The ghost wall sarah moss5/29/2023 ![]() ![]() She started out as an academic specializing in nineteenth-century literature. Among novelists writing now, Moss, who was born in 1975, appears the most eager to continue this tradition. ![]() The effort to capture what we mean by “these days” is one way of trying to answer what Thomas Carlyle, in 1839, called the “Condition of England Question.” This was originally a quasi-journalistic endeavor-a report on hard times, a portrait of the way we live now-but in the past century such novels as Virginia Woolf’s “ Between the Acts,” Evelyn Waugh’s “ Brideshead Revisited,” and Angus Wilson’s “ Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” showed that scrutinizing present-day habits and circumstances could also provide a window onto the country’s long and tangled past. A teen-ager remembers his grandmother bemoaning “young people nowadays,” and a small boy listens to his father raging, in the middle of the night, against the inertia or cowardice of his temporary neighbors: “Bloody typical. . . . ![]() ![]() Everywhere in the book, people are sighing over the present. In Sarah Moss’s new novel, “ Summerwater” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which portrays a Scottish campground during the course of a sodden August day, a character mournfully reflects that Edinburgh is full of English people “these days.” It’s a phrase that occurs repeatedly: having kids “these days” is not a very clever thing to do those who have had the misfortune of being born “these days” are given silly names like Honey. ![]()
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