In 1951 the San Francisco Chronicle observed that "in Sausalito people live on anything that floats." Piper French, reviewing Joe Kloc's Lost at Sea for the New York Review of Books, traces a line from those midcentury houseboat dwellers to Marin County's present-day "anchor-outs," who still live on the anchorage in Richardson Bay. Seventy-five years, one harbor, the same improvisation.
Read this week's literary news side by side and that year keeps resurfacing — not as nostalgia, but as a question with an edge on it. What do people build when the plan is gone and only the materials are left?
The same 1951 turns up in Kate Atkinson's new novel, Our Noble Selves , reviewed this week in the Guardian. Its setting is the Festival of Britain, which the review describes as a desperate attempt to raise the spirits of a shattered nation — a celebration of national creativity, grit and ingenuity staged by a government that had little else left to offer. A festival as a form of first aid. Atkinson, the review notes, loves a quirky detail and a cast of British eccentrics, and postwar Britain handed her a country full of both.