Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Pete Hamill on Willie Mays by James S. Hirsch: "Hirsch has given us a book as valuable for the young as it is for the old. The young should know that there was once a time when Willie Mays lived among the people who came to the ballpark. That on Harlem summer days he would join the kids playing stickball on St. Nicholas Place in Sugar Hill and hold a broom-handle bat in his large hands, wait for the pink rubber spaldeen to be pitched, and routinely hit it four sewers. The book explains what that sentence means. Above all, the story of Willie Mays reminds us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy."
• Kakutani on So Much for That by Lionel Shriver: "This description might suggest that Ms. Shriver has constructed a didactic or lugubrious novel, willfully topical and laboriously relevant. She hasn’t. In fact, she’s managed to take an idea for a kind of thesis novel and instead create a deeply affecting portrait of two marriages, two families, as cancer in one case and a rare, debilitating childhood condition in the other threaten to push their daily lives past their tipping points."
• Marisa Silver on Model Home by Eric Puchner: "In his first novel, 'Model Home,' Eric Puchner cannily trades on the very characteristics that have come to define a recognizable California 'experience' in order to blast them apart, revealing the uncertainty and terror beneath the glossy postcard version we cling to and dismiss.... The writing is attuned and specific, and it reveals how the family starts falling apart as each member grasps for identity in this new, strange place."
• Roger Boylan on The Abyss of Human Illusion by Gilbert Sorrentino: "'The Abyss of Human Illusion,' with its 50 set pieces labeled by Roman numerals — the first a mere 130 words long, the last approximately 10 times that — is not so much a novel as a random collection of mini-narratives, some of them variations on previous Sorrentino themes, one a homage to Rimbaud, another a nod to Saul Bellow. They are very entertaining. A lesser writer, or one with less humor, would have allowed himself to wallow in contempt and schadenfreude, and those feelings are certainly present, but Sorrentino, like the great Roman satirists in his ancestry — Juvenal, Suetonius, Martial — has an antic disposition that rises above all that and makes us laugh, not cry."

Washington Post:

• Yardley on Country Driving by Peter Hessler: "It's an absolutely terrific book, at once highly entertaining (his accounts of the driver's test and of how the Chinese act on the road are often hilarious) and deeply instructive, as he paints a portrait of a country in the midst of change so widespread and profound that it can scarcely be grasped.... Hessler clearly came to love China in the more than a decade he spent there, and he was endlessly surprised, amused and delighted by it. He has a highly developed taste for oddness, incongruity and just plain weirdness, all of which he describes with not a scintilla of condescension. 'Country Driving' is a wonderful book about China that also happens to be a terrific book about the human race."
• Dirda on Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz: "Certainly, most readers will find 'Pornografia' perturbing, or worse: repulsive, confusing, ugly.... Gombrowicz did believe that 'the primary task of creative literature is to rejuvenate our problems.' That seems absolutely right. Whether you like his work or not, you can still understand why Milan Kundera called him 'one of the great novelists of our century.' 'Pornografia' ... compels its reader to recognize the complexities of human psychology and the darkness at the heart of sexual desire."
• Louis Bayard on Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone by Nadine Cohodas: "If you believe a singer's job is to sound pretty, you will have no use for Nina Simone. And, as this even-handed biography makes clear, she certainly would have had no use for you.... Indeed, what kept me from warming to Nadine Cohodas's sharply observed biography is that it tethered me to such a deeply unpleasant character: a woman who neglects her own daughter and pushes away everyone who does her a good turn, who dwindles into alcoholism and self-exile without losing an ounce of her arrogance."

Los Angeles Times:

• Jedidiah Berry on Horns by Joe Hill: "When considered as a supernatural thriller, 'Horns' is thoroughly enjoyable and often original. But Hill uses Ig's new perspective as a pretext to abandon swift plotting in favor of some lengthy back story.... It's a risky move, to stray so far from the weird and compelling matter of the horns on Ig's head, but the gamble pays off. Here is a richly nuanced story that traces the catastrophes of adult lives gone wrong to the complex and fraught relationships of children."
• Tim Rutten on The Infinities by John Banville: "The Irish novelist and critic is, without question, one of the great living masters of English-language prose. 'The Infinities' -- his 15th novel and first work of literary fiction since 'The Sea,' which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize -- is a dazzling example of that mastery, as well as of the formal daring and slyly erudite humor that make his novels among the most rewarding available to readers today."
• Akiva Gottlieb on The Ask by Sam Lipsyte: "'Home Land' was so compressed, so forceful, so hilarious a distillation of one man's psychic struggle that it felt less like a book than a performative tour de force. In Lipsyte's attempt to broaden the scope of his satire, 'The Ask' feels laborious and unfiltered, harnessing little of the previous novel's narrative momentum."

Globe and Mail:

• Charles Foran on Banville's Infinities: "The Infinities, while not as tonally perfect as The Sea, is a joyful reading experience. The book belabours its conceits and doesn’t quite unify its voices. But Banville, who had been showing quiet signs of creative weariness, if not of a creeping misanthropy, a decade or so ago, appears to have fallen somewhat back in love with the very messiness, even the randomness, he has long observed and once seemed so distressed by.... Fifteen novels into his extraordinary career, John Banville may be once more in love with the art he makes so brilliantly."
• Catherine Bush on Reality Hunger by David Shields: "At its best, Reality Hunger is a suggestive, opinionated dictionary of the moment. Even when Shields plays author-as-arranger, the force of his arguments comes through.... There’s something straw-mannish, though, in his antagonism to fiction. He fails to account for what fiction, at its most thoughtful and exhilarating, can do.... And if hordes of younger writers, Reality Hunger tucked under their arms, start writing as Shields advocates, this new literature will quickly become cliché."

The Guardian:

• James Lasdun on Point Omega by Don DeLillo: "Point Omega is very much about lateness: late life, late empire, hindsight, dread, disappearance. It is also something of an object lesson in the methods of late-phase literature in general, where the high-gloss productions of the imagination in full spate give way to a sparser, stonier art of suggestion and juxtaposition.... It requires careful reading, but as with the man in the gallery, and as with every other aspect of this finely austere novel, the harder you look, the more you see."
• Ruth Scurr on Trespass by Rose Tremain: "The story she weaves between her pair of siblings is taut and full of suspense that no reviewer should dispel.... By Tremain's standards, this is a dark book, almost stripped of the humane optimism that characterised The Road Home, winner of the 2008 Orange Prize. Instead, Trespass evinces a steely grip on corrupt human nature, in all its ugliness and inadequacy. But there is, ultimately, redemption in a final scene that brings to mind the Lord's Prayer: 'And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.'"
• Carmen Callil on The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell: "These other novels and mysteries all demonstrate that, without Wallander, the genius of Henning Mankell is stranded, like some great whale on a beach. Such is the case with The Man From Beijing. It has many of the best Mankell attributes. Admirable in its concern about corruption, colonialism and ­cruelty, it is readable, tense, sometimes horrific and chilling in its precise delineation of brutal crime. But it is full of unbelievable moments and explanations. Mankell, it seems, needs the control imposed by the compelling personality of Wallander, and by the town of Ystad in Skåne."

The New Yorker:

• No full-length review

New York Review of Books:

• Michael Greenberg on The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik: "The Aristotelian view had it that the child wasn't important for himself, but rather for his potential. Gopnik reverses this view. She finds that the child is a full partner, with a different brain than that of the adult, more capacious, with a greater plasticity, and a more highly attuned ability to drink in new information. The child is the auteur, the adult the producer.... The Philosophical Baby is both a scientific and romantic book, a result of Gopnik's charming willingness to imagine herself inside the consciousness of young children."
• Nathaniel Rich on Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff: "The portrait of the man that emerges in Mitchell Zuckoff's oral biography is often at odds with this legend of the aggrieved auteur. Altman, it quickly becomes clear, understood the value of myth. And like all great Hollywood directors, he knew how to exploit it.... To Zuckoff's credit, he doesn't try to resolve the many contradictions surrounding Altman's life and work, but lets them stand awkwardly beside one another for the reader to sort out. Robert Altman was conceived as a memoir, with Zuckoff as ghostwriter, but Altman died in 2006, shortly after signing the contract. The book might be better for it. As a form the oral biography is well suited to a director who loved the sound of noisy conversation."

--Tom