This Week in Books: Madonna Is the Blueprint for a Diva
Mary Gabriel’s new biography reveals the star’s indelible position in pop.
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The figure of the diva dominates modern pop stardom. She’s “the female version of a hustler,” says Beyoncé (who made a public appearance on Wednesday night with another contemporary super-diva, Taylor Swift; both have cemented their status with record-breaking tours this year). The Atlantic staff writer Spencer Kornhaber, whose book, On Divas, is out this week, defines the category as “soloists—mostly women—who voice their desires in ways that cause spectacle and controversy.” Also published this week was Mary Gabriel’s doorstop-size biography of one of our longest-venerated pop stars: Madonna. She’s “not just a cultural phenomenon … but a woman who intuits and manifests social change so far ahead of everyone else that she makes people profoundly uncomfortable,” Sophie Gilbert writes in a review of Gabriel’s book. In other words, she’s the ultimate diva.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
Writing about performers like Madonna isn’t easy. The biographer’s task is to reveal the human being underneath the costumes and glamor as well as capturing the secret ingredient that makes them so spellbinding, all while retaining some critical distance. At times in Madonna: A Rebel Life, Gabriel struggles to stay balanced; the biography can be defensive of its subject, dismissing outright the many criticisms Madonna has faced over the years, Gilbert writes. But maybe this is understandable: So much of that disdain has been sexist or unwarranted. Besides, how do you spend hundreds of pages explaining what makes Madonna Madonna without falling for her, just a bit? (This dilemma also affects authors whose subjects are far less charismatic: Michael Lewis’s new book about Sam Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite, has been widely criticized for being too favorable toward cryptocurrency’s fallen boy wonder, including by our staff writer Helen Lewis.)
Gabriel finds her footing when she writes about Madonna as a phenomenon, Gilbert writes. A Rebel Life’s meticulous documentation of five decades of culture reveals the star’s indelible position in pop. She’s entirely self-possessed; she’s unafraid of backlash; her creativity extends beyond her music. Madonna’s art is the creation, sustenance, and promotion of Madonna, and she’s still the blueprint for a diva. Today, we don’t only want divas’ music: We want to see them create empires, leverage their images, and run the world.
The entertainment industry is much more splintered than it was when Madonna was at her maximum saturation in the 1980s and ’90s. Today, it takes more to drive the news cycle—the shock value of open sexuality, especially, is blunted—and celebrities have to work harder to keep the public’s attention. We still have über-famous divas, but none of them is going to replace Madonna. That’s because she’s unique, but it’s mostly because she’s still around, Gilbert points out; she’s refused to gracefully age out of stardom. Her Celebration tour, reportedly featuring more than four dozen songs, multiple outfits, and a “highly evolved storyline,” kicks off tomorrow.
What to Read
Room Temperature, by Nicholson Baker
Baker is best known for his experimental debut novel, The Mezzanine, which takes place largely during a single ride up an escalator. In this, Baker’s second novel, the author brings the same level of detail to a—only slightly—longer stretch of activity: a father feeding his newborn daughter. Giving the baby a bottle constitutes the surface-level action of the novel while the narration acts like a boomerang, flying past and returning to meditations on the narrator's bond with his wife, Patty. Their partnership is generous and kind. They make up quickly after fighting; they playfully tease each other; they comfort each other—such as when the narrator reassures Patty after she’s criticized for her terrible spelling. Baker perfectly captures the intimacy of everyday love. A late chapter in the book detailing the couple’s euphemism for defecating—big jobs—and how the phrase takes its place in their personal lexicon is unexpectedly moving, a testament to how the most mundane parts of a shared life can be the most profound. Room Temperature is a book in which not much happens, and everything happens—a fitting description for an excellent marriage. — Isle McElroy
From our list: Seven books that explore how marriage really works
Out Next Week
Your Weekend Read
“The world is divided into those who can sleep and those who can’t,” Marie Darrieussecq announces in Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia. The line is, like many others in the book, measured hyperbole. Darrieussecq, an accomplished novelist, essayist, psychologist, and critic, is also a veteran of a decades-long struggle against sleeplessness. The book is the story of her loss. First published in France in 2021, and now translated into English by Penny Hueston, Sleepless treats insomnia as a question with no answer, an itch with no salve. Darrieussecq’s account of it is by turns hectic and meandering and erudite and feral: Here is, word by word, the addlement of the endlessly wakeful. As her anxious hours give way to weary years, sleeplessness becomes, for Darrieussecq, an incremental catastrophe. “The insomniac,” she writes, “is not so much in dialogue with sleep as with the apocalypse.”
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