and running full steam. So in that sense, there is a connection between books.
I would also say, as another way to address your question, that I wasn’t born in the United States. I’m an American by choice, although I’ve been here most of my life now, about 25 years. And I’m still fascinated by the place that fiction occupies in American history and in American culture, beginning obviously with the notion of American dream, which kind of says it all.
But I find that the United States is very welcoming to fictions. And there is a blend of fact and fiction in its history to an extent that maybe other countries, at least the ones I know a little bit about, it would be unimaginable in those other countries. This is something that makes me tick, that I find very interesting, this myth-making urge in American history. And it’s something that for some reason I decided to come back to in this book.
Whether you continue to find those myths in the next book or not, the absolute invention of both of your first two novels and the differences between them do make me eagerly anticipate what you turn to next. The new novel, again, is “Trust.” Hernan Diaz, thank you so much for being here to talk about it.
John, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure.
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Paul Fischer joins us now from London. His new book is “The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies.” Paul, thanks for being here.
Thank you for having me. I’m really excited.
OK, we’ll make people stick around for the murder part. You don’t want to lead with that. We’ll hold that dangling for the future. Give me a thumbnail sketch of the man in your title, Louis Le Prince, up to 1888. And then we’ll talk about the remarkable thing that happened in October of that year.
Louis Le Prince was a tinkerer, I guess is the best way to describe him. He was a middle class Frenchman who lived in England and Yorkshire, who worked in a variety of different capacities, originally for his father-in-law at an iron forge. He’d worked as an assistant to a painter. He worked in panoramas. He ran a school of art at one point.
And he was a very tall, very striking Frenchman who had an interest in photography and art and invention and innovation and sort of humanism in the way a lot of middle-class Victorians did. And he was a war veteran, and he was someone who was trying to grapple with the world and was trying to find a new way to engage with it. And one day, while tinkering in his backyard shed in Leeds in Yorkshire, was handling some photographs, and they slipped in his hand. And he had this impression for a second that the people in the pictures were moving, and from that moment on, was obsessed with this idea of capturing life in moving photographs.
When did that moment happen, when the photos slipped out of his hand?
That was about 1880, 1881, from what I can gather.
OK, so he spends the next several years and his tinkering turns toward that objective.
It does. It took him about eight years to make the “Roundhay Garden Scene,” which is the oldest surviving motion picture and what we consider the first one ever made. And he was needing to sort of invent a medium as well as the technology, and invent what the medium would mean and what it would look like, and kind of writing about it. I had to unpack all our assumptions about motion pictures, because Le Prince and others like him were trying to figure out what that meant in real time.
And so in October of 1888, that first— what is now considered the first motion picture— where was it? How did he take it? How long did it last?
The fun thing is it’s a home movie, which is an odd thing, because we don’t think about the first pictures as that kind of thing. We think of it as an industrialized medium to start with. But the “Roundhay Garden Scene,” essentially, Le Prince had a very heavy, big mahogany wood camera. And he lugged it to his in-laws’ house, and he set it up in the yard.
And he asked his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, his son and a family friend, to just do goofy walks, really, in the garden in a circle. And what survives is a few seconds long. The numbers on the contact sheets suggest that the film itself was at least 10, 15 seconds long. And what we have is just a family smiling and self-consciously walking around outside the house, which kind of suggests one of the ways Le Prince thought this technology could be used was the same way you used a family album, the same way you use our phones now, to just kind of record everyday life and not just tell stories.
What were his bigger dreams about what motion pictures might lead to or might be? Because obviously, it’s interesting to think back to when you could have sort of a boundless imagination about it and not foresee some of the ways that it has come to be used.
Well, what’s fascinating about Le Prince, and what I really loved as a film nerd myself, is that he seems to have been the first one of that generation to really have a vision for what the medium could be. There were a lot of people like Thomas Edison or the Lumiere brothers, who were working on moving image projects as a kind of novelty toy. Their idea was, this can make a little bit of money, at least for a while. And then it’ll fade away.
And there were other people like Eadweard Muybridge or the French scientist, Etienne-Jules Marey, who were scientists and who really thought moving images would be a way to deconstruct the way our bodies work, the way things move, the way nature worked. And Le Prince was really the first to write in his notebooks and speak to his family about this medium as something that would change the way we related to reality.
As I said, he’d been in a siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. And he would tell his wife, there’s absolutely no way a mother would ever send her child to war if we could make a film of what war was actually like, as opposed to romanticized paintings or that kind of thing. He would talk about ending the powers of priests and kings because people would be able to see how alike we were and how we all lived in similar ways.
And he conceived of it very early as a collective kind of experience. He designed panoramas, which were these huge, 360-degree painting entertainments, where you’d step into a warehouse or a disused skating rink or a theater. And you’d be surrounded by these huge paintings that recreated a battle scene or a scene from history.
And Le Prince imagined that film would be like that. He had this idea for something he called the people’s theater, which was benches in front of a screen and a stage, very much a cinema. And he was convinced that, in that kind of space, in that kind of room, with life projected at the actual scale it happened, you could teach people and you can entertain them.
And he had lists of possible filming subjects. They ranged from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to methods for teaching deaf children sign language or lip reading. And so he had this huge overarching vision for how this would change the way people related to one another.
Yeah, very lofty and idealistic ideas, and also sounds pretty visionary in terms of— it sounds like immersive virtual reality almost, what he’s describing, putting people in these places and letting them see the panoramic view. What happened in the time after he made that first picture with his family? What were the developments right after that in terms of what he attempted to do with it? Or how did he attempt to, perhaps, put his name on it more firmly?
Well, the year before Le Prince disappears, there’s kind of a year, year and a half between that “Roundhay Garden” scene and him vanishing, which is really the mystery at the core of his story. And that year is also a mystery because up until that point, Le Prince had applied for patents and received them in the United States and England and France and Belgium and all these different countries. And so he held the legal right to the first motion picture machine, and he’d taken these films.
And after this “Roundhay Garden” scene, which seems to have been a kind of apex successful test of his prototype, we know that he developed or tried to develop more polished machines he could take to market. We know that he asked his wife Lizzie to rent the Jumel Mansion in New York Uptown and renovate it and get it ready for a first public screening. And we know that he demonstrated the machine for the secretary of the Paris Opera, to what purpose we don’t know for sure, but it seems as an ongoing discussion for whether they would use motion pictures at the opera as part of their shows.
And then in late 1890, so coming up to two years after that first film, Le Prince in his letters tasks the men he was working with in England to pack up his stuff. And he tells friends he’s going to New York to meet his wife at this mansion to premiere the invention. And he goes back to France to meet his brother for a kind of goodbye visit. And at the end of that visit, he gets on a train to Paris and vanishes, never to be seen or heard from ever again.
At this central mystery, one of the conjectures over time involves another very famous inventor, Thomas Edison. Tell us a little bit about both Edison’s kind of parallel tracks, such as they were, in terms of tinkering with film, and then maybe a little bit of what became one theory about what might have happened to Le Prince. And you can, obviously, feel free to not spoil too much if you don’t want to.
You know, it’s really interesting looking back, as even though he’s considered today one of the inventors of the motion picture, looking back at the timeline back then, he was really late out of the blocks. Le Prince had made the “Roundhay Garden” scene by the time Edison and Edison’s men were really getting started with working on their own version of a motion picture device. And the Edison that exists at this point in his life and in history was a fascinating figure to me because he was immensely famous and immensely recognizable, especially for his time.
But he was kind of on a cold streak. After developing an early reputation as a genius, his reputation had turned at this point to where he had his lab in West Orange, New Jersey. He’d moved away from Menlo Park, which is where his first fame had been made. And he’d announced the phonograph, but it wasn’t really developed enough to be saleable.
And he was in protracted legal battles with George Westinghouse over direct current and alternative currents. And he was touting this light bulb that he said was cheap and would be available to everybody. But he had only really been able to install it in JP Morgan’s house and a few businesses.
And so he kind of had this reputation as a guy who wasn’t entirely honest and was mocked regularly in the newspapers for talking the talk and not being able to walk the walk anymore, and for perpetually announcing stuff that he was never completing. In this context, Edison seems to have been looking for the kind of oversimplified one last great big score, one last big way to reestablish himself as a genius. And one day, he meets Eadweard Muybridge, who was a photographer, had made the famous images, that are still famous, of a horse animated at a trot and a gallop.
And Muybridge, who was touring and giving talks, suggests to Edison, you know, if we took your phonograph and my moving images and developed the two together, we could literally recreate life and project that for people. And that would be pretty brilliant. And Edison, hearing this, tells Muybridge, maybe sometime down the road. And then when Muybridge has left, Edison tasks some of the people who work for him with coming up with exactly that idea, with the only difference being not involving Eadweard Muybridge.
And so there’s a young Scotsman working for Edison called William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. And he was the man who did most of the work of inventing what would become the kinetoscope and the kinetograph for Thomas Edison. And the setup was very much like a modern work-for-hire agreement. Someone like Dickson worked at the lab, did the everyday inventing. And Edison and the company would take the credit, the same way an Apple phone is an Apple phone.
And then a few months after Le Prince disappears, the front page of The New York Sun, suddenly out of the blue, announces, quote, “Edison’s newest wonder,” which is this machine that can capture life and replay it and project it on a screen. And Lizzie Le Prince and her friends and her family pick up the paper that morning. And Louis Le Prince has just disappeared months before.
And all of a sudden, here’s Thomas Edison, who’s got a reputation as someone who’s not entirely ethical, announcing what sounds a lot like Louis Le Prince’s invention, without there being any record of Thomas Edison developing this invention beforehand. And so this idea, this conspiracy theory that Thomas Edison would have got rid of Le Prince to steal his invention, actually starts at the source and is born with Le Prince’s family, because that’s what they became convinced of.
So that theory gained some traction over the years. And let’s say that you do some digging of your own, and you— I don’t want to spoil everything that you conjecture yourself. Is it safe to say, though, that this is a fascinating mystery that remains unsolved in terms of actually being able to pinpoint precisely what happened?
It does, yeah. I come up with a theory that I’m fairly convinced about, that there was a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing towards. But there’s no smoking gun. That’s one of the frustrations about— or at least one of the lessons about writing a book like this one is you get started, and your ambition is, I’m going to solve this. I’m going to— there’s going to be something like in the movies, ironically, where I go to an archive, and there’ll be a little letter in the back of a book. And it’s a confession. And that stuff just doesn’t exist.
Right, to prove or disprove it.
Exactly. But at the same time, I kind of tried to approach it somewhere between a prosecutor and one of those law enforcement talking heads on a Netflix documentary series. And the conclusion I get to, treating it like a cold case, is one that I feel really confident, OK, if I had to go make this case in a courtroom, it’s a pretty solid case. But it is very circumstantial because it’s been 150 years. And it was a cold case from the start because, due to the way people communicated in 1890, it was three or four weeks before anybody even realized Le Prince was gone.
I just want to be clear. So when you say that if you were making a case, it’s pretty solid. Are you talking about a case against Edison or another case entirely?
A case against someone else. It’s weirdly not a spoiler because I think one of the things about the book is it becomes evident really quickly in the book, as it did in my research, that Edison’s a red herring, that this idea, as sexy and exciting as it is that Thomas Edison would have been this kind of Lex Luthor figure assassinating people left and right to steal their stuff, it’s exciting because it’s outlandish. And so I try not to indulge it too much in the book beyond using it as a hook.
Well, it is fascinating. And obviously, the book, in addition to being this mystery, is also very much, as I think people can tell from you discussing it, is very much about the early history of development in film. And you’re a film producer yourself and involved in that world. And I just wonder if researching it, how surprising and delightful that was to just go back into that time. I was struck reading it, just thinking about just how young film is, being reminded of that, and how remarkable it is that we can even look back and see those early developments the way you might, for the first people who ever wrote anything down or something.
It was brilliant because I’m one of those people. I really love films. And I am one of those people who has grand ideas and grand speeches about what it does as a medium. And with that come equally large anxieties about where the medium is now. And I’ve got a 7-year-old daughter. And will she actually go see films in a cinema? Or will it all be on a computer— and the communal experience of it and the dying out of that.
And when I started writing the book, my concern, I thought, would be to try and explain in what way Louis Le Prince was the first. And I was worried that would take a lot of technical explanation about frame rates and perforations and innovation. And all that stuff fell to the wayside, and it was really fun to transport myself into a world where people were trying to articulate all the things that make me love movies and to be rediscovering my kind of love for film through these people inventing what that would be. My hope is that, alongside the kind of true crime of it and the history of it and the fascinating characters of it, one would read it and also rethink some kind of appreciation for whatever that medium becomes, because you’re right. It is very young for what sets it apart from the others.
Well, you have murder and the movies both in the subtitle. And I think it is very much about both of those things. And I appreciate you taking the time again to talk about it. Paul Fischer’s new book is “The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures.” Paul, thanks for being here.
Thank you very much, John.
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My colleagues Greg Cowles and Liz Egan join me now to talk about what we’ve been reading. Hello.
Hello.
Hi, John.
Greg, I feel like it’s been a while since we’ve had you on, which is insane, because you’re the foundation of this segment, I feel like. So what have you been reading lately?
I am reading a memoir that came out last fall called “Music,” comma, “Late and Soon.” It’s by a Canadian poet named Robyn Sarah. That’s Robyn, R-O-B-Y-N.
And it is her first book of nonfiction, I believe, not about poetry, but as you would guess from the title, about music. She studied piano from elementary school, like into her 20s, and actually departed piano to seriously study clarinet for about 10 years, thinking that she would become a professional clarinetist. And she spent some years in Quebec as first clarinetist in her teens in the conservatory there, working towards the path of being a professional musician before she fell away from it and got into writing instead and became a poet.
And this is about her return to music decades later. She’s now in her 60s. The book opens when she’s approaching 60 and starts fooling around on piano again and getting more and more into it, not obviously as a professional anymore, but as a passionate amateur. And she looks up her original music teacher, her original piano teacher in Quebec, who is still, it turns out, accepting students. He’s, like, 80 now.
And he kind of puts her off at first. He sends her to a different teacher. And she plays a recital with that teacher, and he shows up. And he hears it, and he says, you know what? Maybe I’ll take you on again.
And this is a book about her falling in love with piano again and very much about her relationship with this teacher, who’s a wonderful character. He’s this kind of Yoda guru type. He says things like, “The future creates the present. Resist intelligence. Reflex is unreliable.” He’s got all these sayings that you feel like, how is he even helping her?
But somehow, he’s got this amazing way with his students. He thinks of himself more as a coach than as a teacher. But he very much breaks things down into the technical aspects.
And I’m somebody who’s played piano for most of my life, mostly not with teachers. Although, when I was younger, like Robyn Sarah, I studied with teachers from early elementary school right through high school. And I took it up again with a jazz teacher in my 40s in New York City. I used to go on my lunch breaks from work once a week up to a building in the West 70s and study with a jazz teacher there. And I’m not great. One of the things this book—
You’re still working at the Book Review anyway.
I’m still working at the Book Review.
We’re happy to have you.
One of the things this book has driven home for me is how much proficient, high-level musical performance is like high-level athletic performance, because you need to nail it in the moment. You have to have it exactly right and be able to turn it on in front of a crowd. And it’s daunting.
And I fool around, and I’ve learned a lot of the music theory and broken it down. I like studying music. There was a day I went to one of my lessons. I showed up a little bit early, and the student before me, I could hear through the door, was finishing up his lesson. And he was just riffing on top of a bass line that the teacher was laying down. After he left, I went in and I said to the teacher, wow, how long has he been studying? He’s really good. And my teacher said, yes, well, he’s very talented.
He started last Tuesday.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah. And I felt like, OK, I get it. I can read between the lines. But I love it, and I would not give it up.
And so this book, “Music, Late and Soon,” by Robyn Sarah, is partly— it’s a tribute to the amateur and doing something just for the love of it, whether you’re good at it or not. And again, she’s far better. She does perform. And even so, she’s not good enough to be professional. But she’s more dedicated and has internalized more of it than I have. But it’s a book about not needing to be the best at something to still pursue it, to do it just because you love it.
Yeah, I wouldn’t pursue anything if that had to be the case.
That’s me. That’s, like, the mantra of my life.
Yeah. I wonder if— our critic Alexandra Jacobs recently reviewed a book called “Uncommon Measure,” by Natalie Hodges, which is a memoir.
Yeah, yeah, that’s actually what turned me to this book. I have not read the Natalie Hodges. But also, it’s about somebody who is studying to be a professional violinist who dropped it.
Yeah. And it’s a little bit the opposite. It’s at a different moment in time. She’s still a relatively young person, a very young person, I think, Hodges. And it’s basically about how she turned away from it, gave up aspirations to be professional. I do wonder if, later in life, she’ll sort of return to music in a less pressurized way.
So it’s interesting that this person’s perspective might potentially portend that.
Liz, what instruments can you play? And what have you been reading lately?
I took piano for six years. I never learned how to read music, which is a little bit like looking at books for eight years and never learning how to read.
I don’t think that’s true at all.
Well, I was a real failure. There was a lot of pressure in my family to practice an instrument. And I absolutely hated it.
And before I tell you what I’m reading this week, I also just want to comment to you, Greg, that I love books that have punctuation in the title. So I appreciated that you shared the comma with that. The first book I can remember noticing it in was “Girl, Interrupted,” by Susanna Kaysen, which was made into a not-so-great movie, but was a wonderful memoir that came out in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. And I remember thinking that was peak intellectual with a capital I, to have a comma in the title of your book. I always notice that, or ones that have a question mark.
Anyway, so what I am reading is “French Braid,” by Anne Tyler. It’s her 24th novel. It is the story of 60 years and multiple generations in one family, the Garrett clan of Baltimore. Before I tell you any more about it, I should pause here and say, 60 years in the span of 256 pages is an impressive feat for Anne Tyler, who is an impressive person in the first place. But she pulls it off, and we meet Robin and Mercy, who are the parents in this family.
They get married sometime, I think in the 1950s. They have two daughters and a son. And we get to meet them on their one and only family vacation at the beginning of the book that sort of echoes through the whole book. There are things that happen on that vacation that are seminal for the family.
And we see them at different points as the kids are growing up, as the kids are grown. And I don’t want to give too much away, but there is a pandemic piece of this novel. I think it was the first novel that I read that included the pandemic to great effect, I thought.
The book “French Braid” was reviewed for us by Jennifer Haigh, who also has a wonderful new book out called “Mercy Street.” And she described the Garrett family as a loving but aloof family in which everything is unsaid. And the main thing that is unsaid is the fact that Mercy, the mother, the matriarch in the family, who is an artist, quietly and without fanfare moves out of the family home in Baltimore into her studio after her youngest child leaves home. And nobody in the Garrett family says a word about it. It is simply never discussed.
And as with all of Anne Tyler stories, I would say the drama of this one is in the silence or in the kind of tension that fills the silence in the family. And that, to me, is powerful stuff. I don’t know if the two of you are Anne Tyler fans.
I would call myself an admirer. I’ve only read a couple of the books, and it was a long time ago. I’ve actually been meaning to reread one of them which I remember especially liking. But she’s had one of those remarkable careers, where when you said it was her 24th novel, it sounded low to me.
I know. I know. It fills more than one column when they print the titles of all the author’s previous books. It fills at least two columns, which is, to me, the mark of a very prolific author.
And also, in her case I should note, she has this gift for finding the language of the age of every character she’s writing about. The book begins with two— actually one younger member of the Garrett family, one of the grandchildren of Mercy and Robin. And this woman is in her— she’s a college student, so I’m hardly up on the lingo of college students. But it just rang really true. She can slip into the skin of all different ages. And I find that incredibly impressive.
I also just wanted to read one little quote from Jennifer Haigh’s review, which I totally agreed with and absolutely loved. She said, ”‘French Braid’ is a novel about what is remembered, what we’re left with when all the choices have been made, the children raised, the dreams realized or abandoned. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time.”
I mean this is a compliment, but I feel like that describes the books of Tyler’s I read as well.
So John, you’ve just added, like, 22 new Anne Tyler books to your list. But what are you reading now?
I’ve recently read, to write about it for the paper actually, Patrick McCabe’s new book, “Poguemahone.” And I’m going to talk about that but an earlier book a bit more. The new one, “Poguemahone,” is a 600-page novel in free verse. No book is for everybody, and this is also one of those books.
But I think the people who give it a chance, many of them will find a good amount of delight in it, especially in the first half, even though it’s a sort of dark, strange book. The first half recounts the exploits of these squatters, these hippie squatters in the 1960s in London, who were in a primarily Irish neighborhood in the city. And they imagine themselves as creating this somewhat utopian vision. But of course, what they’re really doing is giving LSD to dogs and things. They’re getting into all kinds of trouble. And this is all related by this—
Are you saying that’s not utopian, John? [LAUGHTER]
Fair question.
So the narrator is confiding all of this to us in a somewhat drunken style. And he and his sister were part of this crew. And now in the modern day— and this is back in the mid-‘70s. And now in the modern day, he’s talking about his sister’s life in a coastal nursing home.
And it’s clear from the beginning that we’re not getting the whole story here, that this is a very unreliable narrator. And so what follows is kind of a reveal, as well as all these anecdotes. What I found interesting about this, in terms of my own trajectory as a reader, is that I had read back in, I believe it was the ‘90s, his novel “The Butcher Boy,” which was kind of a sensation at the time. It was the first book of his published in the U.S. I think it was his third novel. It was a finalist for the Booker Prize. It was later adapted into a film by Neil Jordan, I believe, which I never saw. But this made me go back to it because it was such a distinct reading memory, but I didn’t know if it would hold up. And I’m always interested in that kind of thing.
And it really does. It’s about this young boy named Francie Brady, who grows up in small town Ireland in a depressed town with parents who were some mix of abusive or well-intentioned but absent, and a tough childhood. And he gets involved with this woman and her son. And he overhears the woman one day calling his family “pigs.” And this has the effect of taking this probably already-very-on-his-way-to-trouble kid and hastening that trip.
Michiko Kakutani reviewed it for The Times. It was 1993, so I was a wee lad when I read this book the first time around.
John, you weren’t that wee.
I wasn’t that— well, my age ended in “teen,” so I feel like that’s pretty wee for at least one more year. But Kakutani’s lead paragraph says, “To get an idea of Francie Brady, the narrator of Patrick McCabe’s mesmerizing new novel, imagine Holden Caulfield as a young man growing up in a desolate Irish town. Imagine Holden speaking in an idiomatic Irish dialect full of Joycean rhythms. Imagine Holden as a real madman, a cold-blooded if strangely soft-hearted murderer, willing to commit unspeakable acts to avenge himself on the phonies who surround him.” It’s not a terribly long book. It’s about 225 pages. And it essentially flies by because this kid’s voice— and he narrates the book is— it takes a little bit of time— I wouldn’t say terribly long, just a few pages— to really fall into the groove of it. But once you do, it hurtles forward. So that’s an oldie but a goodie.
John, I like you’re going so deep into your Irish roots this year with Fintan O’Toole, with “Poguemahone.”
Fintan O’Toole’s, yes, terrific new personal history of Ireland, modern Ireland, is great. And “Poguemahone” I think, if that description, which is a bit gonzo, but if it at all appeals, I would suggest to check it out. And his earlier work is certainly interesting.
His star has dimmed a bit in the years since “The Butcher Boy,” at least in the U.S. But I think he’s a really interesting writer at his best. OK, let’s run down what we’ve been reading again. Greg?
The memoir “Music, Late and Soon,” by Robyn Sarah.
I am reading “French Braid,” by Anne Tyler.
I read the new novel “Poguemahone,” by Patrick McCabe, and his earlier book “The Butcher Boy.” [MUSIC PLAYING]
Remember, there’s more at nytimes.com/books. And you can always write to us at books@nytimes.com.
The Book Review Podcast is produced by the great Pedro Rosado from HeadStepper Media. Thanks for listening. For The New York Times, I’m John Williams.
