Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Lisa Margonelli on Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It by Elizabeth Royte: "Where others are bold, 'Bottlemania' is subversive, and after you read it you will sip warily from your water bottle (whether purchased or tap, plastic or not), as freaked out by your own role in today’s insidious water wars as by Royte’s recommended ecologically responsible drink: 'Toilet to tap.'"
• Maslin on The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski: "[T]he most enchanting debut novel of the summer. Written over a decade by the heretofore unknown David Wroblewski and arriving as a bolt from the blue, this is a great, big, mesmerizing read, audaciously envisioned as classic Americana. Absent the few dates and pop-cultural references that place the book somewhere in the post-Eisenhower 20th century, its unmannered style, emotional heft and sweeping ambition would keep it timeless."
• Laura Miller on Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of Children's Literature by Leonard S. Marcus: "Marcus, a charming and nimble writer, makes a valiant effort to keep things interesting, but the editorial shake-ups and new printing technologies will be of interest primarily to historians and people in the industry. It’s the editor’s lot, alas, to subsist on reflected glory. The most interesting thing about even the most esteemed individuals that Marcus covers are the authors they discovered and the books they published, and there’s not quite enough about either in 'Minders of Make-Believe.' The effect is a little like hanging around at a perfectly nice party while there’s a terrific one going on just down the hall."
• Lauren Mechling on Moving Day: Allie Finkel's Rules for Girls, Book One by Meg Cabot: "Cabot’s books are quick-paced romps that take one night to read and, apparently, not much longer to write. In addition to regularly updating her blog with detailed posts, she has said in interviews that she writes five to 10 pages a day, turning out roughly a book a month. More unbelievable, though, is that the work holds up. While legions of Meg Cabot imitators get waylaid by brand-name this and 'Oh my God' that, Cabot’s voice remains fresh. She favors the spill-the-beans-as-you-go style common to teenage fiction, but her material has a spirited fizz that’s lacking in many so-called young adult comedies."

Washington Post:

• Michael Dirda on The Delighted States by Adam Thirlwell: "Normally, I would eagerly applaud a young writer's enterprising attempt to recreate the critical essay, to spin out a set of variations on a theme in the history of fiction. But to bring off the loosey-goosey manner of a book like The Delighted States requires more than a few appealing literary anecdotes: It needs considerable authorial charm, and this Thirlwell lacks. Instead, he proffers many thoughtful, if hardly soul-stirring, analyses of passages from classic authors and a slew of sloganizing generalizations, such as this gnomic description of Kafka's writing: 'It is adagio, and massive, and very short.' Well, Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States is flashy, and pompous, and very long. Nobody likes a showoff."
• Margot Livesay on Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian: "There are many moments of loss and violence -- some heartbreaking -- but the reader quickly moves on. This swift pace and the resulting eschewal of sentimentality are part of the pleasure of Skeletons at the Feast, but I wish we could have paused a little longer at one or two of these moments.... But Bohjalian's sense of character and place, his skillful plotting and his clear grasp of this confusing period of history make for a deeply satisfying novel, one that asks readers to consider, and reconsider, how they would rise to the challenge of terrible deprivation and agonizing moral choices."

Los Angeles Times:

• Chris Abani on Slumberland by Paul Beatty: "'Slumberland' is laugh-out-loud funny in many places, and its wit and satire can be burning, regardless of where they are pointed: blackness or whiteness.... At its core, 'Slumberland's' sadness is that of a black man cast loose in a universe of whiteness, carrying the pure sorrow of never being seen, and an even deeper sorrow of not being able to see himself. Perhaps this is the point of the glib tone -- that one can never truly get to the heart of a difficult question by using tropes and ideas that, while ringing of personal truth, are riddled with cultural sentimentality."
• Donna Seaman on How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic: "Richly translated by Anthea Bell, Stanisic's story is loaded on each page with galvanizing details, desperately making an inventory of an imperiled world. He maintains a delirious, jump-cut pace as words flash dark-to-light-to-dark, and sentences coil and snap, conjuring a macabre carnival atmosphere."

New York Sun:

• Gary Shapiro on Abbeville by Jack Fuller: "Robert Frost once noted that he could sum up all he had learned in life in three words: 'It goes on.' This rich novel unfolds in a way that exemplifies this insight, while gathering the sounds and texture of the Midwestern heartland, serving up a swath of Americana along the way; a scene involving boyhood mischief with a pellet rifle might have made Huck Finn smile.... Framing the lives of a grandfather and grandson, but encompassing many others, 'Abbeville' ultimately raises the question of when and how a life, caught up in cycles large and small, might be considered a success."

Globe & Mail:

• Greg Buiun on Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon: "The book business is sagging, web-based readership is exploding, but Maps and Legends is, implicitly, a clarion call back to the future, where serious entertainments count, where the written word - framed by images or just plunked down, alone on the page - create what Chabon calls 'a kind of midair transfer of strength, contact across a void, like the tangling of cable and steel between two lonely bridgeheads.'"

The Guardian:

• Justin Cartwright on The Impostor by Damon Galgut (no US publisher yet): "Although it has become, in essence, a thriller, and a very good one, Galgut's novel also intends a report on the state of South Africa, post-Mandela.... These ambivalent post-apartheid novels are often more interesting than the apartheid novels, in which the moral choices were fairly simplistic. The Impostor is a bleak but compelling book, set in a time of profound uncertainty."
• Christopher Tayler on Netherland by Joseph O'Neill: "O'Neill clearly knows this world inside out, and he details its workings with great specificity as well as a feeling for its symbolic heft. On the other hand, the narrative is unwieldily organised, the supporting characters are underdeveloped and the dialogue is often pretty bad.... Perhaps stories of striving immigrants and America's ambiguous promise speak to New York reviewers on frequencies inaudible to outsiders. O'Neill has said that he wrote the book as 'an American novel ... My first novel as an American novelist', and in this respect, he seems to have succeeded."

The New Yorker:

• James Wood on Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen: "Most first-person unreliability in fiction is reliably unreliable; rather mechanically, it teaches us how to read it, how to plug its holes. Double unreliability—or unreliable unreliability—is rarer, and more interesting, because it asks much more of the reader.... [T]he novel wants to disturb any sense of what might constitute 'a consensus view of reality,' the better to depict the instabilities of a perforated mind.... 'Atmospheric Disturbances' is a novel of consciousness, not a novel about consciousness."
• John Updike on America America by Ethan Canin: "Corey’s story becomes part 'David Copperfield' and part 'An American Tragedy,' with less suspense than either. We know from the outset that Corey has survived and prospered, and how much tragedy can attach to a senator who lives to be eighty-nine?"

--Tom