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Articles by Diana Hendry
Why it’s permissible to betray family secrets
Blake Morrison is the quintessential man of letters. More exactly, he’s a man of genres – poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, librettist and, most notably, memoirist. (Four memoirs so far, each a prize winner and/or bestseller).
Misfits unite: The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong, reviewed
The Emperor of Gladness Cape, pp.402, 20 As a poet, Ocean Vuong has won every prize going. Now here’s The Emperor of Gladness, his second novel. His first, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a coming-of-age story, is currently being filmed. This latest oneis wild, unwieldy and too long. It is fiction/autofiction mixed with 19th- and 20th-century warfare, plus contemporary angst and craziness.
A painful homecoming: The Visitor, by Maeve Brennan, reviewed
The Visitor Peninsula Press, pp.111, 10.99 Maeve Brennan (1917-93) was a supremely gifted Irish/American writer, whose work is periodically rediscovered, only to vanish again. It’s as if her literary reputation (she has been compared with Joyce, Flaubert and Chekhov among others) won’t stay fixed and is as homeless as she herself became.
A haunting mystery: Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry, reviewed
Enlightenment Jonathan Cape, pp.376, 20 As ghosts go, Maria Vaduva, who haunts Enlightenment, is not a patch on the wild, tormented figure who stalks the pages of Sarah Perry’s previous novel, Melmoth. Where Melmoth, in rage and despair, haunts everyone complicit in history’s horrors, Maria is crossly plaintive.
Small but perfect: So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan reviewed
So Late in the Day Faber, pp.47, 8.99 In an email from Claire Keegan’s Fiction Clinic, I learned that she’d be delivering three seminars in Wexford on ‘How Fiction Works’, while down the road, at the Write by the Sea Festival, Faber would be launching her new hardback. I was excited. I’m a Keegan fan. I even considered going to Wexford. So I was a little miffed when the hardback turned out to be a large-print 47-page story.
The long journey from Lindisfarne: Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers, reviewed
Benjamin Myers had a lucky break with his 2017 novel, The Gallows Pole. First published by a small indie press, it won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, garnered a two-book deal from Bloomsbury and this year is to be adapted by Shane Meadows as a BBC television series. He is something of a maverick – his work a mix of Hughesian lyricism and noir violence – and his success has been hard won.
Three men on a pilgrimage
I used to envy Catholic novelists - Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, François Mauriac - as having that extra point of view, namely eternity. The Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue doesn't entirely qualify as a Catholic writer, even though she's on record as saying she's currently obsessed with Catholic theology, specifically Purgatory, but there's a thread of Catholicism (particularly the Irish variety) in many of her books.
Memory test: The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan, reviewed
Jennifer Egan. [Getty Images] On page 231 of The Candy House, a sequel – no, a ‘sibling’ says Jennifer Egan – to the Pulitzer prize-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad, we meet a character called Noreen. Wasn’t she in Goon Squad? Quick check and yes, there she is playing a bit-part peeping through a fence. Now she’s older, madder and still obsessed with the fence.
Compassion and a gift for friendship are touchingly evident in Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days
It has to be one of the most extraordinary stories of lockdown — how Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael, undergoing treatment for recurrent pancreatic cancer, came to be living in the basement of the American novelist Ann Patchett and her husband Dr Karl VanDevender. How it happened is told in the title story of These Precious Days, Patchett’s second collection of essays.
Mothers and daughters: I Couldn’t Love You More, by Esther Freud, reviewed
Esther Freud. Credit: Getty Images A new novel by Esther Freud — her ninth — raises the perennial but always fascinating question about the use of autobiography in fiction. Since her first novel, Hideous Kinky, Freud has frequently used an underpinning of autobiography, but mostly it’s been discreet. You didn’t need to distinguish what was life, what fiction. But with I Couldn’t Love You More the auto-biographical element has become overt and somehow obtrusive.
Violence and cross-dressing in post-bellum Tennessee
Books A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry reviewed It was perhaps a mistake to re-read Sebastian Barry’s award-winning Days Without End before its sequel, A Thousand Moons, since the two soon began to swim together in my head — not least because Moons is a kind of mirror image of Days. Winona, the Indian orphan girl adopted by the Union soldiers Thomas McNulty and ‘handsome’ John Cole in Days, takes over the narration.
Too much American angst: the latest short stories
In ‘A Prize for Every Player’ — one of 12 stories in Days of Awe, a new collection by A.M. Homes (Granta, £14.99) — Tom Sanford, shopping with his family in Mammoth Mart, soliliquises (loudly and nostalgically) about the America he remembers, and finds himself with an audience of shoppers who nominate him as the People’s Candidate for President. Absurd? Not quite so absurd perhaps as in pre-Trump days.
Too much American angst: the latest short stories
In ‘A Prize for Every Player’ — one of 12 stories in Days of Awe, a new collection by A.M. Homes (Granta, £14.99) — Tom Sanford, shopping with his family in Mammoth Mart, soliliquises (loudly and nostalgically) about the America he remembers, and finds himself with an audience of shoppers who nominate him as the People’s Candidate for President. Absurd? Not quite so absurd perhaps as in pre-Trump days.
Selections from 'Tools of the Trade: Poems for New Doctors'
has been seen fluttering the pulse of the night nurse appearing, disguised, as a bunch of grapes and a smile No heart is ever by-passed by Love. Love has been loitering down this corridor mind how you go. If you smile you might catch it. A Brief Format To Be Used When Consulting With Patients The doctor will listen while The patient will listen while The patient will think that the doctor knows what the doctor is talking about.
Five Things: How to keep writing
1. Go for a walk. The rhythm of walking can set your sentences going. You may be trying too hard. A walk is relaxing. It allows ideas – or the next bit of your story – to come into your mind without any effort on your part. 2. Ask questions. Who, What, Why, Where and How are a writer’s most useful words. Question your characters and brainstorm the answers. e.g. So what would X really do when when a strange man appears at his door? Who is he? What does he want?
The Greengrocer's Apostrophe
Skip to Content A collection of three comic tales from BBC Radio 4, ‘The Greengrocer’s Apostrophe’, inspired by those hand-written signs offering ‘Apple's and Banana's’ which can be found in every town in Britain. Originally broadcast in the ‘Afternoon Reading’ slots from 28-30 September 2010. ‘Penny's from Heaven’ by Anneliese Mackintosh: James Anthony Pearson reads a quirky story about the apostrophe that ends a relationship. Produced by Eilidh McCreadie.
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