Review of 2023: Part 1 – Books

Every year I read one of Penelope Fitzgerald's novels – and just one, since she started late in life and her works must be rationed – and every December I look back to discover that no other fiction left me with quite the same feeling. This year, it was The Gate of Angels (1990), a strange and haunting book about a junior fellow at a cramped Cambridge college, and the beaten-down, poverty-scarred nurse whom he decides to idealise after they're both involved in a freak bicycling accident. In terms of its story and characterisation, it perhaps isn't Fitzgerald's most consistent novel, though it's surely her most eerie, its touch of the supernatural intensifying during an unforgettable, self-contained ghost story, before gently infusing that heartstopping ending. Whenever her research threatens to outstay its welcome – the detail beginning to obscure the point – she will suddenly snap to an instance of heartbreak or off-kilter sentiment that reminds you you're in the hands of a genius, reflecting the extremities of life as if in the fragments of a smashed mirror. Her pan is about the deadest in literature.

The Hollywood years of literature's second best Fitzgerald – F. Scott – have given me the greatest of joys and the deepest of chills. His legendary-notorious 1932 story, Crazy Sunday, recounted a disastrous party at Irving Thalberg's house, and mined his pain for art, while unhelpfully immortalising Scott's image as the drunken liability of Tinseltown. He returned to the theme for his cynical, rather thin Pat Hobby Stories (1940-41), dealing with the endless machinations of an amoral former silent film scenarist trying to stay one step ahead of the game. These short stories, written for Esquire, are transparently the work of an alcoholic, not only in their eternal preoccupation with going for a drink, but in their wild swings between despondency and mania. They do, however, contain one of the greatest lines ever shoved into the mouth of a bristling screenwriter: "I wouldn't sell you the story of the Three Bears for five grand."

Of course, these relatively trifling Hollywood diversions were just steps along the beach path to his last, aborted masterpiece, The Last Tycoon (1941). Its first-person approach is tortuous, with the perverse choice of narrator requiring Houdini-like feats of linguistic escapology; it's erratic; it isn't finished. But it is psychologically profound, deceptively complex and desperately moving, while suggesting an innate – though learnt – understanding of screenwriting and moviemaking that was generally considered to be beyond Scott when he was actually trying to write scripts (the jury, though, isn't so much 'out' as 'at war': much, much more of this in the 'non-fiction' section below). The Last Tycoon is full of magical passages, of romance that takes place on an elemental level far beneath the dialogue being exchanged, of Hollywood lore born of equal parts gold dust and pragmatism. What we were bequeathed, when Fitzgerald complained that he was feeling really quite unwell, before dropping dead of a heart attack at 44, was the first 60,000 words of a 50,000-word novel, covering around a half of the story. His outline of the remainder is in itself staggering, showing a literary mind that was still – or once again – firing, concerning itself with ideas of vast ambition, realised through mirroring, dramatic irony and startling clarity of character.

Of the other classic Hollywood novels, I found I Should Have Stayed Home (1938) rancidly irresistible. It's a nasty, brutal and short novel from the author of They Shoot Horses, Don't They, screenwriter Horace McCoy, in which losers meet other losers in Tinseltown, and everybody loses. It's existential and dialogue-heavy, studded with mere shards of action and atmosphere, and if its sourness comes close to self-parody, it leaves its mark. Budd Schulberg's notorious, million-selling What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) taps a similar vein but also fills in the surroundings. It is bristling, flavourful, compulsively readable and curiously one-note, fixated on all-time heel Sammy Glick as he beats a path to the top of Hollywood over the bodies of his contemporaries.

The contemporary books glancing back at the same subject have found an audience but didn't do much for me. Anthony Marra's Mercury Pictures Presents (2022) is clearly intended to be Kavalier & Clay in the world of Day of the Locust, but never feels authentic. While it's well-plotted and occasionally affecting, there's a smug glibness to its viewpoint – as if '40s cinema were just a thing to be mocked – and almost every joke (of which there are hundreds) seems laboriously reverse-engineered. Next to The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017) by Taylor Jenkins Reid, though, it begins to resemble The Last Tycoon. Jenkins Reid can plot, sure, but apparently neglected to indulge in any research beyond skimming Rita Hayworth's Wikipedia page. At the sentence level, the book is just dreadful, full of people "reaching out", perhaps to ensure that no clichéd phrase remains unmolested. Those shortcomings are compounded by a stifling and self-immobilising political correctness that in society is fine, and in art is death. The author is also endlessly preoccupied with clothes and food in a way that, as a reader, I am not.

Were there a competition to crown the Daddy of the Distinctive Sentence, it may come down to a straight fight between Truman Capote and P. G. Wodehouse. And when I need to remove myself from the worries of the world, I curl up with a Wodehouse. He did maybe collaborate with the Nazis a little bit that time, but aside from that it's an uncomplicated pursuit that whisks me off to a happier place. This year I read four (which perhaps offers a clue as to the state of my mental health during these past 12 months). The first two were Jeeves and Wooster. Joy in the Morning (1946) isn't as funny as the previous novel, The Code of the Woosters, but then what is? It comes up short only in the plotting, seeming slightly forced in comparison. By the mid-'40s, his style was pretty much flawless, Wodehouse wringing laughs from every scenario with some inspired turn – and pacing – of phrase. There are a dozen laugh-out-loud moments in the book, though surely the biggest (on p. 283 of the Everyman edition) has Uncle Percy spotting the central flaw in Bertie's plan to placate Aunt Agatha. 'Joy' is right. The Mating Season (1949) is even better: a trifle inelegant in the sweep of the thing, but full of brilliant moments, both in the devising of its set-pieces and the turns of its language; the introduction of Catsmeat is simply one of the funniest passages I have ever read. The only sour note comes from Wodehouse's egregious and unconvincing attacks on a couple of old friends who'd criticised him for (accidentally?) collaborating with those German chaps, if you're puzzled by how preoccupied the author is with having a go at A. A. Milne.

Since I'm keen not to read all the Jeeves books just yet, should the international news fail to improve, I headed off to Blandings. The first of that series, Something Fresh (1915), is early Wodehouse, so the prose isn't yet in full flight, and both the story and writing occasionally seem flat or laborious. It is, though, full of wonderful comic moments. That inadvertent duality is epitomised by the 'Wand of Death' sequence: an unbelievably funny situation which then involves its characters in the joke. Once they understand their interaction to be comic, thus revealing them as romantic juveniles rather than sympathetic laughing stocks, the gag is cosseted in warmth, and the humour evaporates. Leave It to Psmith (1923), which prior to 2018 was the most ambitious crossover event in history, finds Wodehouse's eccentric, garrulous, monocled socialist superhero invading the world of Blandings, the author's voice by now largely developed or discovered. It is like Something Fresh perfected: the story, about contrasting parties competing for a diamond necklace, is essentially the same, but it never drags or sags; it's as light as air.

Being an awful and adolescent snob, I imagined that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2022), being popular, would leave me cold. But being a book-lover and emotional sort who idealises the creative impulse, it knocked me sideways. It's a novel about work, love, friendship, computer games and chronic pain that creates a world as vividly as its characters do; those characters stayed with me for weeks afterwards. Some of its tangents feel a little too on-the-nose, but they're counterbalanced by timely thoughts – if couched in the acknowledgement of a certain reductivity – about how bastardised notions of 'appropriation' are the enemy of art – and of a shared humanity. Another book that got its claws into me was The Imposter (2024?), the work in progress by Rob Palk, a retrospective love story between two stand-up comics: one beset by guilt, the other dead. It's superb on mental illness, meat raffles and wild swimming, its characters stuck together by obsession, regret and the residue of oranges forever being peeled and eaten by its damaged and doomed hero. Presume it'll be coming out soonish, so that'll be nice.

I have really cool friends who buy me books for Christmas. Last year's windfall included Concerning My Daughter (2022) by Kim Hye-Jin, a spare, unsentimental book about old age and new worlds, told from the point of view of a care home worker who's terrified both of her impending obsolescence and the idea that her daughter is wasting her own life on futile protest and lesbianism. Its heroine is difficult, even dislikeable, Hye-Jin (and translator Jamie Chang) astutely relying on the reader's automatic identification with the narrator, before introducing changes that are either infinitesimal or imperfect. That transformation is beautifully judged, all the more affecting because it refuses to resort to simple answers or sweeping sentimentality, offering instead mere chinks of light and moments of partial catharsis.

The Christmas 2022 bonanza also included Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014). “First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.” This book raises up a world, in ruins, around you. And while its reveals, utilising a small cast of characters, sometimes feel more like coincidence than fatalism, it remains a dazzling feat of time-slip plotting. At the prose level, it’s uneven, hampered by some distracting tics and St. John Mandel’s tendency to overexplain small details, as if fighting the pedant in her head. But despite those issues, and an asexuality that feels almost perverse in a novel about the end of days, what lingers is the sheer feat of universe-building, the richness of her characterisation, and the deep love of civilisation – and particularly technology – that permeates her book. A post-apocalyptic vantage point proves the perfect one from which St. John Mandel can gaze with both wistfulness and an awestruck wonder at the mundane miracles of the 21st century.

I also read Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca (1938) thanks to the intervention of a friend, as I'd forgotten my Kindle and didn't have anything for the train home. I quite liked it, though with reservations: is it ambivalent and ironic, or simply simplistic? Are its endless descriptions immersing or overwriting? Do we take its internalised excursions as deftly psychological or, in fact, slightly tedious? Perhaps if I'd gone in blind, rather than having seen Hitchcock's adaptation years ago, it would have tantalised me more, but then I knew the story of Jane Eyre (to which Du Maurier owes a vast and overdue debt) before I read that, and still felt the banging from the attic.

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (2023) is another queer phantasmagoria from one of our most distinctive novelists, Isabel Waidner. It didn't give me quite the same feeling of euphoria and discovery as Sterling Karat Gold, but then subsequent novels rarely do (if I'd read Roth's other historical Newark novels before American Pastoral, would that still be the one I laud and fetishise?). This one features an insectoid Bambi, a psychotic Thumper, and a time-slipped Joe Orton, who escapes his violent death to host a furious, debunking talk show, all of that the riotous collage through which our working-class novelist hero wanders, trying to literally capture the trophy that will let them graduate to the book-tour circuit.

I was left beguiled, tormented and unsatisfied by Barry Unsworth's Losing Nelson (1999), in which an amateur historian loses his mind while trying to coming to terms with mounting evidence of Admiral Lord Nelson's duplicity and dishonour in the city of Naples. It's a triumph of voice, and of historical research, with a startling premise and moments of astonishing impact, but every other character is a caricature (which one suspects is not entirely intentional) and the climax feels both desperately forced and almost unkind in its nihilism. Another book I'd long wanted to read, and am now mildly sulky about, is Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) by Jeanette Winterson. For a while, it is dazzingly effective: glorious first-person narration, a vivid world, hilarious jokes, off-kilter romance... then suddenly it runs out of energy, its impact endlessly diluted by fantasy sequences that simply anticipate or repeat the central story in an alternate world of sledgehammer-light symbolism. There is something so special here, it just isn't sustained.

My forays into the world of Edith Wharton, meanwhile, smacked into Summer (1917). I'd struggled to imagine how a Wharton book wouldn't work, and with this, and The Custom of the Country, now I know. That one was glib and overly comic, this one is laborious and long-winded, appearing to go on forever, despite being a novella. She called it 'hot Ethan', regarding it as a companion piece to her immortal Ethan Frome, but it isn't in the same league. There are, at least, moments of beautiful brutality, and the exquisite pain of that climactic letter.

During previous explorations of middle-grade fiction, I became somewhat enamoured of Stuart Gibbs'Spy School books, and have taken to picking up the latest one whenever it comes out, a tradition I may now abandon, as Spy School: Project X (2022) was no good at all, a curiously mean-spirited book in which barely any of the (broad, overexplained) jokes landed. The series' strong suit used to be its recourse to genuine emotion, but, somewhere along the way, that too has turned phony. It is for 10 year olds, but they deserve good books too, and Gibbs has written several of them.

***

NON-FICTION

My favourite non-fiction book of the year was Anahit Behrooz's BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship (2023). It's the only thing I've read in the past 12 months that caused shifts in my thinking. Anahit has been about my favourite writer on film for a while, and here widens the scope and deepens the vision, seeing with such clarity, and writing with such originality and tactility. If I've got you a Christmas present this year, it may well be this. Not sure if I mentioned that I'm actually a feminist actually?

I'll break down the rest of the non-fic by theme...

Books about movies

There has rarely been a moment in 2023 when I have not had a Hollywood history in my hand. The following is everything I've read cover-to-cover, I'll spare you the other 80 books that have, in one way or another, so far assisted The Opus.

Perhaps the greatest of the lot was Tom Dardis's Some Time in the Sun (1975), an astonishing book essaying the Hollywood years of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Huxley, Nathanael West and James Agee. It's revisionist history of the best sort, positing that Fitzgerald's drunken downfall amid the dream factories is largely a myth that obscures a period of financial security and ultimate creative rebirth. Dardis digs into the unpublished scripts to explain how Fitzgerald faultered when faced with the peculiar restrictions of screenwriting, and suggests that the notorious changes made to Scott's Three Comrades by Joe Mankiewicz ("Monkeybitch", in Fitzgerald's petulant term) were more like good sense. The other studies are every bit as fascinating, until a somewhat fawning section on Agee, who seems a limited figure in comparison with such literary bedfellows, though arguably had more success on screen. The view of Agee's scripts shows how Dardis is in some ways hamstrung by the received wisdom of the era in which he is writing: he piles praise upon The African Queen, which in 1975 was still regarded as a masterpiece, though thankfully its exalted reputation has been brought down a peg or two since. By contrast, the reputation of The Night of the Hunter, a flop on release, was still in the toilet; it is only in recent decades that Laughton's movie has been reappraised as one of the great pictures of its period. In keeping with mid-'70s conformity, Dardis is generally dismissive of genre fare (especially cheap B-movies), overlooking various no-budget Republic gems, while praising Huxley's dreadful script for Pride and Prejudice, perhaps the most incompetent bastardisation of a great novel perpetrated on the public during the Golden Age. His strong opinions, though, while conventional, are clearly sincere, and detract from neither the fun nor fascination of this superb study.

Aaron Latham's spectacular Crazy Sundays: Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood (1971) is the perfect companion read, delving even deeper into Scott, while diverging significantly from Dardis's conclusions. It's an expanded dissertation but unbelievably readable, while exhibiting dizzying levels of scholarship. The book gets inside Fitzgerald's head and his talent, making a compelling case for his being a gifted – and ever-improving – screenwriter, explaining his complex approach to screen story, his developing understanding of the medium, and the transformation in his conception of female characters, from women of capricious passivity to people of practical action. Crazy Sundays is full of extraordinary insights, mining the subject's novels and stories for unguarded autobiography, and expanding the focus way beyond what you might expect. While discussion of Fitzgerald's 'Hollywood period' typically refers to the last four years of his life, Crazy Sundays goes way back: first to his days as a student dramatist, then through his lesser-known Hollywood flirtations – attempts to become a silent screen scenarist, leading man (!) and early-talkie dialogue writer – before exploring his fluctuating fortunes throughout his final stand.

Another unmissable book for fans of Hollywood screenwriting, and associated lore, is Scoundrels and Spitballers (1996, trans. 2020) by Philippe Garner. Yes, he prioritises the hedonist, and the boozy, broken, self-pitying man – Rowland Brown, Charles Burnett, Buzz Bezzerides – but the results are vivid and quite outrageously entertaining, full of untold stories and revelatory details. The format is amusingly odd: a series of barely-connected profiles, mostly of writers, but also of a restaurant (the Brown Derby), a magazine (STORY) and a bookshop (Stanley Rose's). And Garnier has a vast knowledge of his subject: both the literary landscape (including the inevitable H. L. Mencken) and the films, supplemented by diligent research in the Warner archive. The only debits: no index, and the occasionally tortuous (or repetitious) translation.

There were two other good books about screenwriters. Backstory 1: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age (1986) by Patrick McGilligan offers tales from the frontline: interviews with 14 of the studio-era's best screenwriters, encompassing celebrated wits both urban (Julius Epstein) and refined (Donald Ogden Stewart), the greatest husband-and-wife team in pictures (Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett) and a 'constructionist' (Richard Bennett), whose job was to map out the story, not prettify the language. There's a little vintage gossip, alongside some unwitting insights, from John Lee Mahin's lack of remorse about the communist witchhunt to Richard Maibaum's self-serving curation of his own chapter, though its greatest value is its simplest one, as a portrait of an underexamined class still variously proud of its achievements, chasing generation-old credits or smarting about the movie that might have been. Lizzie Francke's Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood (1994) is also a collection of insightful, largely representational case studies, this time recounting the experiences of female screenwriters from 1910 to the period of publication, and analysing their output through a feminist lens. I found the later chapters particularly interesting, both because more of the material was new to me, and because many of Francke's most distinctive and intriguing subjects were available for interview. The book isn't intended as a comprehensive history, and it also somewhat overlooks '30s writers who did extraordinary work within rigid parameters, but it's thoughtful, righteously angry and full of valuable detail. It gave me a long list of films and scripts to explore; I'm especially intrigued by Clair Noto's The Tourist, a near-mythic, unproduced sci-fi screenplay from 1980. I'd be fascinated to know what Francke makes of the 30 years since she wrote the book.

The year's nichest and nerdiest reading (by anyone, not merely by me) was surely How to Write and Sell Film Stories (1938) by the legendary, vaguely over-praised screenwriter Frances Marion. If you are a freelance writer from 1938 looking to find out how to write and sell a film story, then boy do I have the book for you.

Of the various volumes I read about Fox, by far the finest was Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck: The Golden Years at Twentieth Century Fox (1993), in which editor Rudy Belhmer assembles a collection of inter-office studio memos dating from the early '30s to the mid-'60s, held in various archives around the world. Perhaps contrary to your expectations, this proves to be one of the most invigorating spectacles imaginable, taking you within the very walls of Twentieth at its zenith, and evoking the production side of life at the studio like little else. It's like a great novel told in postmodern style, a story of technological change, rampant ego and sporadic creative brilliance, with a cast of incidental characters so improbably eclectic that it verges on the surreal.

There are several more straightforward histories dealing with the same subject, of which the most compelling is George F. Custen's Twentieth Century's Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture Of Hollywood (1997). If it's somewhat messy in construction – dealing with Zanuck's career largely chronologically until the foundation of his major studio, before breaking into thematic chapters more concerned with socio-political meaning – and is based on rather over-familiar sources, Custen is a remarkably clear-eyed and fair-minded (Marxist) chronicler, whose astute analysis of where his subject dared to be different, and where he didn't, feels close to definitive. And while his argument that DFZ was the true author of John Ford films like The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley feels like a stretch, it's also a useful corrective to the auteurist overreach that tends to dominate film discourse today. Zanuck's name is virtually forgotten in 2023, but he shaped – perhaps even dictated – how America saw itself, and how it dreamt, for four decades. In comparison, Peter Lev's Twentieth Century-Fox: The Zanuck-Skouras Years, 1935-65 (2013) is conspicuously dry, if at least having a USP by focusing so much on the (far less interesting) New York office/exhibition side of the studio. 20th Century-Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Creation of the Modern Film Studio (2021) was another Scott Eyman book from his “will this do?” school of film history, a chronological, surface-level regurgitation of secondary sources, easy to read but lacking any panache, full of irrelevant asides, and in need of an editor who can spot the author’s tendency to repeat himself, sometimes within the same paragraph.

Foxy Lady: The Authorised Biography of Lynn Bari (2010) by Jeff Gordon is a detailed biography of the Fox contract player, with a neat gimmick: its standard chronological narrative is studded with chunks of oral history from interviews conducted with the subject not long before her death. It's a familiar story of ambition, compromised success and alcoholism, though Bari tends to be more honest about her various flaws than her adoring and enthusiastically mitigating Boswell. In Alice Faye: A Life Beyond the Silver Screen (2002), author Jane Lenz Elder tackles the life of the actor and songstress who dared tell 20th Century-Fox to shove it, after they slashed her first true dramatic performance to ribbons. But either Faye's life beyond that moment of melodrama wasn't terribly interesting or (more likely) her passion for privacy makes her a hard figure to chronicle or know. There are a few insights from friends (as well as one revelation about hemmorhoids), but too much of this hagiography comes from old newspaper reports, and the author's desire to portray Faye's later life as just as interesting as her Hollywood years is a curious one, since she doesn't really seem to have done anything except for a mediocre radio sitcom and some presentations for Pfizer. Child Star: An Autobiography (1988) is Shirley Temple's rather tiresome memoir: the most extraordinary of lives rendered in rather a catty, superficial way, complete with broadly regressive politics and the endless idealising of her stage mother. The overriding impression is that she is not a particularly nice person, but not in an entertaining way. Gregory William Mank's Laird Cregar: A Hollywood Tragedy (2018) is well-researched and admirably impassioned but also amateurish and disjointed, with endless irrelevant tangents (at one point, a potted biography of Stephen Fry, who was born 13 years after Cregar died), and anecdotes from the author's own life possessed of dubious mystical overtones. Mank also sees everything through the prism of horror cinema and Hal Roach (just as I see everything through the competing filters of The Magnificent Ambersons, HUAC and Darryl F. Zanuck).

If you like the Ritz Brothers, you might feel a little short-changed that in The Ritz Brothers: The Films, Television Shows and Other Career Highlights of the Famous Comedy Trio (2021), author Roy Leibam rarely dwells in detail on the trio's routines. As I can’t fucking stand them, I found the book’s focus on script notes and production detail very welcome. Some Ritz fans (and these do, reportedly, still exist) have complained that the author dwells too much on the criticisms of contemporary viewers. My issue is slightly different: these bloggers are regularly quoted but never by name (always just ‘modern-day commentator’), which isn’t merely cheeky but kind of... inexplicable. Liebman's approach is also somewhat piecemeal and peculiar – one appendix deals with other cinematic versions of The Three Musketeers!? – an aspect that may further frustrate aficionados, but since these people enjoy watching the Ritz Brothers, who knows what they're thinking.

Two other books gave an insight into key creative personnel at Fox. Take Two (1980) are the memoirs of screenwriter Philip Dunne, who adapted How Green Was My Valley and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, was involved in virtually every liberal cause of his day (which he would then sort-of-stand-up-for-but-not-really, invariably resulting in some kind of pissweak compromise), and here makes a solid bid for the Humblebragging Championship of the World. His book is occasionally funny, occasionablly admirable, and a good source of detail about life on the Fox lot. It is also unbearably smug, which coming from me is really saying something. Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen (2012) by David Luhrssen is a short but illuminating and highly-readable biog, focusing on the work of the great Russian-Armenian director, who debuted Porgy and Bess, and Oklahoma! on Broadway, revolutionised early-talkie cinema, and did The Mark of Zorro and Blood and Sand at Twentieth, before being fired from Laura and Cleopatra during a farcical final 20 years of his career that resulted in more sackings (three) than movies (two). There's much more about Mamoulian in my Song of Songs essay.

Widening the focus to Hollywood as a whole, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (1941) is the only sociological study of Tinseltown at its zenith. Author Leo C. Rosten's conceit is that these much-maligned arrivistes are rather benign, compared to captains of industry or the old-moneyed aristocracts of the East. If he somewhat labours that point, the statistical research remains an invaluable resource, and the surrounding report is written with a dash of panache and the odd piercingly perceptive point. His observation that happiness in Hollywood film consists of a woman arriving in an apartment, weighed down with packages, is perhaps the most dead-eyed takedown of Golden Age cinema ever committed to paper. In Gone Hollywood: The Movie Colony in the Golden Age (1979), Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz explicitly try to do something similar to Rosten: the sociology of the star system, but their efforts are culled largely from fan magazines, and grouped A-Z by nebulous theme. The results are only sporadically engaging, with many of the details appearing decidedly apocryphal.

I read a couple of oral histories dealing with the film industry. In the swaggeringly-titled Hollywood: The Oral History (2022), historians Jeanne Basinger and Sam Wasson splice and dice 10,000 hours of interviews conducted by the American Film Institute since 1969, as they chart Hollywood's evolution from a ramshackle start-up in an orange grove to the agent-dominated industry of today. More than half the book deals with the studio era, and those sections are easily the best, particularly when giving a voice to largely neglected figures, like staff writers, cameramen and make-up artists. The detail they share, mundane yet lightly magical, is fascinating. Even some of the bigger, more widely-interviewed names have new insights to share: director Frank Capra (who made Harry Langdon's biggest hits) provides a brilliantly incisive reading of the big four silent comics. There is, however, an obvious flaw in the authors' approach: the AFI's interviewees are – by definition – history's winners; as a result they are overwhelmingly complimentary about people such as the studio executives, whereas those who were trampled or ruined by Mayer et al remain voiceless. Elsewhere, a simpler issue afflicts the book: interest ebbs and flows. The silent film sections are fairly short and shallow (and somehow manage to spell Allan Dwan's name wrong throughout), but it's when we get onto New Hollywood, and beyond, that the book falls apart, in a blizzard of barely-connected anecdotes, followed by some stunningly dull material about deal-making. Perhaps that's the point: that a mighty beast was ripped to pieces, and the vultures moved in – that once it was at least partly about art – but this might have been brought to life in a less tedious way. Still, there's lots here to enjoy for Golden Age nerds, even if as a book it doesn't quite hang together. The Glamour Factory (1993) does the same thing markedly less well, perhaps because it's based on the oral history collection of the Southern Methodist University. The perplexing subtitle, 'Inside Hollywood's Big Studio System' (why 'big'?) betrays the fact that this history might be somewhat superficial, and though once more it's broken down by department, the material therein is dictated almost entirely by what happens to be contained in one fairly obscure archive. There's little that's new here, unless you're a novice.

Zoning in again, Behind the Screen: How Lesbians and Gays Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 (2001) is a groundbreaking, virtually definitive study of its subject from Tinseltown author, and Billy Haines biographer, William J. Mann. He deals with changes in cinematic and social culture, the phenomenon of 'queer work', and the key gay figures of an extraordinary era. While at times the resulting pen portraits descend into formula, Mann has the knowledge, instinct and incisiveness to find the through lines that make it atter.

Finally on the studio era, Camera Over Hollywood (1939) is an unforgettable photographic chronicle from John Swope, simultaneously deglamourising and mythologising its factory town.

And finally, on film, I managed to read a book that perversely didn't mention Barbara Stanwyck even once: Empire editor Nick de Semlyen's The Last Action Heroes (2023), a zippy, extremely funny chronicle of the '80s action boom. Highlights for me were the delightful vignette about how a Chuck Norris character seduces a date, and the recounting of Steven Seagal's still-notorious appearance on Saturday Night Live. I am always perplexed that anyone would like Sylvester Stallone, either on screen or off it, but the enthusiasm here for both the artform and its practitioners is contagious.

Books about history and politics

The pick this year was Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (2023), which is admittedly unfocused but also entertaining, original, provocative and incisively intelligent. In it, Klein uses her nemesis, conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, as the springboard to enter 'the mirror world', and investigate personal brands, the rise of fascism, and the justifications for Israeli violence (uh-oh). Along the way, she explains the ‘diagonalism’ that drew together Neo-Nazis and wellness influencers, and does a superb job of articulating and explaining the way that the far-right – and the literal elite – have co-opted the language and postures of the progressive left. Seeing that written down, so clearly and smartly, felt like sweet relief after years of being gaslit to oblivion.

I also enjoyed American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (2016), by noted lawyer and video-conference masturbator, Jeffrey Toobin (I'm sorry to mention that, Jeffrey, but if you hadn't done it, that would have solved that problem). It's fast-moving, balanced, clear and fairly clear-eyed, though given that its author's specialty is legal procedure, it deals with the trial altogether too briefly. Toobin's casual misogyny is also slightly off-putting, but not as off-putting as when he wanked on that Zoom call.

As regular readers of these reviews of years will know, I am an absolute pervert for a presidential biography. This year, that kink was sated by Bob Spitz's Reagan: An American Journey by Bob Spitz (2018). The main strength – and weakness – of the book is its disorientatingly intimate focus. We get a reasonable portrait of the human at its centre – patriotic, sentimental, limited, incurious and naive – but at times almost forget about the world he’s inhabiting, the scale of his influence, the importance of his every action on ordinary people’s lives. If you’re looking for a race through Reagan’s life, from poverty to Hollywood to General Electric to the governor’s chair and finally the presidency, it does the job. We get a sense of how his mind and his presidency worked – through snap emotive judgements based on short memos, letters from the public or things he’d read in the Reader’s Digest – a colourful tour of the high and low points, and a primer on his presidential advisers and their various rivalries. But the book is far more interested in things that are easy to write about – those internal wranglings, the Gorbachev summits and some whizzbang terrorist stories – than those that aren’t. The actual impact of Reaganism – the economic transformation of America caused by the largest upwards redistribution of wealth in history – is largely unexamined, and yet may be the most important element of all. There are also some fairly common shortcomings for the genre: a propensity to side with those he’s interviewed against those he hasn’t, a fondness for pretentious quotations at the start of chapters, some crashingly clumsy segues and a fair few avoidable errors (particularly in the Hollywood section).

I also read a book about people trying to blow up Reagan's best mate: Rory Carroll's Killing Thatcher (2023), which deals with the Brighton Bombing, and made the Times's list of the year's best history books. It's extremely well-researched, with an access to typically secretive sources at which one can only marvel, but that research is often showing, to the degree that you can trace the author's own journey as clearly as you can his actual narrative. And while it's strong on context, at times you just want it to focus on the story you paid for and deliver as the real-thriller we'd been promised, with the propulsion and explosiveness that implies. Its gallery of characters is certainly colourful, though a lot of writers of contemporary history appear to have caught Benmacintyreitis, in which humans are reduced to between one and three eccentric traits, hammered away at interminably.

Books about sport

After the intense excitement of this year's snooker world championship (you don't know, man, you weren't there), I scooted back to 1985-6 with Pocket Money (1986), Gordon Burn's journalistic chronicle of a season, which vividly captures a time and place during the sport's boom era. At first it's overly preoccupied with financials and merchandising, and thereafter still a little too fixated on Thatcherite entrepreneur Barry Hearn, but it's also erudite, atmospheric and full of deft portraits and telling details. As history, of a sort, unfolds: you're there.

And since so much of what I want to do in life involves either reading or being at the test match, Lawrence Booth and Nick Hoult's Bazball: The Inside Story of a Test Cricket Revolution (2023) seemed just right for me. Its curious structure, hopping about between this year's Ashes, a chronological narrative and a themed approach, leads to some repetition and the periodic fumbling of epic moments (particularly Bairstow's redemption at Trent Bridge) in a way that a simpler narrative might have avoided. But it offers amazing access, crisp writing, and the chance to relive two of the best – and most exhilarating – cricketing summers in living memory; even the dry stats just set the heart racing. That excitement is neatly counteracted by the melancholy contributions of Ben Foakes, one of the Bazball era's few losers due to his vaguely more pragmatic instincts, his undeserved pain leaving a mark.

This year's Ashes inspired plenty of talk about the 'spirit of cricket', so it was nice to read Simon Rae's It’s Not Cricket (2001), subtitled, "Skullduggery, Sharp Practice and Downright Cheating in the Noble Game", and be reassured that such a spirit does not, and has never, existed. The book is essentially a catalogue of appalling, immoral and dangerous behaviour on a cricket pitch, and just as enjoyable and ultimately shallow as that sounds. Ian Botham: The Power and the Glory (2011) by Simon Wilde, deals with one of the fabled Ashes heroes of decades past, but is never anything more than basically functional, failing to capture much of the excitement of his rise or the clumsiness of his fall.

Books about Dorothy Parker, Prince Harry or crypto

This section is always a popular one. Marion Meade's Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (1987) is a fine biography of the funniest person who has ever lived. And if Parker, to misquote Oscar Wilde, put much of her genius into drunken quips at drunken parties, she also wrote good verse, great short stories and some of the best non-fiction of the 20th century. All of it was touched with her excoriating, innocent-eyed wit. In her first ever theatre review for Vanity Fair, she refused to name the creative team behind the production because she didn't "want to tell on them". Her tossed-off telegrams to Robert Benchley, whether about New Year or the public pronouncements of Herbert Hoover, are astonishingly clever. And even when the work was failing, the wit was not: during her ill-fated sojourn in Hollywood, she lent out of the window of a writers' building, yelling at passers-by, "Let me out of here, I'm as sane as the rest of you!" Meade's book is incredibly readable, if a little monotonous in its second half; but then so was Parker's life. The biographer certainly gets close to the heart of her difficult, brilliant subject. Damaged by grief, half-destroyed by drinking, Parker was capable of rare but extraordinary generosity of spirit: spending more than a year with friends as they cared for a child sick with TB; organising endless events to raise funds for refugees during the Spanish Civil War; leaving her estate to Martin Luther King and the NAACP. She was also almost pathologically ungrateful, caustic and unkind. If her humour came from the same place, she appeared unaware that you could still do that and be a good person on your own time. Her friendship with Benchley shows both sides of that character: it was astonishingly touching, and then it soured horribly. This book skimps a little in its treatment of the work, and remains curiously preoccupied with the nefariousness and deceit of Lillian Hellman (Parker's frenemy and will-executor), but as a portrait of the person, her sentimentality and savagery, it could scarcely be improved upon.

I had, somewhat unexpectedly, both the prurient desire to read Spare (2022) by Prince Harry, and then a large number of thoughts once I had done so. And what a strange, unhappy book it is: full of self-pity, lacking in self-awareness. Interest ebbs and flows, the collision between a man and his ghostwriter frequently more interesting than the events they are describing. And yet the tragedy at the book’s centre: that of a boy losing his mum, and simply being unable to deal with it, as his life is disfigured by tradition and a deeply unwell media, is genuinely upsetting, and a story eminently worth telling. The way that the death cast a shadow over his life, becoming its defining incident, will be relatable for anyone who lost a mother young – especially if it happened suddenly – and his terror that the same fate might befall his wife feels, if not necessarily accurate, at least utterly sincere and entirely understandable. More here, if that for some reason sounds appealing.

And, finally for this year, I read finance journalist Zeke Faux's book about the crypto implosion, Number Go Up (2023). It's a rather superficial read, in which a man jets around the world trying to find out information about the cryptocurrency Tether, fails, and then explains why he wasn't able to find out anything, as if you'd set him homework. Along the way, however, he does find out a few other things. Faux isn't quite as funny as he imagines (can't imagine what that's like, must be awful), though his explanations of crypto are handy for novices like myself, and he enjoys an improbable proximity to FTX founder (and now convicted fraudster), Sam Bankman-Fried, the book's most interesting character.

***

Thanks for reading. Part 2 will be about The Movies.