During this period, America was not a dead zone. Brat Pack (Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, Bret Easton Ellis) created a track across Lower Manhattan after midnight. Kmart Realists (Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Joy Williams, Richard Ford) were minimalist fiction wandering around laundromats and discounted hotels.
Fame novels, homework for literate adults, include Don DeLillo’s “White Noise,” Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” William Kennedy’s “Iron Weed,” and John Updike’s ” “Rabbits are rich” was included.
But Walsh makes London look like it used to be. The stage was small. Everything burned brighter. More angels were flooding Pin’s head.
“Circus of Dreams” is both a history and a memoir. Walsh grew up in South London. His father was a doctor, a general practitioner, and his mother was a nurse. Neither was a big reader, but their son was. He earned a bachelor’s degree in literature from Oxford, did a lot of work in journalism, then became an evening standard literary editor, and in his mid-thirties became The Sunday Times in London.
At The Sunday Times, his deputy was Nigella Lawson, who was in his late twenties at the time. She was horribly witty, well-read, and socially connected to Walsh.
One day Walsh needed computer help, and Lawson offered to help. He kept failing. With her frustration, she sank on his lap and made corrections. Walsh had a hard time dealing with it, he wrote, “one of the great beauties of the 20th century just settled on my seated man.”
