Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover (as detailed at length earlier today on Omni): George Will on Nixonland by Rick Perlstein: "In Perlstein’s mental universe, Nixon is a bit like God — not, Lord knows, because of Nixon’s perfect goodness and infinite mercy, but because Nixon is the explanation for everything.... 'How did Nixonland end?' Perlstein asks in the book’s last line. 'It has not ended yet.' But almost every page of Perlstein’s book illustrates the sharp contrast rather than a continuity with America today. It almost seems as though Perlstein, who was born in 1969, is reluctant to let go of the excitement he has experienced secondhand through the archives he has ransacked to such riveting effect."
• Maslin on Bright Shiny Morning by one of our other guests this week, James Frey: "The million little pieces guy was called James Frey. He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time."
• Kakutani on The Boat by Nam Le: "The other tales in this book ... circumnavigate the globe, demonstrating Mr. Le’s astonishing ability to channel the experiences of a multitude of characters, from a young child living in Hiroshima during World War II to a 14-year-old hit man in the barrios of Medellín to a high school jock in an Australian beach town. Mr. Le not only writes with an authority and poise rare even among longtime authors, but he also demonstrates an intuitive, gut-level ability to convey the psychological conflicts people experience when they find their own hopes and ambitions slamming up against familial expectations or the brute facts of history."
• Jennifer Senior on Blood Matters by Masha Gessen: "'Blood Matters' is valuable reading to almost anyone facing a huge health decision, not only for the literary commiseration it offers, but also for the inspired example of medical sleuthing on one’s own behalf that it provides. Gessen keeps an inflammatory topic at room temperature, writing elegantly and without self-pity. The book is very funny in places. (My favorite sentence, for reasons I can’t quite describe: 'DNA-testing equipment tends to fall into two categories: things that look like printers and things that look like toasters.') It’s also very lucid, even when the science gets complex. It’s a liberating book. Strange as it sounds, it would make a great Mother’s Day present."

Washington Post:

• Carolyn See on The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer: "Considering that Andrew Sean Greer is the author of the wildly imaginative 'Confessions of Max Tivoli' ... it will come as no surprise that the new novel is built on several narrative surprises that cannot (or should not) be revealed. So this will be a hard review to write.... This is a plot that deepens as surprises explode unexpectedly and terrifyingly. 'The Story of a Marriage' is more than worth the reader's attention. It's thoughtful, complex and exquisitely written."

Los Angeles Times:

• David L. Ulin on Frey's Bright Shiny Morning: "'Bright Shiny Morning' is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever read. But you have to give James Frey credit for one thing: He's got chutzpah.... Whatever else his failings as a writer, Frey was once able to move his readers; how else do we explain the success of 'A Million Little Pieces'? It's just one of the ironies of this new book that his fictionalized memoir is a better novel than 'Bright Shiny Morning' could ever hope to be."
• Minna Proctor on Exiles by Ron Hansen: "In 'Exiles,' the dramatic inevitable belongs to the five drowned German nuns to whose memory the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins dedicated perhaps his most important work, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland,' a poem that was neither understood during his lifetime nor terribly well-liked.... From the magnificent words of Hopkins to the terrifying drama aboard the Deutschland, the promises of "Exiles" are superlative. The execution is tentative. If only Ron Hansen had plunged more deeply into those dark waters. If only a novel about fate, faith and poetry could give us more."

Globe & Mail:

• Keith Garebian on The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie: "The Enchantress of Florence is many things: a historical romp, a weaving of magic realism, a pure fairy tale, a love story, a postmodern exercise of ideas about identity and storytelling, a thriller, a political satire and a case of legend-making. However, clever though it is, and shot through with some dazzling passages, it is below the high standards we aptly apply to Rushdie."
• Lawrence Scanlan on Burning Down the House by Russell Wangersky: "The book is a record of what he saw and heard, smelled, felt and thought while responding to emergency calls. 'Suffering' is not too strong a word to describe the impact of that experience on him, and I imagine that the act of putting it all down on paper (relying, it seems, on a photographic memory) provoked yet more suffering.... Out of that apparently shattering experience has come this astonishingly visceral piece of writing."

The Guardian:

• Adam Mars-Jones on The Collected Stories by Lorrie Moore (apparently a UK-only collection): "A Lorrie Moore story can sometimes be like a schoolroom full of precocious kids, every sentence raising both hands and squeaking: 'Me! Me! Choose me!'... Moore's humour [is] closer to a compulsion than a talent, with the desperation of someone trying to repeat a trick that brought the house down once without her quite knowing why, and it prefers bad jokes to no jokes at all."
• But Christopher Tayler disagrees: "Although her characters have a way of blurting out one-liners whenever they're feeling defensive or bitter, her own humour doesn't sell their deeper emotions short. You feel bad for Zora, chewed up by love for her son, when Ira tells her he'll call tomorrow, 'though he knew he wouldn't'. As someone says in another story: 'Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.'"

The New Yorker:

• Bee Wilson on The End of Food by Paul Roberts: "If we max out our credit cards buying Nikes, we can simply push them to the back of a closet. By contrast, our insatiable demand for food must be worn on our bodies, often in the form of diabetes as well as obesity. Overeating makes us miserable, and ill, but medical advances mean that it takes a long time to kill us, so we keep on eating. Roberts, whose impulse to connect everything up is both his strength and his weakness, concludes, grandly, that 'food is fundamentally not an economic phenomenon.' On the contrary, food has always been an economic phenomenon, but in its current form it is one struggling to meet our uncurbed appetites. What we are witnessing is not the end of food but a market on the brink of failure."

--Tom

P.S. Apologies for skipping the New York Sun this week, but their site was unavailable at press time.

Comments

[antonio gonzalez on May 15, 2008 at 11:14 PM]

I can’t describe my surprise in reading about EXILES by Ron Hansen in the Amazon’s daily blog OLD MEDIA MONDAY: REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS. I am grateful for this information. I would not conceive of a novel inspired by Gerald Manley Hopkins THE WRECK OF THE DEUTSCHLAND
I read Hopkins’ poem for the first time more than 50 years ago when I was a teenager. At that time I thought it was a “tour de force.” I still do. Now I have the privilege of reading it in “bits and pieces” Its language is indeed lofty.
I look forward to what Mr. Hansen has done with this mystic poem. The reviewer, Mina Proctor, wrote that the book didn’t “go more deeply into…fate, faith and poetry….” Not having yet read EXILES, I anxiously wait to see what was left out of “THE WRECK,” in its adaptation...
For the few which didn’t have Gerard Manley Hopkins in their college reading list, suffice to say that Hopkins is a giant of a poet, a “classic”, an immensely emotional and at times difficult writer. Though he lived in the Victorian Era, he can hardly be called a “Victorian poet.” His poetry can be an guiding beacon into the study of modern poetry; among many other non-Victorian traits he is unconventional in form and a mystic more in line with Saint Therese of the Cross, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Saint John of the Cross, and T.S. Eliot.
He invented the so called “sprung verse.” (See encyclopedia.farlex.com/sprung+rhythm ) In a few words sprung verse is a metrical stress which like in music, syncopates the reading by omission of a word or musical beat. Hopkins does not say “Oh God that masters me” but “sprungs “his phrase: “Oh mastering me God!” (Here we encounter a typical Hopkins line in what W.H. Gardner calls: “The omission of the indispensable nominative relative pronoun.”).
In my mind his poetry is an inevitable outburst of emotion, tumultuous, beautiful, enthralled, And INTENSE. He loves animals and brings them to his verse: PIED BEAUTY, “Glory be to God for dappled things, for skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.” And in THE WINDHOVER (To the Lord Jesus Christ) another animal, this time a bird in one of the most beautiful and compelling uses of onomatopoeia: “I caught this morning morning’s minion kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn Falcon, in his riding…./Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here/Buckle…O my Chevalier!” Here we have it---long sprung verse stanzas, without line respite.
His inspirational response if often naïve, as in THE STARLIGHT NIGHT: “Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies/ Oh look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!” And how much like a hurt child he turns from joy to grief and blames the sky for the sinking of a passenger ship, THE LOSS OF THE EURYDICE (Yes, another shipwreck, this time he writes a shorter poem!) “And you were a liar, O blue March day./ Bright sun lanced fire in the heavenly bay;”
Hopkins died at age 44. Despite a death in early middle age he ends in the darkest mysticism. Some consider his last poems his more powerful poetry, but his thematic gets hopelessly more morbid. He reminds us John Donne in his late period. Hopkins however is more detached from theology and more desperate in the imitation of Christ. In CARRION CONFORT he protests any relief: “Not, I’ll not carrion comfort, Despair not feast on thee;/…That night, that year/ Of now done darkness I wretched lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.”
He never attained spiritual bliss or rest from his faith: (Sonnet 44)”I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree/ Bitter would have me taste….”And (Sonnet 45) “We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills/ To bruise them dearer.”
Someone called these late poems the “terrible sonnets”.

I have tried and found a ray of sunshine in one of late inspirations (Sonnet 46):
Elsewhere leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
‘s not wrung, see you, unforeseen times rather – as skies
Betweenpie mountains – lights a lovely mile.