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7 May 2022 THE WEEKARTS
When Amy Bloom’s husband Brian
Ameche, who knew her taste for
simplicity, bought her a very expensive
sweatshirt with a fancy tulle trim,
“she might have guessed something
was amiss”, said Salley Vickers in
The Guardian. At the time, the novelist
dismissed the gift as a harmless oddity.
Looking back on it, she was “surprised that I didn’t look at that
sweatshirt and think, ‘I see that you have Alzheimer’s’”. In this
“sharply observed, often witty, eminently moving memoir”,
Bloom “charts the gradual progression of the illness from her
slow recognition that her husband was not himself, to an eventual
diagnosis”, when he was in his mid-60s. But what happened next
is the book’s true subject. Within a week of being diagnosed,
Ameche had decided that the “long goodbye” of Alzheimer’s was
not for him. He resolved to end his life while most of his faculties
were still intact, and Bloom had to help him do it.
The disease had already diminished her husband to the point
where “orchestrating his exit” was beyond him, said Hephzibah
Anderson in The Observer. And so it fell to Bloom to make the
arrangements. A period of “eerie
internet trawling” followed, with the
couple considering various creative
solutions involving illegal drugs,
guns, even “a futuristic suicide pod”.
Eventually, the Swiss organisation
Dignitas emerged as the only “fully
legal, pain-free option” – though
the bureaucratic obstacles were still
considerable. In January 2020, the
couple flew business class to Zurich
from their home in Connecticut, and
checked into a room described by
Bloom as “hotel-pleasant”. After
being repeatedly asked by doctors
if he wanted to go through with the
procedure, Ameche took a fatal dose
of sodium pentobarbital. Before doing so he asked his wife,
shatteringly: “What time’s your plane?”
While one half of In Love is the story of the assisted suicide, the
other tells the story of their relationship, said Sarah Ditum in The
Times. Theirs was a blissfully happy “midlife love match”. Pre-
Alzheimer’s, Ameche was “intelligent, handsome, well-groomed”
and self-deprecating. “You should be with a guy who doesn’t
mind that you’re smarter than he is,” he said to Bloom when they
got together. It all adds great force to her portrait of his demise,
which is unsentimental, immaculately written, and “can make
you laugh and break your heart in the same beat”. Here, for once,
is an account of tragedy that doesn’t induce the guilty thought:
“I wish this terrible thing had happened to a better writer.”In Love
by Amy Bloom
Granta 240pp £16.99
The Week Bookshop £13.99Review of reviews: Books
Book of the week
In the 1980s, the world of books, which had long
been “drab and worthy”, suddenly became “hip”,
said Kathryn Hughes in The Sunday Times. This
transformation was powered by an exciting new
generation of writers – Salman Rushdie, Martin
Amis, Angela Carter – and by a publishing
world that became cannier at exploiting new
commercial opportunities. Witnessing it all was a
young John Walsh, who rapidly rose up the ranks
of literary journalism to become books editor of The Sunday Times in 1989.
In Circus of Dreams, he offers an entertainingly gossipy memoir of the period
which gleefully mixes “high and low”. Thus we learn that the eminent publisher
George Weidenfeld considered himself the “Nijinsky of cunnilingus”, and that
when Walsh met the “brilliant academic polymath” George Steiner for lunch, all
he wanted to discuss was Andrew Neil’s hair tonic. Walsh tells us that Nigella
Lawson – who worked with him at the Sunday Times – once insisted on
“climbing onto his lap to show him how to manage his computer”.
Walsh is an attractively enthusiastic chronicler and he can be “very funny”,
said Anthony Quinn in The Observer. I “laughed long” at the set-piece lunch
with Martin Amis, and at his character sketch of his old boss, Rupert Murdoch.
That said, his prose is a bit “try-hard” at times – “Tina Brown hit the journalistic
empyrean like a sleek blonde rocket”, he writes – and he’s irritatingly gushy.
Walsh is also predictably sniffy about today’s literary scene, said D.J. Taylor in
the Literary Review. Sally Rooney is apparently “linguistically unadventurous”;
the Booker Prize is highly tedious. Such comments intensify the book’s slightly
anachronistic feel. For all the funny anecdotes, there’s no denying that a
“belletrist’s autobiography” such as this belongs to a “practically extinct genre”.Circus of Dreams
by John Walsh
Constable 432pp £25
The Week Bookshop £19.99Novel of the week
Trespasses
by Louise Kennedy
Bloomsbury 320pp £14.99
The Week Bookshop £11.99The Irish writer Louise Kennedy only began
writing aged 47, but her rise has been meteoric,
said Madeleine Feeny in The Spectator. The End
of the World is a Cul de Sac, her debut short
story collection, was “fought over” by nine
publishers. And now, with this first novel, she
has written what promises to be another hit.
Plot-wise, Trespasses doesn’t break new ground,
said Kevin Power in The Guardian: set near
Belfast in 1975, it’s about a young Catholic
primary school teacher who falls in love with
a posh Protestant barrister. What distinguishes
it is its “sense of utter conviction”. This is a story
“told with such compulsive attention to the
textures of its world that every page feels like
a moral and intellectual event”.
Kennedy is a superbly visual writer, and her
“idiomatic dialogue gives her prose real verve”,
said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer:
the protagonist’s mother, catching sight of Helen
Mirren on a chat show, describes her as a “dirty
article”. Combining “unflinching authenticity”
with a “flair for detail”, this is a “deftly
calibrated” and ultimately “devastating” novel.To order these titles or any other book in print, visit
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