The second part of Robert Crawford’s two-volume biography of T.S. Eliot (the first volume, Young Eliot, appeared in 2015) opens in 1922 just after the publication of Eliot’s masterpiece, The Waste Land. We find him overworked, sick, and deeply unhappy. At the heart of his misery (and much of his sickness) is his loveless marriage to Vivien, his first wife. In a letter to John Middleton Murry Eliot writes: “In the last ten years [in other words since he married Vivien] – gradually, but deliberately – I have made myself into a machine. I have deliberately killed my senses in order to go on with the outward form of living“. The “machine” pressed ahead nevertheless, becoming a British citizen and a member of the Church of England, looking for solace in religion and work, both commercial and creative. The book follows Eliot over the course of the next forty years as honors and accolades are heaped on him and as he takes his place not only in the Establishment but also in the pantheon of the greatest writers of the 20th century. All the while it looks as if sustained personal happiness will elude him until, in the last few years of his life, he makes what proves to be a short but profoundly contented marriage.

Robert Crawford does a fine job tracing the roots of Eliot’s work back to his life. It’s fascinating to see how Eliot’s reading, his work as a publisher, his deepening Christian faith, and his turbulent personal life all influenced his poetic and dramatic output. But Eliot After The Waste Land is the biography of a man, not just of a celebrated writer, and that is a remarkable achievement in itself. Admired and liked by many, but fully known and understood by almost no one, Eliot is shown here in all his complexity and contradictions.

Eliot is a very challenging subject for a biographer. Although he was sociable and had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, he hid much of his true character from almost everyone, preferring to control carefully what facets of his personality were displayed. Even in his decades-long correspondence with Emily Hale, much of which has been accessible to scholars only recently, you sense the care he devoted to managing how much of himself he revealed. Having said all that, I sense Robert Crawford has given us as convincing and as authoritative account of Eliot’s life, character, and work as we could reasonably expect to get, and who could ask more of a biographer than that?

I lost interest in Alexis Schaitkin’s debut novel quite early on. Something about it felt tiresomely familiar. Yet another story about a privileged, white family touched by tragedy when their teenage daughter (beautiful, of course, and brilliant, of course) turns up dead on vacation on an exclusive Caribbean island. Saint X is mostly narrated by Claire, the dead girl’s sister, who, back in NYC, is obsessed with finding out what happened. Claire (who works in publishing, of course), trails one of the original suspects, now working as a NYC cab driver, and becomes obsessed about knowing what happened and what part he played in the events.

Don’t be misled by the jacket blurb that wants readers to believe that Saint X is some piece of sophisticated social commentary. It isn’t. It’s a basic and not very interesting mystery story.

Barry Lopez is a difficult writer to categorize. Essayist, naturalist, traveler, environmentalist, novelist – Lopez did it all. I’m a newcomer to his work, so my assessment of him is inevitably shaped by this set of essays collected and published posthumously, but he reminds me of one of those itinerant evangelists who draw us towards a greater understanding of our world and our experiences of it not just by what they preach and write but also by how they choose to live. (Rebecca Solnit, in her introduction to this collection, talks about “something priestly” about Lopez’s presence). Lopez traveled extensively, not as a tourist travels, but as someone seeking to live as fully as possibly in the wonders of the world. He was drawn to remote places and the people who live and work in them – Alaska and Antarctica, for example – and also to every corner of the United States. His particular brilliance, it seems to me, was his ability to communicate a sense of place with remarkable vividness, to relate what specific places meant to him, and, by extension, to explain why they ought to matter to us.

He saw very clearly, and much earlier than most of us, the terrible destructive impact we are having on our planet, on its species and habitats, and on the human communities who live in the remaining wildernesses. He wanted to warn us, but most of all he wanted us to pay attention and to learn. “Perhaps attention is what we owe one another and the world first, and this writer wandered about, paying it out lavishly, and writing down what he learned as an exhortation to others to likewise pay attention“.

I suspect Susan Hill has lost interest in her Simon Serrailler series of crime novels, in which A Change of Circumstance is the eleventh and most recent book. The plotting has become cursory and in this instance amounts to little more than a tale of low-level drug dealing. As for the hero of the series, Simon Serailler in this outing barely develops. It all feels perfunctory. Perhaps the author or the publisher (or both) couldn’t resist what was bound to be yet another big payday. Dedicated fans won’t care much, I suspect, but it’s a shame to see the series run out of steam like this. If it can’t be reinvigorated, it should be brought to an end.