In Jim Carrey’s new semi-autobiographical novel, “Memoirs and Misinformation,” there are flying saucers and a fire-bombing on Rodeo Drive, apocalyptic fires devouring Malibu and a mega-budget Hungry Hungry Hippos movie written by Kenneth Lonergan. One moment, “Carrey” dreams of strangling his late mother; the next, he pines for Renée Zellweger (“his last great love”) and challenges Nicolas Cage, a man “whose artistic bravery had always given him courage,” to a jujitsu duel. (Warning: Cage fights dirty.)
Cowritten with novelist Dana Vachon in the third person to capture what Carrey calls the “wholeness that has an infinite knowledge of all of its parts,” “Memoirs and Misinformation” is, like the twisted political drawings Carrey posts on Twitter, entirely its own thing. A satire of Hollywood’s self-absorption coinciding with the end of the planet, none of it is real ... except when it is. And given the extreme circumstances that have marked Carrey’s life, it’s sometimes difficult to sort out fact from fiction.
On 26 April 1976, after suffering a stroke that robbed him of the ability to walk and speak, the matador Sidney Franklin died in a nursing home in Manhattan, roughly thirteen miles from his native Brooklyn. Fifteen years earlier, on 2 July 1961, Ernest Hemingway donned his ‘emperor’s robe’ and shot himself in the head with a double-barreled shotgun. As young men, the two had split bottles of brandy in Spain, had traveled through the countryside together (a remarked-upon odd couple, one clean and effete and the other greasy and unshaven), had watched bombs explode in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. The New Yorker journalist Lillian Ross had said theirs was a friendship between a great man and a lesser one. I am the grand-niece of the lesser one.
When Dartmouth College offered me a full scholarship and fellowship to study full time in its mathematics doctoral program, I did not stop to think. Like Henry David Thoreau, I went to the woods to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” which in my case meant spending all of my waking and many of my sleeping moments thinking mathematical thoughts. Thoreau, I was certain, would have understood. “The most distinct and beautiful statements of any truth must take at last the mathematical form,” he wrote.
At Dartmouth, I felt like a poet. I spent my days attempting to write mathematical proofs that distilled hidden truths into concise, elegant prose. Indeed, I overheard more than one debate regarding whether Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken’s proof of the long-unsolved Four-Color Theorem was valid, for everyone agreed that it was neither as concise nor as elegant as a poem.
Not even the lockdown could stop the most dedicated sea-swimmers of Brighton, the British seaside city an hour’s drive south of London. Making the most of their daily exercise quota, the Speedo-wearing stalwarts of the Brighton Swimming Club carried on as always. Arriving at the sea wall as the sun rose over the boardwalk, they teetered down the pebbly beach toward the lapping tide and slid in. Now that pandemic restrictions have lifted, these enthusiasts have been joined by daytripping crowds braving a record-breaking heatwave across the U.K. to bask in the sun.
Brighton’s sea swimmers are all sorts: a nurse, a tattoo artist, a retiree of 85 whose minder supports him into the surf until he’s deep enough to float. Companions with as much in common as a corporate focus group, they share one passion. And they do it, on average, five times a week. “If it’s too rough to swim,” says 49-year-old psychotherapist and daily swimmer Sam Milford, “we’ll lie in the path of the waves and allow them to wash over us.” In this good-time town legendary for hard-partying into the wee hours, the sea swimmers prefer the high that comes from submerging yourself in the English Channel before breakfast.
Adrian Duncan’s second novel, A Sabbatical in Leipzig, presents us with the limit, both structural and thematic, as the point from which human meaning flourishes. Its protagonist, Michael, is a retired Irish bridge engineer who spends a morning puttering around his apartment in Bilbao, playing versions of Schubert’s Trout Quintet, drinking coffee, and describing with frankly idiosyncratic focus a series of encounters with objects that serve as portals to the past. None of these objects or effects — mechanical drawings, a porcelain cup, the quality of light reflected in accidentally harmonious or at least sympathetic windowpanes, an envelope of photographs — open into emotive Proustian sinkholes or sequences; there is instead a gently obsessive and narrow margin to Michael’s concerns. They are not sudden lava flows of memory, but the contours of a ritual enacted each morning before he leaves for his daily trip to the nearby Guggenheim Museum, to visit Richard Serra’s huge steel structures in, once again, a set order, with intent.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Mexican Gothic” is a feminist horror novel inspired by Gothic classics including “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights.” It’s also a nod to fairy tales, though not the Disney versions. “Mexican Gothic’s” characters recall the macabre stories in which Cinderella’s sisters chop off their feet and Sleeping Beauty’s stepmother meets her fate in a barrel of snakes.
Poised on a bridge, streetlights
on either shore, a man puts
a saxophone to his lips, coins
in an upturned cap, and a carousel