Saturday Review - 21/11/2009

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by novelist Linda Grant, literary editor Boyd Tonkin and writer and critic Matthew Sweet to discuss the cultural highlights of the week - featuring bad habits and good ones. The latest film from the Coen Brothers, A Serious Man, tells the story of an ordinary man's search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV. It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith that she is leaving him. Larry's unemployable brother Arthur is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny is a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school, and his daughter Sarah is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job. How will Larry cope? Poet WH Auden had some bad habits but you would have to balance that against his unbreakable urge to write poetry. It's one of the subjects of Alan Bennett's new play, The Habit of Art, which centres around an extraordinary meeting between Auden and composer Benjamin Britten. Vladimir Nabokov couldn't shake the creative compulsion either, continuing to work on a new novel even in during his final illness. He wanted the results destroyed but 30 years on, his son Dmitri has published it as The Original of Laura - a novel in fragments. Cast Offs is a new Channel Four drama series that presents itself as an unusual twist on reality programming. The drama features disabled actors sent to a deserted island, but none of them are acting their disability and the drama is shaped so that the struggles of life in the wild are intercut with the struggles of life in a world shaped for the able bodied. The Water Table, by Philip Gross, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, is a collection of poetry with water at its heart.