Le carre smiley trilogy5/26/2023 I thought about it when John le Carré died at the end of last year, having long believed that the most celebrated espionage writer on earth was underappreciated and misunderstood. I once met someone who told me she planned to “go to Turks and Caicos” in the event of Joan Didion’s death so as to avoid this whole business, and while I believe that she was joking, I do think about it every time a writer I love dies: me on an island with no internet, effortlessly turning my gaze away from wrong ideas about Janet Malcolm. A writer you love and for some reason feel proprietorial over dies, and you grit your teeth in preparation for disagreeing with every critical assessment or fond remembrance that is weirdly more about what a winning little upstart the eulogist was when she sat next to the bard of Chicago at the lunch that began their erotic friendship. Maybe it was always like this and people were tetchily rattling their big feathery newspaper sheets as they read an obituary for George Eliot that failed to interrogate the mystery of why it is funny when Will Ladislaw of Middlemarch is described as “an Italian with white mice,” but let’s agree that stuff like this is more taxing on the spirit now. One thing about having access to the computer is that the death of a writer you love is now primarily an occasion for getting indignant instead of sad.
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