The prose can feel deadening, with mundane activities described in a detached manner – “The map interface displayed on the screen [...
] shows a blue dot representing her current location and a red pin representing her destination. The blue dot overlaps the red pin completely, indicating that she has arrived.” The idea, I suppose, is to reflect the deadening effects of late-stage capitalism, a style that has become ubiquitous in contemporary fiction , for better or for worse.
Elizabeth MacBride The Long Look Back centres on that rare subject – working-class life. Beckett could not be read: “My own reality was so severe. Reading about it was a luxury I could not afford.
” Childhood in New York , schooling at “Synger”, “cut knees, falls, terror, ignorance, the constant fear of not making the grade”. Teenage TB. Visiting the North – post the Nazi blitzkrieg.
An encounter with Elizabeth Taylor, “a spoiled American lady”. “I stare back down through the years,” writes MacDonagh. “There is no death.
Family and friends are still alive.” Portobello was “a kip” but it was home. It evoked “love, before I realised what love was about”.
It deserves a place among the classics – The Outsiders, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, The Grass Arena. A work of literature. Rosita Sweetman [ Stronger by Nicola Hanney: An unputdownable memoir about escaping coercive control Opens in new window ] In this, his second memoir, O’Rourke resumes his story whe.