Still, for most readers the real appeal of Christmas mysteries is likely slightly less psychological: like a Hallmark movie, the tropes of crime fiction are familiar to the point of comfort – and so, paradoxically, there’s something reassuring about the moment when the bodies begin to drop. From there, everything’s under control: a detective will begin to investigate; clues will be revealed; red herrings will be planted; and, by the last chapter, everything will be tied up with a bow. This is the fantasy of a genre that presents the mess of murder but, ultimately, gives us tidy resolution. Throw in some stock festive imagery, a good amount of campy drama, a group of ridiculously extravagant suspects, and the Christmas crime novel makes sense: it’s easy reading for cold nights.
How have these hundred or so lines, over the last hundred years, beguiled such a disparate array of minds? And for so long? The poem’s afterlife is all the stranger for its concern, via a tangled web of nightmarish visions, with nothing less than the end of the world. This presents a paradox. The poem’s omens of Armageddon – “this is the way the world ends”, it thunders – rubs up against its timelessness, its everlasting interest to Palestinian professors, political advisers and fictitious colonels all the same.
For many generations, there has been a joke, which goes something like this: An old musician is lying in bed, ill. His daughter wants to get him out of bed. She goes to a nearby piano and plays an unresolved chord, over and over. Unable to take it anymore, the old man rises from bed, staggers to the piano, and resolves the chord.
Mozart wrote a string quartet dubbed “Dissonance.” He begins with an A-flat–major chord, which he builds note by note – until he lays an A natural on top of it. Dissonance. There is no tool of which Mozart would not avail himself.
Adler seems to believe more deeply in enjoying her meals than I think I believe in anything. Far more than any culinary trick or skill I’ve gathered from reading her over the years, this dedication is what brings me back to her work. Its frank strangeness, whether or not it converts you to stem saving, is a prime example of what I consider her books’ greatest pleasure: They let you visit lives and minds—and, in this case, kitchens—that may be nothing like your own.
For Wasif, this subject matter is not merely visually but also psychologically rich, a facet of his work that his collaborators’ texts do much to bring out, in a way that the usual white-cube exhibition display would not. The result is a mobile, tactile survey of his practice that reminds us of the individual and collective psyches that form an urban environment.
Over the course of four decades, seven books and countless exquisite magazine features, Orlean has profiled celebrities and nobodies, followed cults and choirs, turned her eye to supermarkets and surfers. “Writers fall into two categories: there are those who have something they want to say to the world, and there are those who believe the world has something to tell them,” she observes. Orlean falls squarely into the second camp. There are two kinds of story she likes best: “hiding in plain sight” and “who knew?”.
A memoir is usually neither of these sorts of stories, but Orlean rises to the challenge of writing about her own life with grace.