And when his real Nanny was married, to part from him for ever, Rupert clung to her bridal veil in hysterical tears. The juvenile drama queen with the mother-nanny fixation grew up to be the lanky, elegant, Cary Grant-ish star of perhaps four good films (Another Country, Dance with a Stranger, The Comfort of Strangers and My Best Friend’s Wedding) but a lot of terrible dross (especially the steaming pile of ordure that is Hearts of Flame). At that moment, he explains, “a giant and deranged ego had been born”. He began to dress in his mother’s red tweed skirt (she looked like Julie Andrews). He took to sitting in the cinematic darkness of an old wardrobe, behind his grandmother’s mothballed gowns, watching through a crack in the door.
The defining moment of Rupert Everett’s childhood was his first trip to the movies. His mother and his nanny took him to see Mary Poppins in 1965, when he was six, and he loved it until the ending. When the Sixties super-nanny left without saying goodbye, he became a distraught, screaming lump. Coke and violence loom larger than beer and barbies, but what saves this first novel from sun-baked sensationalism is the searingly raw voice Burns gives her heroine Hot stuff from a writer who’s cooly in control. BT Further Under the Duvet, by Marian Keyes (PENGUIN £7.99 (395pp)) Like Barbara Cartland, Irish chick-lit queen Marian Keyes produces her best work lying down, dressed in her favourite “PJs”. In this second volume of collected journalism, she treats us to her most recent bedside philosophising and seven short stories.
A writer with the ability to give the most banal thoughts a Celtic twinkle, Keyes muses engagingly on turning 40, her near-perfect husband, and the art of dogging: “It beggars belief” EHTo order these books call: 0870 079 8897. Jack Lemmon is “charming, surprising”; Bj?”cheerful, shy”, and Sandrine Bonnaire “magnificent, and stunning, too” The cool maquillage never cracks. EH The Dark Part of Me, by Belinda Burns (ATLANTIC £9.99 (296pp)) Neighbours was never like this. In a roasting Brisbane suburb at Christmas, tearway Rosie is torn between same-sex delights with best mate Hollie and the riskier allure of wild-boy ex, Scott. Her thumbnail sketches of fellow actors, although generous, are cursory. Despite the promising title, no intimacies are revealed – aside from the actress’s love of Nordic landscapes, unfussy hotel rooms and blue lupins.
EH Close Up and Personal, by Catherine Deneuve (ORION £8.99 (198pp)) Deneuve’s decorous diaries consist of notes kept during the making of six films including Bu?’s Tristana (1969), R?s Wargnier’s Vietnam-set Indochine (1992) and Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (1999). BT She May Not Leave, by Fay Weldon (HARPERPERENNIAL £7.99 (284pp)) Grumpy old woman Fay Weldon debunks the politics of childcare in a novel that sees the author at her shibboleth-shaking best. Hattie and Martyn are a well-meaning Kentish Town couple adjusting to the arrival of their first baby. Ecological nappies drip into the bath; food and sex have gone out of the window. Tired with yet another meal of frozen peas and tinned tuna, Hattie decides to return to work and hire a nanny. The new Polish arrival – reassuringly plain – insinuates herself into their life with subversive results On-tap therapy for every working mother. In The Sportswriter (1986), we enter the brilliantly-depicted world of his sharp-eyed, self-doubting, divorced New Jersey Everyman, Frank Bascombe, and follow his post-journalism suburban life (and move into real-estate) a decade later in Independence Day (also £7.99).
BT Between Salt Water and Holy Water, by Tommaso Astarita (NORTON £10.99 (352pp)) Although a thriving centre of Greek, Arab and medieval civilisation, southern Italy has often looked like a basket-case to outsiders over the past 400 years. This admirably lucid narrative history turns a welcome spotlight on the past glories of Sicily, Naples and Calabria, explains how scheming Popes, Spanish kings, feudal landlords and (of course) mafiosi turned the region into “paradise inhabited by devils”, and looks ahead to a brighter future. From Muslim Palermo to Enlightenment Naples, Astarita sets works, and people, of genius against the misdeeds of grandees or godfathers. Fabulously rich in insight and observation, these are defining novels of modern US culture – but hugely enjoyable as well Better than Updike? Read and decide.