Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Susann Cokal on Angelology by Danielle Trussoni: "With 'Angelology' she revisits the subterranean burrows and the concern with paternity and inheritance, twisting them into an elegantly ambitious archival thriller in which knowledge dwells in the secret underground places, labyrinthine libraries and overlooked artifacts that have been hallmarks of the genre from 'The Name of the Rose' and 'Possession' to 'Angels and Demons' and 'The Historian.' 'Angelology' is richly allusive and vividly staged, with widescreen-ready ­visuals, a dewy but adaptable heroine and a dashingly cruel villain."
• Kakutani on The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee: "With 'The Surrendered,' Mr. Lee has written the most ambitious and compelling novel of his already impressive career — a symphonic work that reprises the themes of identity, familial legacies and the imperatives of fate he has addressed in earlier works, but which he grapples with here on a broader, more intricate historical canvas. Though the novel has its flaws, it is a gripping and fiercely imagined work that burrows deep into the dark heart of war, leaving us with a choral portrait of the human capacity for both barbarism and transcendence."
• Lydia Millet on The Ask by Sam Lipsyte: "What makes 'The Ask' work so well is the way it dovetails its characters’ self-loathing with their self-consciousness. For instead of making its characters blind — a strategy upon which much farcical writing since 'Don Quixote' has depended — it gives them 20-20 vision but endows them with perfect impotence. Milo and Don and Maura and their colleagues have more depth than many of the celebrated satirical characters of the past, and Lipsyte’s great accomplishment is to pull this trick off without trumpeting it. His characters are intelligent, even hyper­intelligent — they’re nobody’s fools, clearly — but finally their weakness is near-infinite."
• Laura Miller on The Infinities by John Banville: "If 'The Infinities' has the bones of a novel of ideas, it’s fleshed out and robed as a novel of sensibility and style. Its drapery is velvet and brocade — sumptuous and at times over-heavy. Banville is the sort of writer, drunk on Joyce, who wants to nail down every fleeting moment and sensation with some strenuously unprecedented combination of words: the 'slurred clamor' of a startled heartbeat, the 'humid conspiracy' of a grandmother, the 'lumpy wodge of stirabout' that is cereal left too long in its bowl of milk.... Fortunately, lavish demonstrations of literary virtuosity don’t bog down 'The Infinities,' as they often did with 'The Sea,' the novel that won Banville the Man Booker Prize in 2005. Things, mostly farcical, happen at a regular clip."
• Allison Glock on Tammy Wynette by Jimmy McDonough: "While Wynette the singer warrants extravagant praise — her unique interpretations fortifying every song, taking lyrics that would otherwise seem cheesy and transforming them into little odes of devastation — Wynette the person is a letdown. If you drained Dolly Parton of her swift wit and Loretta Lynn of her winning pluck, you’d get Tammy Wynette, a fairly plain, small-minded gal whose searing ambition and begrudging temperament kept her from any lasting contentment. As McDonough ... describes in striking detail, Wynette’s life may have been a heaping helping of trouble, but it was trouble, with few exceptions, she brought on herself."

Washington Post:

• Donna Rifkind on Lee's The Surrendered: "Serious readers these days are not so unsophisticated as to expect a novel like 'The Surrendered' to provide any sort of uplift -- which it certainly does not -- or to teach them Very Important Lessons about war and its catastrophic effects. They will read this book to share the life that's in it, and they have every right to expect that it will offer life in return. With one full-hearted portrait out of three, Lee has only partially but rather magnificently succeeded."
• Curt Suplee on The Science of Liberty by Timothy Ferris: "It is clear that modern science and modern democracy have evolved in striking parallel over the past 350 years. Can that epochal concurrence really have been a mere coincidence? Absolutely not, says Timothy Ferris in this important, timely and splendidly written book. In fact, he says, history shows exactly the opposite.... 'The Science of Liberty' is a profound delight whether one puts it down convinced or not. Either way, contemporary civilization won't look quite the same."
• Steven Levingston on Courage and Consequence by Karl Rove: "Rove addresses far more of his personal life than one would expect from a man who so effectively controlled information in the White House. That the drama is so touching and convincing leaves one to wonder if the master is again spinning with ease or, more fairly, if he isn't entitled like anyone else to a compassionate ear for his sorrows."
• Kristi Jemtegaard on Bunny Days by Tao Nyeu: "How much trouble can half-a-dozen bunnies get into in only seven short sentences? That's how long it takes to tell the tale of 'Muddy Bunnies,' the first of three effervescent escapades in this jolly romp, and the answer, apparently, is 'lots of trouble.' ... Tao Nyeu's fat fluid lines capture every emotional nuance from freshly washed joy to tail-clutching concern. Her backdrops resemble nothing so much as rumpled quilts, and her palette modulates with each episode. It all adds up to a dreamscape in which every chapter's final sentence seems not only believable but inevitable: 'Everyone is happy.'"

Los Angeles Times:

• Scott Esposito on The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe: "Oe's next novel, 'The Changeling,' has just come out in English, and it offers evidence that the Japanese master has regained his footing.... Chatty and casually indulging in cliché, the narration at times feels closer to the minimalism of Haruki Murakami than to Oe's once ostentatious prose. But 'The Changeling' is not a bland novel -- far from it. It is a richly imagined, complex story full of the oddity, irony and existential angst that have long been at the heart of Oe's writing, only here they are seen more often on the level of plot and structure than on that of sentence and image."
• Dinah Lenney on Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt: "Innocence and beauty restored then, with this gem of a memoir, deceptively simple in its proportions, but in truth: sad, funny, brave and luminous -- see how it catches the light.... Without self-pity or sanctimony, the author reminds us in this rare and generous book that there is no remedy for death. The way to live, he concludes, is 'to value the passing time'; the best we can do is to pay attention and to love each other well."
• Tim Rutten on Rove's Courage and Consequence: "Rove has produced -- that seems the right word -- a curious memoir, clear in its antipathies and in its constrained but obvious affection for the Bush dynasty, particularly George W. The why of those antagonisms and affections is more obscure. Can it really come down to the geographic accident of birth and a feisty little girl down the street? Perhaps -- or, maybe both are fruits of a largely unexamined life lived entirely within the hothouse of contemporary electoral politics."

Globe and Mail:

• Vivian Moreau on Deloume Road by Matthew Hooton: "The woods may be lovely, dark and deep, but in Matthew Hooton’s Deloume Road, the woods are also luminous, melancholy and vicious. Four pre-teen boys – two brothers, one friend and a misfit shunned by the first three – anchor the story set on forested southern Vancouver Island over a few days in what is supposed to be the early 1990s. But there is an otherworldliness to the story that could place it in any decade that includes boys riding bikes with skidding flourishes and adults with their own silencing troubles."

The Guardian:

• David Hare on The End of the Party by Andrew Rawnsley: "No dispassionate reader of Andrew Rawnsley's thumping 800 pages could doubt that we have lived through a strange and fascinating passage of British history which is still obscure. Our fate – through the lie-infested trauma of Iraq, the resultant general loss of faith in democratic politics and the clinching catastrophe in the money markets – has all the while been determined by a couple of the weirdest people ever to attain Downing Street.... This lively Shakespearian account is far too important to be remembered only for the stupid headlines it generated. When the smoke of mock-battle clears, we shall be left with the most thorough, the most enjoyable and the most original book yet written about New Labour."

The New Yorker:

• James Wood on David Shields's Reality Hunger: "His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken: it is always a good time to shred formulas. But the other half of his manifesto, his unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling 'reality' over fiction, is highly problematic. A moment’s reflection might prompt the thought, for example, that Tolstoy (who so often reproduced reality directly from life) is the great 'reality-artist,' and a powerful argument against Shields’s anti-novelistic religious fury." And Lee's The Surrendered: "Shields may be imprecise and overwrought, but I found myself thinking of his useful skepticism while reading Chang-Rae Lee’s new novel, 'The Surrendered'—a book that is commendably ambitious, extremely well written, powerfully moving in places, and, alas, utterly conventional.... Many of these scenes are piercingly evoked, and the novel is so spacious in design and reach, so sensitive to historical catastrophe, that it seems churlish to bridle. Yet in the aggregate this slabbed magnificence seems, if not melodramatic, then certainly stagy, even bookish, a livid libretto, something made for the novel rather than made by it."

The Atlantic:

• Hitchens on Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: "On the origins of this once-world-shaking combat, with its still-vivid acerbity and cruelty, Hilary Mantel has written a historical novel of quite astonishing power.... The means by which Mantel grounds and anchors her action so convincingly in the time she describes, while drawing so easily upon the past and hinting so indirectly at the future, put her in the very first rank of historical novelists.... Wolf Hall is a magnificent service to the language and literature whose early emancipation it depicts and also, in its demystifying of one of history’s wickedest men, a service to the justice that Josephine Tey first demanded in The Daughter of Time."
• Benjamin Schwarz on a reissue of Moving Pictures by the late Budd Schulberg: "It’s a dryly elegiac chronicle of a privileged youth in the California sunshine, when the moguls’ kids attended the public high school, half of Hancock Park was empty lots, and Malibu was really a colony. It’s also a discerning and cold-eyed history of the emergence of the picture industry ... and the flowering of the studio system.... And, not least, it’s a collective portrait of horribly flawed but not unsympathetic people: the monstrous but heroically ambitious Louis B. Mayer; the broken, vulgar, and vulnerable Clara Bow, the It Girl (she was drawn to Budd, a shy and stammering boy, and his memories of that sad sex symbol achingly balance affection and pity); and above all, Budd’s parents.... Moving Pictures is a plangent and honest book, rendered all the more affecting by its modulation and detachment."

--Tom

Comments

[Stephanie Patterson on March 09, 2010 at 04:42 AM]

Tom-
Just a note to thank you for this weekly feature. You ruin my budget on a regular basis.

[Tom on March 09, 2010 at 09:35 AM]

Thanks, Stephanie! Some technical difficulties last night almost squashed this installment, but I know there's a few of you loyalists out there, so I'm glad I sorted it out--even if your wallet is not.