THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 85
BRIEFLY NOTED
The Golden Thread, by Kassia St. Clair (Liveright). In an en-
livening history of fabric, St. Clair takes aim at those who
trivialize the study of clothing. “We live surrounded by cloth,”
she writes. “We are swaddled in it at birth and shrouds are
drawn over our faces in death.” Rather than a broad over-
view, St. Clair provides a cleverly structured patchwork of
vignettes spanning the eras and the continents: Paleolithic
bast threads excavated in a cave in Georgia; the patterns of
ancient China’s silks (“mirrored flower,” “nimble waves”); the
inflatable rubber-and-nylon suits that weighed down Mer-
cury astronauts as they journeyed into space. Her descrip-
tions of textiles and the people who created and wore them
are sensual and even moving.
Smacked, by Eilene Zimmerman (Random House). Opening
with the author’s discovery of the body of her ex-husband,
Peter, a fifty-one-year-old corporate attorney in San Diego,
this memoir explores the factors that have led to a precipi-
tous increase in so-called white-collar addiction in the United
States. Peter’s addiction was unknown to his family, friends,
and colleagues, until an autopsy found cocaine and opioids
in his system. Zimmerman charts a startling rise in anxiety
and depression among even the youngest professionals, at-
tributing it to a toxic blend of ultracompetitiveness, worka-
holism, and isolation from family and the wider community.
The corresponding spike in drug use underscores the book’s
central message: that a reformation of “inhumane” corporate
culture is urgently needed.
Writers & Lovers, by Lily King (Grove). The narrator of this
novel is a thirty-one-year-old writer beset with student debt,
living in an adapted potting shed in Boston, and laboring
over her début. Distractions from work include grief (her
mother died suddenly while abroad) and a choice between
two men, both writers themselves. One is young and unre-
liable but irresistible; the other is older and established and
has children, something she craves. “It’s always a choice be-
tween fireworks and coffee in bed,” an acquaintance tells her.
The love-triangle plot proves to be a nimble vehicle for ex-
ploring the book’s true subject—overcoming, and making
art from, hardship.
The Cactus League, by Emily Nemens (Farrar, Straus & Gir-
oux). An ode to baseball, this début novel, by the editor of The
Paris Review, unfolds across nine “innings,” told from several
perspectives. During spring training, in Scottsdale, the super-
star left fielder of a Los Angeles team, struggling with a di-
vorce, becomes involved with a “cleat chaser,” whose charms
draw him into a drunken incident at Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Taliesin West house. When his handlers attempt damage con-
trol, it emerges that his problems go deeper. As Nemens por-
trays the life of the team—a pitcher is in thrall to pain pills;
players’ wives hold a lingerie party—it starts to seem almost
an organism, each constituent part brushing against others in
a larger story of competition, survival, and obsession.
glish ended up sending him to the pyre.
There’s something familiar about
the cruelly efficient machinery of state
intimidation that Cromwell is shown
operating so brilliantly. King Henry
emerges as an all too recognizable type,
a vain and unbalanced autocrat whose
dangerously mercurial desires have to
be managed by his skillful minister.
And Cromwell often puts you in mind
not so much of Machiavelli’s cool Real-
politik in the sixteenth century as of
Stalin’s warped jurisprudence in the
twentieth. “He needs guilty men,” Man-
tel’s hero thinks, as he hounds Anne’s
alleged lovers into confessing. “So he
has found men who are guilty. Though
perhaps not guilty as charged.”
And yet Mantel slyly works to keep
him sympathetic. (She’s not the first
historical novelist to fall for her sub-
ject; older readers might think of Mary
Renault and Alexander the Great.) To
the end, Cromwell is presented as a
flawed idealist. He is a distant cousin
of one of the characters in “A Change
of Climate,” who ruefully observes that
“we set out with high ideals. ... The
things we wanted have not happened.”
Taken together, those first two vol-
umes function as a dark diptych, a por-
trait of an increasingly haunted man
who finds it ever more difficult to ex-
tricate himself from the moral impli-
cations of his sophisticated political
maneuvering. From other things, too:
he occasionally suspects that, as high
as he has risen, he may be more like his
thuggish father than he likes to admit—
another past that proves inescapable.
“
B
ring Up the Bodies” ends in the
summer of 1536, just after Anne’s
beheading and Henry’s marriage to his
third wife, Jane Seymour. That leaves the
short but eventful remainder of Crom-
well’s life still to be narrated. He was ex-
ecuted in July, 1540, for treason and her-
esy, after his enemies among the old
nobility succeeded in convincing the ever
more paranoid Henry that he was aim-
ing to depose him and take the throne.
“The Mirror and the Light” does
cover those years, but the tightly sym-
metrical trajectories that organized the
first two volumes and generated their
morals and meanings have gone. This
book has to embrace a concatenation
of major events, any one of which could
