In From the Cold
Autumn brings a range of
literary offerings—and the
latest from a master of spycraft.
Even those who haven’t
read André Aciman’s
desire-soaked 2007 novel Call Me by
Your Name have likely lived through it by
way of Luca Guadagnino’s sumptuous
film adaptation, starring Timothée
Chalamet and Armie Hammer as fated
lovers Elio and Oliver. Now comes a
sequel, Find Me (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux), in which years have passed and
the scorching summer backdrop has
given way to autumn. Aciman’s newest
work is a composition in multiple
movements, the first taking place on a
Rome-bound train, where Elio’s newly
divorced father meets Miranda, a
manic-pixie dream ragazza who guides
her new acquaintance to his late-stage
sexual awakening. Meanwhile, Elio and
Oliver now live continents apart and
have struck up romantic arrangements,
each unsatisfying in its own way. “What
mattered now,” Oliver realizes with
quickening despair, “was unlived.”
A study of human intimacies, this novel
asks: Does true love ever die?
In 1914, Vanity Fair’s inaugural editor,
Frank Crowninshield, declared the
members of the magazine “determined
and bigoted feminists.” In the decades
that followed, Tina Brown and Graydon
Carter would carry on that legacy, and
now the magazine’s current editor in
chief, Radhika Jones, and editor David
Friend have gathered up some of the
shiniest touchstones in Vanity Fair’s
Women on Women (Penguin Press). The
collection offers glimpses of a randy Julia
Child, an emotionally scarred Tina Turner,
a glittering Princess Diana, captured
at a moment when “star quality was still
emerging but the schoolgirl was still
there,” as Brown writes. A veritable candy
box of glamour and personality, the
book is a celebration of women’s voices.
Actress Jenny Slate, a regular on
indie-film credits and cocreator and
voice of the viral stop-animation video
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,
experiments with a different type of
protective armor in Little Weirds (Little,
Brown), her alternately tender and twee
not-exactly memoir. The comedian
wraps her themes in ethereal layers of
whimsy, fantasizing throughout that
she is not a woman but a mouse, a
croissant, and a lighthouse. Rather than
asking herself “the same old questions,”
the comedian posits, “what if I only
dreamed gardens, what if I ate carrots
because what if I were a pleasant rabbit?”
The party trick isn’t for everyone, but
fans of her distinctive voice are bound to
have fun.—LAUREN MECHLING
Meghan Daum’s most fearless writing
has always been her most personal.
An award-winning essayist and journalist,
and frequent Vogue contributor, Daum
combines probing cultural commentary
with bracingly introspective confession.
But nothing she’s written before is
quite as brave as The Problem With
Everything: My Journey Through
the New Culture Wars (Gallery Books),
a lament over the contradictions and
paradoxes now gripping the resistance-
mad left. Daum is herself a liberal,
a Gen-Xer who has reliably voted
Democratic her entire life, and she is
as mortified at the Trump presidency
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as the next thoughtful person. But she’s
also gripped with dismay at the way
nuance and complexity have disappeared
from the discourse around feminism,
#MeToo, identity politics, and other
preoccupations among the liberal social-
media set. Her willingness to question
dogma and call out virtue-signaling will
infuriate some, but it’s an approach that’s
affectingly personal, achingly earnest,
and something close to necessary.
Somehow he has done it again. John
le Carré, who is 87 , has written another
sophisticated, characteristically dyspeptic
espionage novel (his 25th, if anyone’s
counting). Agent Running in the Field
(Viking) follows 2017’s better-than-it-
had-any-right-to-be best seller A Legacy
of Spies, which brought his famous
spymaster George Smiley back for one
last hurrah. Legacy felt like a curtain
call, but Agent Running in the Field has
plenty of pep. It’s set in Brexit London
and begins with a 47-year-old intelligence
officer named Nat, who suspects he’s
in for an early retirement after a middling
career at MI6. He’s more interested
in skipping off to badminton matches
than running a station of spies. The
badminton material is fantastic—
le Carré captures the atmosphere at
Nat’s threadbare sporting club with
characteristic ease. And he effortlessly
weaves a plot involving a young
opponent of Nat’s who is possibly a
double agent for Putin’s Russia. This
is late-period le Carré, understated and
modulated to the low-key finale, but
also deeply pleasurable.—TAYLOR ANTRIM
VLIFE
96 NOVEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
LIAM GOODMAN
