Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: It's their 10 Best Books issue. And the slow time for new releases gives them room to review a little further off the beaten path than usual.
• Megan Marshall on Sargent's Daughters by Erica E. Hirschler: "'From this singular picture,' she explains, 'a novel unfolds.' And her 'biography' of this painting — written after she documented the Boit sisters’ lives and researched every significant detail in the painting, from the 'molded composition' baby doll (named Popau after a right-wing French politician) to the floor plan of the apartment to the 'colossal' vases 'made specifically for the West according to Japanese ideas about what Europeans liked' — is that thoroughly absorbing novel."
• Jascha Hoffman on Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century by Masha Gessen: "Perhaps because of his silence, Perelman has become a kind of mathematical Rorschach test. Some of his peers see him as a righteous nonconformist, others as a cranky purist.... Given the lack of firsthand evidence about Perelman’s motives, one could have hoped for a clearer sense of the work he pursued with such devotion.... But she does provide a thorough account of the circumstances that led to Perelman’s rise in the 'vicious, backstabbing little world' of Soviet mathematics and a brilliant reconstruction of the twisted logic that might have led to his mysterious exit. In so doing she has written something rare: an accessible book about an unreachable man."
• Garner on Literary Life: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry: "It’s as slack and distracted a memoir as I’ve read in years, packed with scenes and observations that are repeated nearly verbatim from his last memoir, 'Books.' It skims the surface of Mr. McMurtry’s life; few moments seem genuinely honest or painful or revealing.... If Mr. McMurtry didn’t dislike technology so much, I’d swear he wrote this book while texting, or updating his Facebook status. His heart isn’t in it; it isn’t even next door.... [But] 'Literary Life' is exactly the kind of slipshod book I enjoy more than many good books, panning for unexpected bits of gold about an interesting writer."
• Tom Bissell on Season of Ash by Jorge Volpi: "The Mexican writer Jorge Volpi’s latest novel, 'Season of Ash,' is also a book one very much wants to like. It is thoughtful, has epic sweep and contains many notionally appealing characters. What it is not: surprising, involving or at all interesting. What it lacks: any occasions of arresting language or appreciable drama. Another thing it lacks: quotation marks. It says something about Volpi’s strange achievement that quotation marks are frequently what the reader misses most.... It has been a long time since a novel of such unmistakably serious intent has been this unintentionally hilarious."

Washington Post:

• It's their Best of 2009 issue too. (More on that later if I can get a sec.)
• Dirda on No Tomorrow by Vivant Denon: "You can read 'No Tomorrow' in just an hour. Its chiaroscuro effects of candlelight and shadow, its teasing tone, its picture of gradual unveiling and dishabille will keep you both charmed and on edge. Embrace the gradualness, the anticipation. There's no need to rush."
• Carolyn See on Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution by Joel Richard Paul: "'Unlikely Allies' is a nonfiction account, but it reads like a Monty Python movie. You can tell it's nonfiction, though, because the bad guys prosper and most of the good characters stop having fun.... How they sinned, those revolutionaries we were taught to revere! What gigantic whoppers they told. (I was especially disillusioned by Tom Paine.) They lied and cheated and routinely went back on their word. They had a pretty good time, though, ... until they got old and sick and died. The wonder is, our great country came out of such undignified scheming."

Los Angeles Times:

• David L. Ulin on The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly: "Featuring 67 stories, all but two from the 1940s and 1950s, the book is a repository of lost culture, a reminder of how much fun comics are to read.... On the one hand, this is kid stuff -- 'art for laugh's sake.' But even more, it is a reclamation project with surprising nuance, not just in terms of the art but also of the artists themselves."
• Heller McAlpin on Yours Ever by Thomas Mallon: "Mallon is such a sharp literary critic that his sparkling turns of phrase actually do compete with the real thing, often overshadowing the letters he's discussing.... Not all the letters he cites are compelling. But Mallon is an ideal guide on this whirlwind tour, and he wisely limits quotes to a few trenchant lines rather than blocks of epistolary prose. 'Yours Ever' puts the belle back in belles-lettres."

The Globe and Mail:

• Lisa Foad on Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin: "Shoplifting's compelling disjunctions and disconnections – its shoring-up of articulation as a site of simultaneous failure and possibility – are blunted by the tedium of the novella's navel-gazing insularity. Despite its wit, Shoplifting stales quickly and halfway through the novella, I was as ennuied as Lin's characters."

The Guardian:

• Ruth Sunderland on Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin: "So is Too Big to Fail the best book about the crisis? For my money, Fool's Gold by Gillian Tett is a more sophisticated read; from a UK perspective, Alex Brummer's The Crunch is more engaging; and Graham Turner's No Way to Run an Economy is more provocative. But it's unfair to expect any one book to serve such a huge, multilayered subject and Sorkin has provided an entertaining addition to the crunch-lit genre."
• Ursula K. LeGuin on The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson: "Her style is not at all 'poetic' – quite the contrary. It is prose of the very highest order; it is pure prose. Through its quiet clarity we see unreachable depths, threatening darkness, promised treasures. The sentences are beautiful in structure, movement and cadence. They have inevitable rightness. And this is a translation! Thomas Teal deserves to have his name on the title page with Jansson's: he has worked the true translator's miracle."

The New Yorker:

• Louis Menand on Koestler by Michael Scammell: "Scammell would therefore be entirely justified if he felt (a) proud and (b) exhausted after completing his biographical task, which has taken him, he says, to fourteen countries on three continents over a span of twenty years.... Just getting the file cards in order would have challenged Hercules, if Hercules had been literate. Other reviewers may second-guess Scammell’s take on, say, Zionist fraternities in interwar Vienna, but not this one. 'Koestler' seems a prodigy of research, in many languages, and a scrupulous piece of fair-minded advocacy."

The San Francisco Panorama (aka, McSweeney's 33--more on this later. Not available online.):

• Anthony Doerr on Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow: "In his ravishing new novel Homer & Langley, Doctorow reanimates the Collyer brothers from the inside, and in the process manages to invest them with a piteous and searing dignity.... I found it impossible to read Homer & Langley and not think of the internet, its own steady accumulation of ephemera. In Doctorow's sentences we watch the Collyers' labyrinth grow huge and unruly, we watch its corridors shrink to nothingness, and eventually we watch it smother its inhabitants. Are we Americans not caught up in towering, treacherous labyrinths of our own consumption?"
• Katie Crouch on the out-of-print August Is a Wicked Month by Edna O'Brien: "I wince as I bring up the term ['chick-lit'], limp as it is from flogging. Still, it's worth mentioning, I think, if only to point out what a shame it would have been if O'Brien had turned her Herculean abilities away from feminine desires. Without great fiction like this, how are girls supposed to learn that being a free woman often requires walking the line between the disgusting and the glorious? That sometimes when you go to the blow-your-mind party, you sleep with the ugly old guy, and that's okay."

--Tom