So Long, Hollywood

24 Saturday 23 July 2016 The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph Saturday 23 July 2016 25 BOOKS Eloquent, euphonic, wise Is it just and funny, her speech stands for all the complexities of the So long, novel. Different strata of the past are folded into her patois. hair? “Autoclaps”, her favourite word, is dense with layers of etymology. It is something one Hollywood brings upon oneself (auto- collapse); it is also heavenly force majeure (“afterclap” is thunder); and it is prophetic Tim Smith-Laing on a poet’s (the “unveiling” of apocalypse, with Ma Taffy as its blind novel about Rastafarianism seer). English, Middle English and ancient Greek all at once, “autoclaps” is unmistakably and AUGUSTOWN ‘There entirely Jamaican. Dave Eggers’s new novel, about an alcoholic dentist driving by Kei Miller shall no Miller relies heavily on theme and variation. Flight, for through Alaska, is defiantly unfilmable, saysDuncan White 256PP, W&N, £12.99, razor instance, comes up again and EBOOK £6.99 again, ambivalently: the ethereal and anonymous online critics. come narrator, Bedward’s walk, Rastas HEROES OF THE Her hippie Ohio town is being upon his floating on clouds of ganja, the FRONTIER gentrified; the new residents are struggle for liberation, a suicide ÌÌÌÌÌ by Dave Eggers entitled and angry, the organic head… dangling from a tree. Each is a market a pit of aggression. A Lycra- iterally panoramic, Kei different story and part of the 400PP, HAMISH clad cyclist beats an innocent driver Miller’s latest novel is he shall same story: the dream of “Flying £18.99 L HAMILTON, , almost to death with his pump. narrated by something in Africans” who pray for the “wings EBOOK £9.99 She wants to escape to a place the air that hovers high above be holy of a dove” or that they might “fly that offers purity and light, away a cityscape with an “uncanny and shall away to Zion”, singing songs that from small-town cruelty and resemblance” to August Town, a “at the right moment, can lift a ÌÌÌÌÌ cowardice. Alaska is the farthest former plantation village turned let the man or a woman all the way to ave Eggers has just she can go, because her daughter violent Kingston suburb. The heaven” – even if, as the narrator arrived somewhere near doesn’t have a passport. It “was at narrator’s elevated eye takes in locks of suggests, that means nothing D the cultural mainstream. once the same country but another the lives of a few of the town’s the hair more than being “another Two of his novels have now been country, was almost Russia, was inhabitants on a single day in 1982. nameless thing in the sky”. turned into big-budget films, almost oblivion, and if Josie left her In a device familiar from movies of his It’s fortunate that Miller can both out this year, both (as it phone and used only cash – she’d such as Pulp Fiction, Crash and conjure meaning into things like happens) starring Tom Hanks. So brought $3000 in the kind of Amores Perros, the characters are head this, as his plot hangs on a belief has Eggers, staunch defender of velvet bag meant to hold gold coins knit together by a catastrophe – or grow’ that will most likely be alien to his creative independence, finally The final American frontier: Alaska or magic beans – she was “autoclaps”, in the Jamaican patois. many of his readers. Rastafarians sold out? untraceable, untrackable”. There is a historical dimension, prohibit cutting one’s hair Heroes of the Frontier makes went into production. The money, too. As in the real August Town, because of the “Nazarite vow”: short work of that theory. It’s a on the other hand, was put to good ut Alaska, the final American Miller makes this the spot where, “There shall no razor come upon mark of the author’s admirable use: Eggers set up writing labs Bfrontier, disappoints her. in 1920, the preacher Alexander his head… he shall be holy, and cussedness that his latest for children and McSweeney’s, Everything is expensive: “it Bedward came before a vast shall let the locks of the hair of his novel is about a semi-alcoholic a not-for-profit publisher in looked like a cold Kentucky but its congregation drawn from across head grow.” Hence, dreadlocks. dentist having a breakdown in a San Francisco. prices were Tokyo, 1988”. Her REX FEATURES WRITER PICTURES; DC; WASHINGTON, OF CONGRESS, LIBRARY Jamaica to prove that he could fly. As more than one character motorhome in Alaska. Josie is in That social conscience, that velvet purse soon empties. Even His flight was crucial to the birth of notes, it’s just hair; and, then search of pioneers, heroes, the anger at the way the world is going, nature refuses to play along with PHOTOGRAPHY environmental, the new Farming photographers wanted to This photograph, taken by the Rastafarianism, which, in turn, is again, it isn’t. The Rastas of frontier, and pursues the sacred runs through Eggers’s various her fantasy. At a tired animal park, Security Administration hired capture a mood. Roy Stryker, the Ukrainian-born Jack Delano the crux of the plot. Augustown hold their locks as land of her imagination on a kind novels, and Heroes of the Frontier Josie is thrilled that her children y 1935, America was photographers and writers. man behind the project, said: on a spring day in 1943 in Like a wide-angled lens, Miller’s dear as anything in the world; to of mock epic odyssey through is no exception. Josie runs away can watch bighorn sheep picking B deep in the Great Their mission was to record the “News pictures are the Clinton, Iowa, depicts the novel fits much into a small frame have them forcibly shaven by shabby tourist towns – one of to Alaska ostensibly because her their way along a mountainside, Depression. Long spells lives of the rural poor: “To noun or the verb; our kind of women who worked as – Augustown itself, Rastafari, “Babylon” – in the person of a them called Homer – while trying “invertebrate” ex-boyfriend – a symbol, to her, of “unadulterated of heat on cleared prairie had introduce Americans to photography is the adjective or “wipers”, cleaning the gang and police violence, religious policeman or teacher – is enough to protect her two children from “loose-bowelled man named Carl” bliss”, of an “uncomplicated life also brought about the Dust America.” the adverb.” machinery, in the opposition to colonial rule – but to cause suicide or a riot, or libertarian gun nuts, raging – is getting married. Despite his lived high above everything.” Then Bowl. To document the social While press photographers The best of the FSA’s library roundhouse of the Chicago still gives an impression of space. To order this worse, an “autoclaps”. forest fires and the consequences failure to support their children in an eagle swoops in, plucks up one of upheaval caused by these twin took their shots to illustrate are brought together in New Deal and Northwestern Railroad. It never feels crammed. In an age book from the The Nazarite vow admits of of her own disastrous decisions. any tangible way, he wants them to the sheep and drops it off the cliff. disasters, one economic, one specific news stories, the FSA Photography: USA 1935-1943. Taschen, £12.99 that indulges the giant novel, it is Telegraph for no scepticism – and the reader By turns tawdry and touching, visit him in Florida so that his new This becomes the pattern for a joy to read an author who can do £10.99 plus has to follow with that in mind. it is an episodic catalogue of their peripatetic road trip. Each all that, economically. £1.99 p&p call As the narrator says: “Look, this small failures. It is not the stuff Josie takes her chapter begins with fresh hope, bipolar episode provokes.’ her, feeling and thought join in Dialogue is the novel’s greatest 0844 871 1515 isn’t ‘magic realism’. This is not of Hollywood. and a moment of transcendence; ‘I felt like an amiable sheep, Although writing about madness ecstatic dance: “Words were a satisfaction. As in his most another story about superstitious But, then again, nor was A children to Alaska then it is undercut, and the family is predisposed to be harrowing, slender thread to logic, which was recent poetry collection, The Musical: Kei island people and their primitive Hologram for the King (2012), in search of purity, has to move on. Heroes of the straitjacketed on the inside’ Griffiths’s ferocious, exploratory a stronger rope to lucidity.” But this Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Miller won the beliefs […] You may as well Eggers’s lament on the decline Frontier is a shaggy dog story in intellect makes her book shine. is far more than a diary of madness. Zion, which won the 2014 Forward Forward Prize in stop to consider a more urgent of American manufacturing told light and heroes which the kids find an actual “This condition may be seen as a Griffiths finds a delicate mode Prize, Miller mingles standard 2014 question, not whether you through the story of an American shaggy dog – but the unpleasant form of illness, but it is not only an – funny, honest, iridescent with English with patois, embracing believe in this story or not, but salesman’s midlife crisis amid in-laws will be persuaded he’s a owner turns up to reclaim it. illness; it also hurls the mind into scholarship.

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