The month in books

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, published in Britain last year, was a genuine cause for celebration; a joyous, funny collection of essays about American culture pitched just right and with a virtuosity and intelligence that most novelists can only dream of. Such has been the fuss over Pulphead that one of Sullivan’s earlier works, Blood Horses (Yellow Jersey, £12.99), is now being published in the UK. In part the book is a touching memoir of Sullivan’s relationship with his dead father, who loved and wrote about horse racing, especially the Kentucky Derby. Sullivan investigates this world, talking to breeders and jockeys, but also reflects on equine history from hobbyhorses to the “liquidation” on 4th May 1944 by the German army of 30,000 beasts by machine-gunning them over a precipice into the Bay of Severnaya in Russia. The prose is relaxed, the choice of material telling: it is once more a delight to be in his company.

Anne Norton’s provocative, engaging commentary on Islamophobia, On the Muslim Question (Princeton, £16.95), takes as its inspiration Karl Marx’s 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question.” Marx was writing in response to Bruno Bauer, a philosopher who argued that the Jews should not gain equal rights unless they renounced their religious identity. “I see the Muslim question as the Jewish question of our time,” Norton says. In the same way Marx turned the Jewish issue on its head to become an examination of liberal political theory, so Norton is interested less in Islam itself than in “our” own intolerance of it; our anxiety and our fear—of the many (Muslims will outbreed “us”) and of the one (the suicide bomber). Her argument takes in the Rushdie affair, the Danish cartoons, the idea of the “clash of civilisations,” sex and terror. In making it, Norton seems strangely to reinforce the separation of Muslims from “us.” But she scores many hits, and illuminates the smug racism behind much recent blazoning of Enlightenment values. How would some of our esteemed Islamophobes respond to being called anti-Semitic?

If Indian non-fiction is the new Indian fiction, thanks to Suketu Mehta, Katherine Boo and others, the excitement largely surrounds books that engage with the booming, globalised “new India.” Amit Chaudhuri’s Calcutta (Aurum, £16.99) is a different proposition, and not only because his city, due to sclerotic local politics, has been rather left behind. Chaudhuri concentrates on the everyday and there’s something admirable about the calm confidence of his unelectric narratives—of buying some vintage windows, of a street food vendor or a friend of the family. As with his novels, once you relax into his sentences, they seem more honest, much closer to reality, than other forms of prose. What’s more, the connections he makes between Indian life and Joyce, say, or Cézanne, add up to a radical approach, a kind of anti-orientalism. His India isn’t only the exotic other we’re still so invested in, and his truths, quietly disclosed, are highly valuable.

“We are like people in a gothic novel,” a character says in Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed (4th Estate, £18.99), a novel in which the devil comes to Princeton and which is layered with so many clevernesses I’m not sure it works. Oates began writing it in the early 1980s, having recently moved to the New Jersey university, and after publishing a series of gothic novels, among them the much-liked Bellefleur. Why it was put aside I don’t know, perhaps because it has more than one shaping idea—the racial prejudices of elite Princeton society at the turn of the 20th century; the tribulations of university president Woodrow Wilson; Upton Sinclair and American socialism (real and fictional characters come together in this 700-page edifice), and, colouring all, the workings of demons, vampires and a famous curse. There are vivid set pieces, particularly the meeting of Sinclair and a grotesque Jack London, and touches of fine horror writing (a gruesome death by electric fan). But the structure—not least the camp and clunky “authoring” of the “history” by “MW van Dyck II” and the presentation of his various “sources”—is unsound.

More horror and more vampires in the new collection of short stories from Karen Russell, author of the novel Swamplandia! In the title story of Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Chatto & Windus, £14.99), Clyde, aged 130, is told life isn’t as dark and narrow as he has assumed: “‘I don’t have to sleep in a coffin? I don’t have to sleep through the day?’” His wife tells him he’s a “poor thing, believing all that garbage.” Russell is practised at whimsy and the surreal, at the magical and the unnerving. Girls change into silkworms, a scarecrow assumes the identity of a bullied boy, and a barn is populated by ex-presidents reincarnated as horses. So, after Woodrow Wilson’s appearance in Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, here we meet another fictional incarnation of the president: I think I prefer this four-legged version, pawing at the floor of his stall.