Paperback reviews: The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit, Charlie Chaplin by Peter Ackroyd

Charlie Chaplin by Peter Ackroyd

Vintage £7.99

Welcome to south London in the late 19th century: “It was frowsy; it was shabby; the shops were small and generally dirty… The predominant smells were those of vinegar, and of dog dung … compounded of course by the stink of poverty.” This,writes Peter Ackroyd, was the world Charlie Chaplin knew as a boy.

Charlie was born in 1889. His mother, Hannah, had a brief career as a singer, but she was mentally fragile and spent much of her life in lunatic asylums; Charlie and his brother were in and out of the workhouse.

The minor music-hall actor Charles Chaplin, who was briefly married to Hannah, may or may not have been Charlie’s father, but he gave him his surname and a contact that got him started in the theatre. Ackroyd’s wonderful biography follows Chaplin’s journey from the London music-halls to the United States, where he arrived in 1910 with the Karno travelling pantomime.

His talent for physical comedy was spotted by the Keystone Company and he moved to Los Angeles to become the leading film-maker of the silent era (and the most famous man on the planet).

Ackroyd traces the formative influences on Chaplin’s genius, although there’s a sense that, as Fitzgerald says of Jay Gatsby, he somehow “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself”. And like Gatsby, Chaplin saw his fair share of scandal. He had numerous extra-marital affairs – he boasted of having slept with 2,000 women – and in 1953 was forced into exile after being accused of Communist sympathies.

Ackroyd paints a moving portrait of the final years as the ageing movie star withdrew “into a vast and silent sphere of self-regard”. But it’s those early scenes of poverty and squalor in Victorian London that linger in the reader’s mind, as they did in Chaplin’s own.

*****

Self-help by Lorrie Moore

Faber £8.99

The title of Lorrie Moore’s debut story collection Self-Help (1985), reissued as part of Faber’s Modern Classics series, is something of a misnomer. These stories are less about self-help than about selfanalysis; their protagonists use secondperson narratives to subject their lives to forensic examination. The effect in each case is of watching an eloquent young woman sternly upbraid her own reflection in the mirror.

In “How to Be the Other Woman”, a twentysomething New Yorker gets involved with a married man (“After four movies, three concerts and two-anda- half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events”). In “What is Seized”, the young narrator explores her growing awareness of the coldness at the heart of her parents’ marriage, and its effect on her own life.

The balance between sardonic humour and bleak psychological insight is exquisitely caught – and shows that Lorrie Moore is that rare thing: an author who arrived on the stage fully formed.

****

The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit

Bloomsbury £8.99

Tarashea Nesbit’s first novel explores the story behind the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the sites where the US government started developing the atomic bomb in 1943. Nesbit focuses on the experiences of the scientists’ wives, who were in the dark about what their husbands were doing and who did their best to forge a sense of community in this military town in the desert of New Mexico.

Nesbit has the women narrate via a collective “we” throughout. But this bold conceit ultimately fails: we struggle to pick out individual characters or scenes from the mix, and the impression is of a chorus in search of a principal.

***

How to Speak Money by John Lanchester

Faber £9.99

John Lanchester’s aptly-titled book Whoops! was a deft and readable explanation of the financial crisis and its fallout for a lay audience. One of its key themes was the oppressively complex language of high finance: “derivatives”, “vanilla synthetic mezzanine RMBS”, “credit default swaps” and the rest.

Hence this follow-up: a financial dictionary featuring concise explanations of relevant terms. Lanchester’s introduction finds him a little too preoccupied with his own role as a self-appointed “intermediary” between the financial experts and the public. But there’s no denying the usefulness of this primer. As he rightly puts it: “Once you learn [the language of money], the world does start to look different ….”

***

Mr Mojo: a biography of Jim Morrison by Dylan Jones

Bloomsbury £8.99

Jim Morrison, who died of a heroin overdose in Paris in 1971, always wanted to be known as more than just a pop star.

The Doors frontman’s celebrated music reflected the dark underbelly of 1960s LA, but he thought the world had failed to appreciate the depths of his intellect, and that left him bitter. He enjoyed rubbing people up the wrong way (often by rubbing himself up the right way; his most notorious provocation saw him get arrested after masturbating on stage).

He was manipulative of his girlfriends and ignored his mother’s phone calls. “Pop genius but amateur human being,” is Dylan Jones’s verdict. Which is perhaps a roundabout way of saying that Morrison was a bit of an arsehole.

***