Dense and dystopian, a jaundiced examination of the dark underbelly of Los Angeles. A social and cultural history that verges at times into a Marxist critique, it is also a very knowing take on the real motive forces in that perplexing metropolis. He tackles everything from real estate to Hollywood, from the dirty cops to the importance of water, from the social conservatism to the anything goes, from race to religion. Joan Didion did much the same thing in a different medium, the title of that book was Slouching towards Bethlehem. Davis’s title is similarly apposite, quartz is certainly not gold even with the glitter.

Lucia having risen to the top – she’s now called Her Worship, can only have trouble in store for her. For a while she is typically brazen and adept at dealing with things. Fortune however is one of those things that waxes and wanes and Lucia comes very close to losing control. Throughout there is vicious, savage fun. Tis a pity when people stop believing your tall tales.

Lucia starts to invest, or rather speculate in stocks and the rest of Tilling follows her lead with varying results. Success and ambition meet pretension and she mounts a campaign for official recognition and higher office, first abortively for the town council, but then, at length, for mayoral. Along the way there is dispossessing of a rival’s house, rumour mongering about supposed Roman ruins – which turn out to be Victorian sewers and lots of disastrous dinners and tea parties. The poor Mapp, newly married, keeps getting the worst of the various intrigues. The set pieces are deliciously vicious, gossip and social airs have never been so finely described. A comedy of manners, beastly manners that is, and amour propre.

He pulls no punches and simply confronts the vissitudes of race in America head on. This is the era of Jim Crow, a time when lynching was all too frequent in the South and blase attitudes and lip service was omnipresent in the North. Thus everyday life was tainted by the pathologies of race relations and from this springs forth the . The writing style is spare and ironic and each story leaves a sting; it’s never overwrought. There’s high life and low life, every social sphere is observed. I found myself shaking my head at once, laughing out loud at other times and clutching the book as the tension mounted on occasion. Beautiful and lyrical prose everywhere. The title may be the ways of white folks but it could as well be the ways of black folks.

Shiva Naipaul is… complicated. Or perhaps one should say difficult. Not in the sense of an inordinatedly dense narrative with heavy psychological underpinnings – although he is prey to a fair amount of schematic or symbolic portrayals, rather it is a sort of deliberate ambiguity in his novels. Detachment is his stylistic terrain. He writes like Coetzee with economical and careful prose. No one is likable – which would not be a problem if it wasn’t for the niggling notion that he doesn’t like his characters. Their travails embody futility. He writes of a peculiar type of madness, that of the mongrelised in a mongrelised country. The original sin of the Caribbean is race and it deserves such an observer and the attending caustic and limpid prose.

Economical yet searching, personal yet all-encompassing. Grappling with Lagos and its dance with modernity. A voice in full, a star fully-formed, complicated and virtuosic. Simply put, one of the best travel novels I have read.

An exemplerary bildungsroman. A look at life in wartime England and the post-war years. It dwells on the contrast between poor, ration-beset England and the literal freedom of the Americans ascendant after the war. When the action shifts to Heidelberg, there is a quickening. Self-awareness, freedom, the awakening of the sexual impulse and enfin, drama, comedy and un espece de tragedy. As always with Lodge there is that Catholic deliberation that underlies the events and in its complications it makes one empathize with the protagonist.

Impotence. Old age. Misogyny. Curmudgeon manners. Farce. Newfalutin psychotherapy. Campus manners. Feminism. These are the ingredients of this fairly vicious late-era Kingsley Amis effort. There are no sacred cows, all characters are vaguely unsympathetic with Jake being perhaps the biggest boor albeit with a handicap: his lost libido. After a lifetime of running roughshod over others with his Oxford don manners and selfish womanizing, Jake finds himself without any desire for sex. Cue the doctor, cue the psychotherapist, cue the group sessions, cue the various machines to measure the strength of nocturnal erections, cue the homework assignments (from porn reading to “non-genital sensate focusing” and perhaps the progression to genital sensate focusing with the wife). The set pieces are appropriately grotesque and farcical but at heart this elegy for a lost libido is also an elegy for a changing of the guard and remembrance of an era that wasn’t quite golden. Modernity must intrude, Oxford should admit women, men should try to understand women – they are not half men after all.

Hallucinatory travel writing meets the ultimate subject: the Jonestown murders and mass suicides which Jim Jones inflicted on his cult of 900 followers who had followed him from Indiana to California and ultimately to their communal graves in Guyana.

There is a lot of anger in this book, as well there should be, but it is not overbearing in its righteousness. He tells the many stories simply by letting people speak, their words are inadvertently bewildering as they all try to abjure responsibility. The original title was Black and White and correctly fits both the structure of the book (2 parts: the black part deals mostly with Guyana and the white part deals mostly with the antecedants in California) and the manichean worldviews that led to the tragedy. There is absurdity, fraud and neglect in abundance.

He traces how the phrase, revolutionary suicide, passes from Huey Newton and the Black Panthers and finds its macabre exposition a decade later in the hands of a man like Jim Jones. No one took responsibility and everyone proclaims puzzlement. 900 people die and all people do is shake their head and carry on.

There are peaks and valleys in this collection of essays. The peaks are virtuosic, the keen observation of American culture circa 1960 to 1968. The intense look at the California ethos and at the unreality and dissonance of San Francisco in late spring 1967. The resort to drugs of all sorts, free love, slogans without context, everything is there. She captures a time of dislocation and fracture in the social fabric and California is an apt terrain from which to explore.

The valleys too are poignant and deeply personal pieces and perhaps it is fitting: it would have been intolerable to have book full of ambitious and highly stylized pieces, exposing herself as she does makes the journalistic heights more transcendant.