Forget about matching dinner services and solemn soldiers of cutlery; this is not about whether you inherited a soup tureen or which way the blade of a knife should point. The old-fashioned rules of laying the table have made way for the modern art of tablescaping, where mixing trumps matching, and the point is to make sure everyone is having fun, not to catch anyone out for not knowing which is their side plate. Hurrah for that. Snobbery always was terrible taste.
Is there anything you wouldn't do for a loved one if they were dying? That's a morbid question, for sure, but the dilemma at the center of Some Bright Nowhere, Ann Packer's new novel, makes a reader wonder about such things.
Television is as much an ode to Hollywood as it is a critique. There is in some ways a celebration of how these characters live their lives, whether it’s writing screenplays in France or laying about drinking all day. Hollywood unlocks those perks. But whether the novel addresses how luck molds outcomes, there isn’t necessarily a resolution—there’s no happy Hollywood ending.
If you read the poems collected here in chronological order, what you will see, primarily, is a man thinking about hope—what sustains it, and what happens when you lose it. The practitioners of ketman have of course abandoned hope, but there are so many of them that the one who refuses ketman may not be more hopeful than they.