with Caroline Campbell and
Stephan Wolohojian
Those who missed this remarkable exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art this past winter can still catch it at London’s National Gallery this spring. If you can’t make it there (and even if you can), this sumptuous book should be in your home since it amply illustrates the wonders of a city’s art that shaped European art for centuries to come. Consider Duccio’s panels featuring the Virgin Mother and Child for the main altar of Siena Cathedral: “a little over life size, framed by the splayed sides of their marble and mosaic-encrusted throne, and attended by 10 richly vested saints and 20 angels.” Or look at two portable altarpieces by Simone Martini, brought together for the first time in centuries for this show and wondrously illustrative of Martini’s vibrant technique. The Black Death snuffed out Siena’s creative flame, but with this book you can revel in its glory days. Kudos to its editor, Joanna Cannon, along with Caroline Campbell and Stephan Wolohojian.
Oh, joy! Penguin Books has collected all five novels in a single, smartly produced Everyman edition, so now in one sitting you can read about the adventures of Patrick Melrose from age five through a hard-lived adulthood, an engaging character who swims his way through parental abuse, unbounded privilege, a terrifying drug addiction, and his own parenthood, complete with adultery and the loss of his family home. Never once does the reader feel less than sympathetic to Patrick, a neat trick since he takes so many missteps, including in his choice of friends. A nice chaser after reading the novels is to watch the criminally underrated TV series based on some of the books, with Patrick brought decadently to life by Benedict Cumberbatch.
This is a curiously entertaining book, since it is not so much filled with gossip as it is about what constitutes gossip. Kelsey McKinney wisely expands the definition of gossip to anyone talking with anyone about someone else who is not there, which means that when your doorman truthfully tells a visitor you have gone out, well, that’s gossip. The author covers all the variations, and not just celebrity gossip, whose modern birth owes so much to the evil machinations of Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, and Louella Parsons. And what about the Internet, which has a hunger to create what McKinney calls “a Main Character,” whose misdeed can be amplified in minutes and end up destroying a career in hours. (Remember the P.R. executive who, leaving for South Africa, tweeted that she hoped she didn’t contract AIDS there, and was out of a job by the time her plane landed.) From the voyeurism of reality TV to the urban legends of the poop-in-Ziploc-bag guest (please google if interested), McKinney is never less than incisive and illuminating about slippery facts. Who can resist a writer who concludes by quoting Nietzsche, who long before the invention of “Page Six” wrote, “There are no facts, only interpretations”?
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIl
