Jonathan Gibbs

Round up 11 of your besties and go en masse as Widmerpool through the ages, one per book.

A couple of hours left till I unleash my terrible infographics of Sally Rooney's narrative structures on the world. Register quick here for this free online seminar – a taster session for the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City St George's, Uni of London:

www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

Submissions for Gorse 15 close this Friday. Have a goo below at the chosen theme! My Mrs complains that people don't always look at the theme, though interpretation is loose as a rabbit in July. It's an 'experimental' literary journal, which obviously means the writing should do just that! #Brazen

I wrote a bit about that below the main post (though BlueSky doesn’t make it easy to follow a thread!)

bsky.app/profile/jona...

Absolutely. The fact that Simon Costigan and Eileen are mentioned tangentially in Intermezzo implies a Rooney Expanded Universe that can be filled out and more full networked.

The books these make me think of, also, are Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over and Love, Etc. I’d be interested to reread.

Anyway, I'm giving a free online seminar (officially a 'taster session' for the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City St George's, Uni of London) this evening at 5.30pm. All welcome!

Come see my terrible schematic diagrams of Rooney's plots!

www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

I don't see any reason for her not to continue. Let her be our John Updike! The themes introduced 'at one remove', as it were, such as parenthood, divorce, ageing, death of parents, can be treated again, 'from the other side'.

And I think the depiction of Ivan is more nuanced than just 'autistic'. I can't remember if the word is used in the book, and certainly his social awkwardness is explicable (and presented) in other terms. The way he, as a 22yo, looks back on his thoughts and behaviour as a 16yo, is very moving.

I do think it's probably her best book (so far!), but I like them all and in fact I think I like them more together, as 'a corpus', than individually: how they interrelate, as different approaches to the same problem. (Different narrative approaches.)

Interesting too to see whose POVs Rooney chooses to use, and whose she refuses us. Naomi perhaps we can imagine more easily: she's like an echo of Bobbi from CWF, whose interiority we know via Frances's narration. Sylvia is different. Her intelligence would be a useful counterpoint to Peter's.

In a way the book is like those skits on women's pornography that feature men folding laundry and doing the hoovering: get off on two grown men gingerly trying to get back in touch with their feelings! But the women here are as flawed as the men.

It's fascinating to see how Rooney's novels develop from each other. They all address the same theme – contemporary sexual mores – but the variations in the relationship dynamics of the characters lead her to vary her narrative strategies in interesting ways.

Hardback book jacket. Author name in thick blue sans serif capitals. Book title in oddly formalist vertically stretched black capitals. In the middle a blue and black illustration of a man in a suit standing looking sadly away, in the distance, seen through the legs of another man in a badly fitting black suit trousers. A toppled white Queen chess piece lies on the floor.

2026 Reading 16: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. A re-read ahead of a free online seminar on Rooney's novels that I'm giving this evening (details below) and that I want to develop into something bigger. For the first 50pp I was enjoying it less than the first time around. Then I started blubbing.

James Wolcott · What you can get away with: Updike Reconsidered Betwixt and between is a strange place for any major writer to be more than a decade and a half after their death, and...

James Wolcott was interesting on his current status in the LRB recently: "It’s one thing to fall out of fashion, another to fall out of favour, and Updike seems to have fallen out of both while still being suspended mid-air, cushioned by the thermals while posterity figures out what to do with him."

John Updike – A Personal Anthology Posts about John Updike written by Jonathan Gibbs

Updike has picked a mere five times on A Personal Anthology – to Cheever's fifteen!

apersonalanthology.com/tag/john-upd...

10. 'The Happiest I've Been' by John Updike (1959). A simple and heartfelt paean to youthful naivety. A car, a pal, a girl, a song on the radio. Even its intimation of the disappointments to come – "the moment occurred of which each following moment was a slight diminution" – is minor key.

I'm running a free online taster session for the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City St George's, Uni of London tomorrow 5.30pm.

In it I'll be looking at the narrative structure of Sally Rooney's novels, complete with terrible schematic infographics.

Register for your free place here:

A starling murmuration over Brighton pier, as seen from the sea.

A starling murmuration over Brighton pier, as seen from the sea. Lots of people lined up along the pier to watch the starlings overhead.

Two pictures from the sea in #Brighton on Wednesday. The beach was packed, and everyone was smiling for the first time in about three months. Went for a swim after work, watched the birds, saw a few friendly faces up there on the pier and cycled home without getting rained on. More of this please.

I love writing on the train, except you can’t try out dialogue out loud.

Just now I need to hear what comedy can be got from saying

“Some *soup*?”

through badly chattering teeth, and that would be a bit weird in the middle of carriage K of the Newcastle train.

If you live in the Gorton and Denton constituency and spoke to a Reform party member on your doorstep or in the streets then I'd like to speak to you for an article. My DMs are open.

Well, the plumber fixed the drip

And probably ninety-four or ninety-five times out of one hundred that you type mothers', you mean mother's.

Thanks! He borrowed it off my shelves but it's one I haven't read. His rucksack was stolen and he says he was really enjoying it but couldn't remember the title or author name.

(He also had my copy of The Ballad of Peckham Rye in his bag, but that's another story.)

Hurrah, thank you!

#Booksky help me solve this mystery. Son was reading a book but it got stolen. 'Scandinavian style author name'. Girl visiting some bloke in his flat (in New York?) and he is paying her to describe items that he gives her (a glove) into a voice recorder. Items belonging to a dead woman. WHAT IS IT?

Books on the tube

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard
Invisible Girl by Lisa Jewell
The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

Books on the tube

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Unidentified NYRB Classic
Murder at the Black Cat Cafe by Seishi Yokomizo
The Echo Chamber by John Boyne
RHS Encyclopedia of Garden Design

Ha! Though Rite of Spring has got to be 15 or 20 shorter than Daphnis and Chloe. And it’s a lot tighter, from memory. (I’m not a fan of Firebird Suite.)

So he dies while he’s asleep? If so, I think that’s a brilliant way of doing it. Presumably, most often when someone dies when they’re awake, it’s visible, so you could narrate the effect of death on their person (collapsing, etc) but if you die in your sleep, there’s often nothing *to* narrate.

The guy playing the fairground Tombola! I admit I didn’t know the piece well enough to appreciate that it was actually a ballet score, but the last five minutes I was just watching the conductor turn the pages, praying for the end.