Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Terrence Rafferty on Innocent by Scott Turow: "'Innocent' is a meticulously constructed and superbly paced mystery, full of twists and surprises and the sort of technical arcana on which the genre thrives. The reader will learn quite a lot about toxicology screening, e-mail shredding software and the peculiar properties of MAO-inhibitor antidepressants. The book’s real distinction, though, is its stubborn, powerful undercurrent of regret, mostly felt by Sabich but also, to a lesser degree, by everybody else in this murky world, where even the bright light of the law can’t show people, or their desperate acts, as they truly are."
• Dexter Filkins on War by Sebastian Junger: "Junger has found a novel and interesting lens through which to view the conflict in Afghanistan, and he captures many things a lesser writer might miss. But he pays a price for it.... There’s too much telling, not enough showing. The result is that for all its closeness to the men in the field, 'War' lacks the emotional power it might have had if its characters had been described in more depth. Junger risked his life to be with the men of Battle Company’s Second Platoon, but I would have liked to have heard a little more from them and a little less from Junger himself."
• Eric Weinberger on The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall: "Udall’s novel is not satire. No one and no creed is held up to ridicule. No authorial woundedness, rage or glee is discernible. Ironies aside, the basic insight of this book is an eloquently stated platitude, that love is 'no finite commodity,' that 'to give to one did not necessarily mean to take from another; that the heart in its infinite capacity . . . could open itself to all who would enter, like a house with windows and doors thrown wide, like the heart of God itself.' .... Sometimes, reading 'The Lonely Polygamist,' one wishes the author had a little less respect, but then the book might be that much less charming."
• Bryan Burrough on Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides: "This must be the first book on King that owes less to Taylor Branch than Robert Ludlum. If you accept this approach as valid — and I’m inclined to, if a tad reluctantly — this book will engage you.... Yet I couldn’t entirely escape a feeling of queasiness even in these passages, a vague sense that King’s murder was being exploited for entertainment purposes.... At times, 'Hellhound on His Trail' feels less like a work of serious history than a screenplay, 'The Galt Ultimatum' maybe, starring Matt Damon as a racist anti-Bourne."
• Our own Jeff V. on The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer: "In his tragicomic first novel, 'The Dream of Perpetual Motion,' Dexter Palmer takes elements from Nabokov, Neal Stephenson, Steven Millhauser and 'The Tempest,' tosses them into a retro-futuristic blender and hits “purée.” The result is a singular riff on steampunk — sophisticated, subversive entertainment that never settles for escapism."
• Elyssa East on Finding Chandra by Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz: "Higham and Horwitz have written a remarkably detailed, straight-up exposé of bureaucratic incompetence and human folly, set against the alluring backdrop of Washington.... [T]he book sheds new light on this sex scandal turned murder mystery and media circus. It builds suspense through the careful articulation of the things that the police and the media botched, and through the revelation of how various players in the case had a hand in their own undoing. It’s an impressive feat of reporting and storytelling, full of the kind of plot elements that seem unbelievable and are made all the more engrossing because they’re true."

Washington Post:

• Matthew Dallek on The Promise by Jonathan Alter: "Jonathan Alter has delivered an exceptionally well-written account of President Obama's first year in office. Brimming with fresh and judicious ideas, his book fuses political analysis, subtle insights into the president's mind and policy debates into a fast-paced, crisis-filled story.... While it praises the president as a commanding leader, 'The Promise' isn't a paean to Obama or a blinkered brief on behalf of his administration.... It underscores how much political and policy contradictions have defined the president's early tenure."
• Susan Shreve on Something Red by Jennifer Gilmore: "In this wonderfully funny and compelling story of a splintering suburban family, Gilmore has written an intimate social history of three generations of American Jews.... 'Something Red' is an ambitious novel, though too exhaustive in detail and with an excess of back story that occasionally detracts from the characters. But that is a minor flaw in a warm, intelligent story about the dangers to a family as it tries to hold together in a dark political time."
• Heller McAlpin on The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell: "Irish-born writer Maggie O'Farrell isn't one to hold her reader's hand, but with an urgent tug on your attention she'll pull you into her complex, intricately imagined novels about women who refuse to conform. Her mesmerizing, enormously satisfying fifth novel, 'The hand That First Held Mine,' follows 'The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox' and again involves nastily suppressed family secrets that cause untold damage."
• Dirda on Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham: "While I've known for a long time that William Lindsay Gresham's 'Nightmare Alley' (1946) was an established classic of noir fiction, I was utterly unprepared for its raw, Dostoevskian power. Why isn't this book on reading lists with Nathanael West's 'Miss Lonelyhearts' and Albert Camus' 'The Stranger'? It's not often that a novel leaves a weathered and jaded reviewer like myself utterly flattened, but this one did."
• Charles on The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis: "There's not a smarter, cleverer writer alive than Martin Amis. With that encyclopedic mind and father Kingsley's comic timing, he's a riveting stylist who walks across every sentence as though it were a line stretched taut between wit and erudition. Why, then, has he become such an exasperating novelist?... The setting is exotic, the subject is erotic, but the story is necrotic. For more than 300 pages of ironic dithering about who will have sex with whom, the climax is endlessly delayed like a painful case of literary priapism."

Los Angeles Times:

• Sarah Smith on Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris: "Fairy socks in the living room, an overcrowded vampire guest room in the cellar and a Tabasco-dash of supernatural Southern politics: It's another delicious installment of Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries.... Harris is no mean shakes at romance — Erik may be dead, but he's still hot — and she serves up the paranormal thrills and juggles her enormous cast with ease. But more to the point, she seamlessly blends all this into a lovingly observed portrait of small-town Louisiana."
• David L. Ulin on Almost Dead by Assaf Gavron: "How great is Assaf Gavron's fourth novel, 'Almost Dead'? The answer, I suppose, depends on how comfortable you are with the idea of a black comedy about suicide bombing, which is what this book is. That it's also more than that should go without saying, although in our culture, with its penchant for the sound bite, those textures run the risk of being overlooked. That would be unfortunate, for in 'Almost Dead,' Gavron has pulled off something I would have thought to be impossible: to make us reconsider the very nature of terrorism, what it is and how if affects us, from both a survivor's and a bomber's point-of-view."

The Globe and Mail:

• Lisa Moore on Amis's Pregnant Widow: "Amis suggests ... that many reviews are fuelled by envy. So I will be up front and admit I am deeply envious of how funny The Pregnant Widow is. Amis is very, very funny about sex. I began folding down the pages every time I laughed out loud and now my copy is like a child's pop-up book. The pages fan open.... Here is a romantic comedy in the vein of Jane Austen – whom both Keith and Amis (as he admits in the acknowledgments) admire for her sanity and her great feminism – only Amis is more like pornography."

The Guardian:

• Christopher Tayler on The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell: "The main problem seems to be that Mitchell hasn't decided if he's writing a straight historical novel, a grandly themed fable or a cheerfully trashy romp. Or rather that he's decided to write all three, but without a structure robust and flexible enough to keep the different elements in balance.... All the same, it's hard not to warm to the fluency and copiousness of Mitchell's yarn-spinning. Even – or especially – at his silliest, he keeps the pages turning, effortlessly throwing out each character's back story, setting up cliffhangers and moments of pathos, and, when it's necessary, summoning Abbot Enomoto to kill butterflies by telepathy. Mitchell has been under pressure for a while now to write something tastefully understated, even middle-of-the-road. Sensibly, and perhaps to his credit, he hasn't tried too hard to do so here."
• Justine Jordan on Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker (available on Amazon.co.uk): "Barker's sheer energy is irresistible, while the intelligence that drives this small comic universe is both spikily awkward and sweetly benign. It may be lightweight when set against the expansiveness of Behindlings, the profundity of Darkmans, or the more serious play of Clear, but for inventiveness and verve, for those wild exaggerations that exactly skewer the truth, no one else comes close."
• Alison Flood on Turow's Innocent: "Here we see again the whip-sharp courtroom exchanges that Turow excels at, the twist and counter-twist and the last-minute revelation that turns everything on its head.... The years that have passed since Rusty was last on trial have given prosecutors DNA analysis, instant fingerprint matches, email and computer searches to bring to the table. Turow, himself a partner in a law firm, adds them coolly to his arsenal to produce a novel that cuts through to the heart of the fallibility of the legal system and its practitioners. So yes, it's poor Rusty Sabich, but it's lucky, lucky readers. The prolific Grisham might do it more often, but Turow does it so much better."

The New Yorker:

• Adam Gopnik on books on Jesus: "The current scholarly tone is, judging from the new books, realist but pessimistic. While accepting a historical Jesus, the scholarship also tends to suggest that the search for him is a little like the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes: there were intellectual-minded detectives around, and Conan Doyle had one in mind in the eighteen-eighties, but the really interesting bits—Watson, Irene Adler, Moriarty, and the Reichenbach Falls—were, even if they all had remote real-life sources, shaped by the needs of storytelling, not by traces of truth. Holmes dies because heroes must, and returns from the dead, like Jesus, because the audience demanded it."

The New York Review of Books:

• Ian Buruma on Kissing the Mask by William T. Vollmann: "In the hands of a pure aesthete, this essay on female beauty and the art of Noh would have been rarefied, and probably somewhat hard to stomach. It is Vollmann’s warm-blooded romanticism that makes him so convincing a writer. And he ends his quest accepting that he has come no closer to finding the key to female beauty than he did at the beginning. The teahouses and Noh stages he frequented in Japan are like memories of places as remote as the moon. He accepts that he can never see what the Noh mask and the geisha’s white face conceal. It is better to leave mystery a mystery, and 'click little sake-glasses with whomever in this floating world I can love.'"
• Mark Lilla on the "Tea Party Jacobins": "Quite apart from the movement’s effect on the balance of party power, which should be short-lived, it has given us a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers."

--Tom