Stephen Phelan

THERE is a place called the Zone, which looks more or less like the world we know, but the colours are fuller and brighter, and the natural laws are not quite so constant. Within the landscape of the Zone, there is a Room, where a person’s deepest desires are supposedly fulfilled. This is the premise of Stalker, a monumentally slow and meditative film made in 1979 by Andrei Tarkovsky. Relatively few people have seen it. “Not as many as have seen Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels,” admits Geoff Dyer. “But among those who have, you often hear that this film has been a big thing in their lives.”

IN 2007, the year before he was elected president, Barack Obama told a biographer that his favourite writer was E.L. Doctorow. To my mind, Obama’s political opponents did not make as much of this as they could have. Taken together, Doctorow’s body of work might easily be painted as a fictional analogue to Howard Zinn’s People’s History Of The United States – a liberal-secular rejection of America’s sustaining narrative, a chronicle of the betrayal or disfigurement of the nation’s original promise.

JAMES Salter will turn 88 next month. Nobody could blame the guy for being old-fashioned, although the publication of his new novel All That Is – his first in over 30 years, and presumably his last – has occasioned a certain amount of eye-rolling, to set against the swell of widespread acknowledgement that this great writer’s moment may finally have come. With Updike and Mailer now dead, and Philip Roth recently retired, the lesser-known Salter is the only one of his generation left to fly the flag for post-war American virility.

IN the woods west of Amsterdam, between the dunes of the North Sea shoreline and the vast floral-industrial greenhouses where world-famous hypercolour tulips are grown, there is a small working village of intellectuals. Current residents include experts on forgotten medieval cities, a team of linguists attempting to reconstruct the earliest human language, a German philosopher, a former adviser to Russian president Vladimir Putin and the novelist David Mitchell, who recently arrived to begin research for a new book.

THE first I ever heard of Rodolfo Walsh was when I read Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine in 2007. By that time, Walsh had been dead for 30 years, but Klein cited him as a posthumous source for her treatise on “disaster capitalism”, and introduced him in the most dynamic terms: “A gregarious Renaissance man, a writer of crime fiction and award-winning short stories … a super sleuth able to crack military codes and spy on the spies.”

WITH Bellow, Vonnegut, Mailer, and Updike all recently departed, Philip Roth is now supposed to be the last living giant of American literature. Roth’s late productivity has become an ongoing wonder of the publishing world, his sustained priapic raging a rebuke to every author and pensioner who has ever gone quietly into decline. At 76, he continues to cast the indignities of old age into one livid fiction after another, as if writing could dispel them, although some have noted that each of these senescent novels has been slighter and weaker than the one before.

IT has taken Michael Ondaatje seven years to write his new novel Divisadero. It took him eight to write his last one, Anil’s Ghost, having been made famous by the one before that, The English Patient, which won the Booker prize and then several Oscars when Anthony Minghella adapted it into an auspicious motion picture. The long delays between novels may partly be caused by Ondaatje finding other things to write and do in the meantime.

THERE are books about Seamus Heaney and “the crisis of identity”, Heaney and “the impress of Dante”, Heaney and “imagination and the sacred”, but there are no straight biographies available for the casual reader, even though Heaney has more of such readers than any other living poet – his titles now make up two-thirds of sales in that depressed market. Famous Seamus himself has said he likes it this way, and would prefer his life story to go unwritten “until after”, when he’s under the very dirt which has inspired so much of his work. As for his own memoirs, there may be no need for Heaney to put down in prose what’s already there in the poetry.

TOKYO is plagued by crows. They are thieves and murderers, stealing the eggs of meeker birds and biting through high-speed internet cables. Walking through Ueno Park to meet David Peace this morning, I watch one of them drag a plastic bag of food away from a sleeping homeless man. There is another screaming on a bare branch outside Peace’s office in Nezu, and it continues for the duration of our interview. “I actually quite like them,” says Peace.

WHAT other novelists refer to as research, Richard Price calls “hanging out”. Most often, this means spending time with police officers in and around New York, whose experience tends to have a direct bearing on the stories that Price chooses to tell. For the sake of specificity, he may also need to sit in on staff meetings with local restaurant managers and community outreach workers – as he did for his latest novel, Lush Life – or to participate in drug deals on dark corners of certain housing projects, if only as an observer.