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      Book Review: ‘Bad Nature,’ by Ariel Courage

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      In Ariel Courage’s novel, “Bad Nature,” a powerful career woman sets out on a road trip intending to kill her father.BAD NATURE, by Ariel CourageFor many people, being diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of 40 might prompt an instant reassessment of priorities. For Hester, the narrator of Ariel Courage’s debut novel, “Bad Nature,” this means immediately quitting her job in Manhattan to drive across the country and murder her father.It’s the sole item on her bucket list, and it’s also unfinished business: Her first attempt, at 13, when she shot him with a BB gun to stop him from abusing her mother, coincided with his permanent exit from their household. Since then, their relationship has consisted of Hester checking the internet now and then “to confirm he was alive and therefore still killable.” Think of “Bad Nature” as the anti “Eat, Pray, Love.”Personal-crisis travel narratives by white women, both memoirs and fiction, tend to follow certain conventions: protagonists embarking on journeys of earnest, emotional introspection in response to devastating news. These women tend not to be jerks. Hester — a lawyer who spends her days negotiating settlements for her conglomerate employer’s E.P.A. violations — runs right over these expectations with her Jaguar E-Type, then throws the car in reverse to do it again.Putting an unlikable heroine in the (literal) driver’s seat of a debut is an admirable feat, and Courage pulls it off through her character’s ruthless self-awareness, acerbic humor and one-liners so hilarious it’s tempting to read them aloud. “I wondered what my tumor was up to,” she thinks. “My breast was such an inhospitable place, meager and thin. I pictured my tumor like a goat on a cliff’s face, hunting for roughage to gnaw on. You almost had to root for it, the underdog. I called it Beryl.”Over the course of her journey — which quickly strays from the linear path she’s planned — Hester is not immune to personal growth, but “Bad Nature” is refreshingly more interested in social critique — particularly of American individualism and its harm to the collective good. Before she’s even left New York she’s already picked up a hitchhiker named John, a radical environmentalist (and sometimes eco-terrorist) whose current mission involves breaking into government “cleanup” sites and documenting their chemical damage via artistic photographs.Guiding Hester to several of these sites along her westward route, John becomes an unlikely but convincing foil to her amoral, fur-wearing consumerism: He’s “a species of ethical genius” who shuns materialism, shows interpersonal care and has an encyclopedic knowledge about the environmental impact of every human action, from drinking coffee to shooting someone. John challenges Hester’s long-held yet barely examined values by forcing her to confront the tangible fallout of the same kind of work that made her wealthy — and its link to terminal illnesses like her own.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Liz Moore on ‘Long Bright River’ and the Slow Burn of Success

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      Suddenly Liz Moore blazed, comet-like, onto small screens and best-seller lists. But her writing career has been a slow burn.No matter how you slice it, Liz Moore has arrived.This month, an adaptation of her blockbuster novel “Long Bright River” started streaming on Peacock. And her next book, “The God of the Woods,” now on the best-seller list for 36 weeks (and counting), will soon hit the million mark in sales — a distinction normally reserved for celebrities and novelists recognizable by last name alone.Moore isn’t one of those authors. But, over the past two decades, she’s proved to be “a writer who can do anything,” as her editor Sarah McGrath put it.Moore taps into an elusive sweet spot between literary and commercial fiction, populating vividly drawn settings with characters who seem to live, breathe and make terrible mistakes along with the rest of us. Her novels can be enjoyed by, say, a teenage girl and her 50-something father, defying genre and categorization to such an extent that, from one to the next, a reader might not register that they’re written by the same person.“I get messages saying, I loved your new book. Do you have any others?” Moore, 41, said during an interview at a cafe in Philadelphia. “Or they’ll call ‘The God of the Woods’ my second book because ‘Long Bright River’ was my first that broke out.”In fact, “The God of the Woods,” a mystery about siblings who disappear 14 years apart, is Moore’s fifth book. She wrote her first, “The Words of Every Song,” while she was a student at Barnard College. Shortly after she graduated in 2005, she signed on with an agent who’d come to campus for a panel on the publishing industry.“I reached out and said, ‘I have this manuscript of interconnected stories about the music industry. Would you be interested in looking at it?’ She said yes,” Moore recalled. “Only in retrospect do I realize what a lucky break that was.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Molly Young on Space and Music

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      A Booker-winning novel; a rocking essay collection.Édouard Manet/Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial CollectionDear readers,Do you know the difference between an astronaut and a cosmonaut? The distinction rests on where the -naut was trained: Cosmonauts hail from Russia and astronauts from the United States, Canada, or Europe. Not China, though: The Chinese version is a taikonaut. If there exists another job with three different names of equally silky mouth-feel, I cannot think of it.The -naut distinction is one of several vocabulary upgrades you might receive from Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital,” which has taken the books desk by storm. Nobody pays us to get obsessed with specific books all at once; it just happens. (If we got paid, you’d know. Our fingers would be heavy with diamonds.)To counteract the expansive dreaminess of “Orbital,” I got down and dirty with Ian Penman’s collection of music essays. If you’re hankering to see the likes of James Brown and Prince (among others) treated with the penetration of an X-ray machine and the besottedness of a poet, Penman is your fella.—Molly“Orbital,” by Samantha HarveyFiction, 2023We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Actress Candy Clark Captured Some of the Most Famous Faces. Then She Put Them in a Drawer.

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      The actress Candy Clark documented her unlikely journey through 1970s Hollywood in a series of Polaroids, now published in a memoir.Jeff Bridges taught her how to drive in his Volkswagen bus. Steven Spielberg refused to flirt with her. She successfully talked the actor Rip Torn out of assaulting the director Nicolas Roeg on a movie set. While lying on a beach in Mexico with the painter Ed Ruscha, she was grazed by a stray bullet on the thigh. Once, she pinched David Bowie’s nipples.In Los Angeles, a city built on oversize lore and swaggering legend, where does one file away stories like these? Revealing but not gossipy. Candid but not lurid. Occasionally surreal but consistently sweet.“It’s a confessional era, right?” said Candy Clark, a former actress who wears a neat blonde bob and Warby Parker glasses, sitting in a booth at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, Calif. It was a recent Sunday afternoon, and Ms. Clark — the one behind the wheel of Mr. Bridges’s van, the starlet who tried to flirt with Mr. Spielberg, the peacemaker, the bullet-wound victim and the nipple-twisting culprit — was nibbling on pita and hummus.Dodging a life of mundane midcentury expectations, she started a modeling career in New York and went on to become a darling of the “New Hollywood” era in the 1970s. During her five decades onscreen, she collected over 80 film and television credits, establishing herself as a ubiquitous face who played mostly free-spirited lovers and burnouts like Debbie Dunham in “American Graffiti,” the part that earned Ms. Clark an Oscar nomination. It was her second-ever acting role.“It was my arrival,” she said, recalling the nomination. “You’re just the center of the universe, and it’s really wonderful.”A young Ms. Clark with the X-70 Polaroid camera she used to take photos of her fellow actors, before many of them became mega-famous.Candy ClarkWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘Streetcar,’ Patsy Ferran Gives Blanche a Nervy New Read

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      The London-based actress has been heralded as one of the most talented of her generation. Still, she worried audiences would balk at her “very unconventional Blanche.”Patsy Ferran will not judge a book by its cover. But covers are important to her. “See?” she said, palming a copy of a Barbara Kingsolver novel at a Brooklyn branch of McNally Jackson bookstore. “Such a good cover. Aesthetics do matter.”Ferran, a London-based actress, is currently starring in Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, just up the road from the store. A latecomer to reading for pleasure, Ferran picked up fiction, particularly American fiction, during the pandemic lockdowns and has yet to put it down. Currently working her way through Percival Everett’s “James,” with Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” cued up next, she had promised herself that she wouldn’t buy any more books. But the shelves were calling.“I kind of explore cities via book shops,” she said. “That and good coffee.”In the store, Ferran, lively, shrewd and lightly self-deprecating, (“I do my own glam,” she said wryly as she shook out her hair from a woolly hat) picked up and put down several recent paperbacks, enthusing about their feel. “British paperbacks are so stiff, you have to crowbar them open, which I hate,” she said. Ferran decided that she might buy just one. Or two. Certainly not more than three.Ferran leaped onto the London “Streetcar” days before previews were set to begin after another actress had to withdraw from the role.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesFerran, 35, made her professional debut just after her graduation from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in a production of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.” More stage roles followed, including her first lead, as Alma in “Summer and Smoke,” also by Williams, directed by Rebecca Frecknall. “This young actor is a genuine marvel, as hilarious as she is heartbreaking,” one critic wrote of the performance. Soon she was recognized as one of the most talented stage actresses of her generation.Small and quick, with dark, curling hair, Ferran was an unusual choice for Blanche. A great American heroine, “an aging Southern belle who lives in a state of perpetual panic about her fading beauty” in Williams’s words, Blanche is typically played by willowy, languorous blondes. (Recent New York Blanches include Cate Blanchett and Gillian Anderson). Ferran knows this. She worried that audiences would dismiss her as the wrong cover for this particular book.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Books on Healing From Trauma

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      Neuroscientists, psychologists and other experts share the titles they recommend most.When Gabor Maté was in his 40s and a successful doctor in Vancouver, Canada, he struggled with depression and strained relationships. Picking up “The Drama of the Gifted Child,” by Alice Miller, was the first step to understanding the root of his problems.“A good book gives you a map to yourself,” said Dr. Maté, now a trauma researcher and author of “The Myth of Normal.”While reading Dr. Miller’s book, his experiences started to make sense. “My depression, my self-loathing,” he explained, were a result of early childhood trauma.Trauma is a deeply distressing experience that leaves lasting effects on a person’s thoughts, emotions and behavior. It rewires both the body and mind and shapes overall health. Research shows, however, that the right tools can help us regulate our emotions and rebuild a sense of safety.Many people are hungry for books that explore trauma: Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score” has sold more than three million copies globally and spent more than six years total on the New York Times best-seller list. But there are other works that can help us make sense of negative experiences.The five titles below were recommended by neuroscientists, psychologists and trauma specialists as sources to help you understand and process trauma.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Do You Know the Classic Works That Inspired These Popular Family Movies?

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      “The Lion King,” first released as an animated film in 1994, has spawned multiple adaptations and sequels, including Julie Taymor’s 1997 Broadway production and a soundtrack companion album by Beyoncé for the 2019 computer-enhanced movie version. The plot of the story, about a young lion finding his place in the world, has been compared to which play by William Shakespeare? More

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      Book Review: ‘Class Matters,’ by Richard D. Kahlenberg

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      Richard D. Kahlenberg has long argued for colleges to weigh socioeconomic status to promote diversity. His position is more relevant than ever.CLASS MATTERS: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, by Richard D. KahlenbergIf there is one lesson that centrist Democrats have taken from Donald Trump’s startlingly broad-based victory in November, it is that their party will never return to majority status unless it regains the trust of working-class Americans. Those voters — nonwhite as well as white — rejected the language of race and identity that they associate, fairly or not, with the Democrats. So it’s no surprise that the party has scrambled to develop a “credible working-class message” that will “win them back,” in the words of one super PAC that plans to invest $50 million in the effort.Enter Richard D. Kahlenberg, who has been arguing for virtually his entire adult life that our race-based system of affirmative action pits the white working class against Black people, and aligns the Democratic Party with middle-class or well-to-do beneficiaries of color against Americans who see themselves as the losers in a zero-sum game. His ship finally came in two years ago when the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action violated the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. Kahlenberg’s new book, “Class Matters,” is his personal history of the debate, his victory lap and his spirited argument for a liberal politics of class rather than race.That victory lap is hard to begrudge: Kahlenberg writes that he has been laboring in the vineyards since he wrote his senior thesis at Harvard in 1984 on Robert F. Kennedy’s attempt to forge a cross-racial working-class coalition in the 1968 presidential election. Kahlenberg found that Kennedy opposed even mild forms of racial preference in favor of economic programs that would benefit all working-class Americans. I was as surprised to learn this now as Kahlenberg was then, though as a biographer of Hubert Humphrey I know that the devastating loss in 1968 sent Humphrey on the same trajectory.A politics in which elite liberals told ordinary white Americans that they had to make sacrifices — from which elites themselves were largely exempt — in order to compensate for historical injustices was an invitation to disaster.Just before the 1992 election, Kahlenberg notes, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded that the fraction of white voters who felt they had a “personal responsibility” for those injustices was “zero.” Greenberg described affirmative action as a “problem of historic proportions” — as mandatory school desegregation plans had been for an earlier generation of Democrats. Bill Clinton won the 1992 election in part by soft-pedaling race-specific policy solutions; but as president, Kahlenberg concludes, Clinton felt the need to reward civil rights groups by embracing affirmative action.Unlike many conservatives, Kahlenberg accepts the immense salience of race in American life and thus the unfair disadvantages so many students of color face. But the ugly secret of affirmative action, the author argues, is that most Black beneficiaries are middle-class, while many of the white or Asian applicants left out in the cold are working-class students who have done well in school despite significant disadvantages of their own. Are they less deserving?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More