In this week’s Mirror Book Club we review an entertaining summary of American novelist Patricia Highsmith – one which contains intrigue but has not unearthed much that previous biographers haven’t pored over.
An unusual and thought-provoking mix of prose and poems has a clear message.
And Dr Sanjay Gupta is on hand to give you a better understanding of how your brain works – and help it work better.
Read on for more – and don’t forget to join the Mirror Book Club, see below.
Devils, Lusts And Strange Desires: The Life Of Patricia Highsmith by Richard Bradford
Bloomsbury, £20
Has the devil ever had a better spokesperson than the American novelist Patricia Highsmith? Her classic thrillers, such as Strangers On A Train or The Talented Mr Ripley, hypnotise you so you find yourself rooting for her evil killers, nodding along when they argue that goodness and decency are cowardly qualities – excuses for not being brave enough to sin.
This new biography by Richard Bradford marks the centenary of her birth (she died in 1995). Personally, I can never get enough of reading about this thoroughly unpleasant woman – like her books, her life was somehow both sordid and compelling.
Highsmith had a voracious appetite for alcohol, cigarettes and lesbian lovers, especially married ones. She professed to loathe black people and Jews. She seemed to have no real political views but would just offer whatever opinion the person she was talking to would find most offensive.
She kept snails as pets and would take them to parties in her handbag, preferring their company to that of humans. Cruelty to animals is the only vice properly punished in her generally amoral fiction.
But she was not an exemplary pet owner – she thought it was a shame that her cat never had the pleasure of being drunk so she would swing it around in a sack to replicate the sensation.
She spent years stalking a woman she had briefly met once, fantasising in her diaries about murdering her. And when one of her lovers took an overdose after a quarrel, she left her alone and went out for dinner, only calling the doctor on her return several hourslater.
Richard Bradford thinks that Highsmith spent her life making people miserable and precipitating relationship crises in order to inspire ideas for her books and stimulate the creation of horrible characters.
One girlfriend, he writes, proved totally unsuitable because she “had an abundance of patience and imperturbability” and Highsmith returned from a holiday with her feeling “horribly disappointed” because “they’d had a lovely time”.
Bradford’s caustic wit helps to make this shortish book an entertaining summary of Highsmith’s life.
He cunningly catches her out in a lot of lies about herself and confidently, if not always convincingly, finds ways of showing that her plots and characters were based on events and people in her own life.
His new interpretations of familiar material can be intriguing but he hasn’t unearthed much that previous biographers haven’t pored over.
I suspect we’ll get fresher insights into Highsmith’s mind when her diaries are published for the first time later this year – a prospect both exciting and rather terrifying.
BY JAKE KERRIDGE
Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden
Canongate, £14.99
Poet Salena Godden reinvents Death as a kindly elderly black woman in this unusual and thought-provoking mix of prose and poems.
As a boy, writer Wolf Willeford witnessed Mrs Death take his mother in a fire, “in a greedy gulp of flame”, but she let him live. His initial fury gives way to respect. Death speaks to him and, mesmerised, he decides to write her memoirs.
They date from Earth’s first morning – and first mourning – and come with a spoiler alert: we will all die in the end.
Death’s stories range from poor doomed Victorian prostitute Tilly Tuppence to Princess Diana, via Bowie and the Moors Murders. The famous and the forgotten.
Her sister is Life, her lover is Time, her conscience is heavy.
Mrs Death hides in plain sight – in cigarettes, factories, trenches, poverty and prisons. But although she extinguishes our lives, her messages are aimed at the living: “Be kind,” she says. “We have each other: it is all we have.”
The moral of Death’s story?
Life is short, make the most of it.
“Switch your phone off and look out of your window.”
And, channelling Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians: “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.”
By GARRY BUSHELL
Keep Sharp: Build A Better Brain At Any Age by Dr Sanjay Gupta
Headline Home, £14.99
Sanjay Gupta’s message is clear: “Anyone can build a better brain at any age.”
Apart from being a brain surgeon, the author is medical correspondent for CNN, a combination ideal for a book that draws on his lucid communication skills to explain what we now know about the brain. Disentangling myth and discredited ideas from reputable research, it delves into what we can do to delay or prevent cognitive decline, and culminates in a 12-week plan.
Gupta’s regime is based on what he calls the Five Pillars Of Brain Health: Move (exercise), Discover (keep learning new things), Relax (unwind, sleep long, reduce stress), Nourish (eat the right foods), Connect (develop and maintain diverse social networks).
More specifically, he offers many surprising suggestions.
He says we shouldn’t try to multi-task, we should have one screen-free day a week, we should eat seven different coloured foods daily, and we should walk regularly with a friend and talk about our worries. Admittedly, some of these goals are harder to achieve during lockdown but as Gupta explains, it’s in our interests to make what changes we can.
“Once your brain is running cleanly and smoothly,” he writes, “everything else follows.
“You will make better decisions, have improved resilience and a more optimistic attitude, and the physical part of your body will improve too.”
Not only will this book give a better understanding of how your brain works but it will help it work better.
BY WILLIAM HARTSTON
Join the Mirror Book Club
Join us in reading the current Mirror Book Club book of the month, Long Bright River by Liz Moore.
A mystery set against a backdrop of the US opioid crisis, police officer Mickey Fitzpatrick searches for her missing sister Kacey, a sex worker with a drug addiction, while a killer preys on street women in Philadelphia. Mickey becomes obsessed with finding the killer before Kacey becomes the next victim.