Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Touré on Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead: "Whitehead’s delicious language and sarcastic, clever voice fit this teenager who’s slowly constructing himself. 'Sag Harbor' is not 'How I became a writer'; there’s no hint of Benji’s destiny beyond his sharp-eyed way of looking at things, his writerly voice and his desire to provide a historical and sociological context for blacks in the Hamptons. Still, with the story meandering like a teenager’s attention, the book feels more like a memoir than a traditional plot-driven novel. It’s easy to come away thinking not much happens — Whitehead has said as much — but 'Sag Harbor' mirrors life, which is also plotless. It’s an inner monologue, a collection of stories about a classic teenage summer where there’s some cool stuff and some tedium and Benji grows in minute ways he can’t yet see."
• Liesl Schillinger on Brooklyn by Colm Toibin: "Toibin’s new novel stands apart because its protagonist has such an uncritical nature that she doesn’t see she has grounds for complaint, much less possess any impulse to initiate confrontation. But slowly, equably, and without malice, Eilis exacts a bittersweet revenge for the expatriation she never intended — or, rather, one unfolds for her unsought, organically." (Also see Alex Witchel's long profile of Toibin from Sunday's NYT Magazine.)
• Garner on The First Tycoon by T.J. Stiles: "In this whacking new biography of Vanderbilt, T. J. Stiles, previously the author of a life of Jesse James, demonstrates a brute eloquence of his own. This is a mighty — and mighty confident — work, one that moves with force and conviction and imperious wit through Vanderbilt’s noisy life and times. The book, 'The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,' is full of sharp, unexpected turns. Among the biggest: Mr. Stiles has delivered a revisionist history of American capitalism’s original sinner, the man who inspired the term 'robber baron.' He has real sympathy for the old devil."
• Thomas Mallon on Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley: "Each was, it might be said, a piece of work, in both the Shakespearean sense of something wondrous to behold and the more current one of being, shall we say, a handful. The memoir provoked by their lives and deaths is loving, exasperated and very funny. In its moments of real ambivalence, 'Losing Mum and Pup' is surprisingly strong drink." On Wednesday Maslin wrote, "Read it and chortle. Read it and weep."

Washington Post:

• Charles on Whitehead's Sag Harbor: "The novel's eight chapters are, in effect, masterful short stories, deceptively desultory as they riff on the essential quests of teenage boys: BB guns, nude beaches, beer and, above all, the elusive secret to fitting in. But plot is the least of Whitehead's concerns here. Charm alone drives most of these chapters, the seductive voice of a narrator as clever as he is self-deprecating, moving from one comic anecdote to the next with infectious delight in his own memories."
• Dirda on Who Is Mark Twain? by Mark Twain: "These 24 pieces weren't kept in a drawer because they offended 19th-century morals. No, most of them were failures; they simply don't work. One or two are absolutely terrible; several intended to be funny aren't ('The Music Box'); some are dated and practically incomprehensible ('The Quarrel in the Strong-Box'); and a few never got finished.... Still, 'Who Is Mark Twain?' possesses one inestimable virtue: Its author is never dull."

Los Angeles Times:

• Sonja Bolle on The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan: "The brilliant thing that Rick Riordan has done with these books is to make true what his story says: The Greek gods have moved to wherever their stories are told. Mount Olympus can as truly be at the top of the Empire State Building as it can be on a mountaintop in Greece. The important things to know are that the gods are not all-powerful, nor are they eternal, but that the stories of heroes are eternally told."
• Floyd Skloot on Toibin's Brooklyn: "Tóibín offers a scaled-down work, the formally restrained account of a young woman's ragged, almost unconscious struggle for independence and self-expression. While akin to his previous novels, "Brooklyn" is Tóibín's most subdued, reflecting its main character's inner life, where access to her profoundest emotions and needs and her capacity to articulate them for herself are deeply buried.... [In the novel's final movement] Tóibín, writing about the crippling power of conformity, bursts the bounds he has established for his story. Form echoes theme in the novel's final 50 pages, as Eilis acts in ways that challenge all we thought we (and she, and everyone) knew of her. This is Tóibín's central point, the crux of his otherwise conventional, 1950s love story. Freedom and authenticity occur when we are able to surprise ourselves."

Wall Street Journal:

• Arthur Herman on The Forge of Christendom by Tom Holland: "The years after 1000 were the classic age of feudalism, a form of social organization that used to be dismissed as the darkest part of the Dark Ages but that historians now see as dynamic, even entrepreneurial. Local energies tamed the wilderness and gradually imposed order.... It was the men and women of what Edmund Burke later called 'life's little platoons' who gave Europe its energy and wealth. The big institutions -- the church and feudal monarchies -- merely cashed in. As we listen to today's great worriers, we should remember how wrong doom prophecies can be -- how they can even herald a beginning and not an end."

Globe and Mail:

• Samantha Nutt on Six Months in Sudan by James Maskalyk: "Generally, books of this type read exactly as you might expect — stories of personal triumph over adversity, a retrospective on human nature and our innate capacity to ignore the suffering of those living with war and poverty — but Maskalyk avoids such clichés with impressive results. Perhaps one of the greatest successes of Six Months in Sudan is that it does not try to be anything more than it is — a moment in time, a distinctly human story full of laughter and tears, hope and sadness, anger and resiliency."

The Guardian:

• Tim Adams on The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen: "Spivet is that staple of contemporary literature from Salinger onwards: the misunderstood child genius, damaged, hypersensitive, refusing to grow up and precocious way beyond a fault. He is an alternative version of the narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a product of our strange fetishisation of Asperger's, a child who uses lists and formulae as a defence against the messiness of the world.... One effect of reading this book was to have me go back and read a comparable debut, Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, which also revelled in marginalia and footnotes. There was a palpable difference between the two; whereas the obsessions of Baker's (adult) narrator - about wing-flap milk cartons, and moving staircases - seemed genuinely compulsive, and to have grown out of a lifetime of looking, Larsen's seem too often the kind of thing that you might expect a prodigy could become hooked on in this kind of book."
• Adam Mars-Jones on The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt: "A teacherly element is undoubtedly part of Byatt's literary personality and gradually it becomes dominant in The Children's Book. There is a potentially fatal unwillingness to trust the reader to get the point or the full range of reference.... Benedict Fludd describes how any one of the four elements can betray a potter and reduce months of his work to dust and ashes and spitting steam – 'failure with clay was more complete and spectacular than with other forms of art'. This is perfectly true and The Children's Book is not a failure on that scale, or anything like. It contains magnificent things, but readers are entitled to feel short-changed when a family drama slowly turns into a history lesson."

The New Yorker:

• Judith Thurman on Bad Girls Go Everywhere by Jennifer Scanlon: "One hesitates to seek a moral in the glittering life of a bad girl, and Helen Gurley Brown, thank goodness, is incorrigible. That is the dissonance in Scanlon’s redemptive approach: the colorless prose that keeps its ankles decorously crossed on the dais; the savant discussions of second-wave and third-wave and 'lipstick' feminism; and the vision of Brown as a transitional species of New Woman. No, she was a classic poor girl on the make, lusty and driven, who, with her husband’s help, found a clever formula that wasn’t unique, except perhaps in its crude honesty, for marketing her own worldly wisdom. And now she is a great old tough cookie, whose survival one applauds. Most of all, Scanlon’s portrait reminds one it has never been easy to be both a woman and a person—that femininity (like masculinity) is, to some extent, a performance. What has changed since Brown wrote 'Sex and the Single Girl' is that women have more roles to play, on a greater stage. She helped—but only modestly—to expand the repertoire."

--Tom

Comments

[loresinger on May 05, 2009 at 12:03 PM]

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