Book reviews roundup: Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, Caitlin Moran’s Moranifesto, Margaret Forster’s How to Measure a Cow

What the critics thought of The Lonely City by Olivia Laing, Moranifesto by Caitlin Moran, How to Measure a Cow by Margaret Forster

Critics flocked to welcome Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. Over three books, she “has teased non-fiction into a new kind of literature”, enthused Philip Hoare in the New Statesman: her latest is “a wonderful and worrying inquisition of the contemporary state of isolation”, adding up “the costs and consequences of a connected, 24/7 world” and asking “if art can bridge our sense of aloneness at the same time as it expresses it”. Ada Calhoun in the New York Times also praised a “daring and seductive book” which “trips lightly from sociology to cultural criticism to personal anecdote” as it explores the lives and works of American artists who started out as outsiders, including Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger and David Wojnarowicz. Laing weaves autobiography with art criticism, wondering if these examplars of solitude can lighten her own loneliness as she drifts through New York in the wake of a breakup. “Everybody, lonely or not, should read this book,” declared Michèle Roberts in the Independent, while Jerome Boyd Maunsell in the Evening Standard applauded the way it “takes a difficult, almost taboo, subject and deftly turns it over anew”. Helen Rumbelow in the Times, though, wanted less art criticism about figures “whose only link is New York and that Laing likes them” and more of Laing’s own story. “The irony here is that if only The Lonely City hadn’t been so populated by others, it would have been a more revealing book.”

The personal is political in Caitlin Moran’s Moranifesto, a collection of journalism and new essays presented as “a rallying call for our times”. Critics found it fun but frustrating. “Reading a book that is essentially like getting drunk with Moran is, of course, brilliant. I could spend every weekend necking Prosecco with her in the loos of a Vauxhall gay club,” said Katie Glass in the Sunday Times. But she is inconsistent on class, capitalism and especially feminism: “Moran complains about ‘dumb, limiting, representations of women’, then perpetuates them.” Rosamund Urwin in the Evening Standard has been a Moran fan since childhood. “Her 2011 memoir-cum-polemic How to Be a Woman not only brought new disciples to feminism, it spawned a string of imitations. She is now hoping to open politics up to a new audience”, and the results are “predictably brilliant”. But while Urwin would love to “live in the world Moran is arguing for – a kinder, fairer, more equal place”, the book needed editing and updating, and could have done without irrelevant material on everything from Bowie to the delights of bacon. Fiona Sturges in the Independent on Sunday had no such niggles, relishing the way Moran encompasses “online misogyny, sexual assault, FGM, abortion, cystitis, libraries, migration, adolescence, and why she has given up wearing high heels”. “Her fury is evident but so, as ever, is her clear-sightedness. She may be funny, but she’s also right.”

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