New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Walter Kirn on Methland by Nick Reding: "The book, wrought from old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting of a type
that’s disappearing faster than nonfranchised lunch counters on Main
Street, isn’t chiefly a tale of drugs and crime, of dysfunction and
despair, but a recession-era tragedy scaled for an 'Our Town,' Thornton Wilder stage and seemingly based on a script by William S. Burroughs. As Reding painstakingly presents it, the production, distribution and
consumption of methamphetamine is a self-catalyzing catastrophe of
Chernobylish dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives,
get richer and more detached, while the poor get high and, finally,
wasted. In the meanwhile, the traffickers fatten in their dens,
expanding their arsenals and their private armies, some of whose troops
are recruited from the ranks of the pale zombies their business spawns."
- Dominique Browning on The Bolter by Frances Osborne: "Alcohol. Cocaine. Promiscuity. Nymphomania. Wife swapping. Divorce.
Profligate spending. Sixties swingers? Merely rocking in their
cradles. The beautiful and damned of New York’s Roaring Twenties?
Neophytes vomiting on the sidewalks. It was the British colonialists in
1920s Africa, the Happy Valley set, who took partying to mythic
heights, or depths, depending on your perspective. They didn’t stop
until their lives were in smithereens. And the internationally
celebrated and reviled high priestess of this crowd ... was Idina Sackville.... Out of countless trunks and boxes of letters and diaries pours the
unremittingly sad story of a legendary woman, and an unnerving portrait
of upper-crust London and colonial Africa in the early 20th century."
- Garner on Last Journey by Darrell Griffin Sr. and Darrell Griffin Jr.: "Two soldiers in dress greens knocked on the door, came inside to deliver their news and then walked back out. It’s
an all-too-common scene, but it arrives at the beginning of an uncommon
book, one in which a mourning father has scooped up a dead son’s e-mail
messages, blog posts and journal entries and combined them with his own
observations. He’s made something that is, at worst, ungainly, but at
best raw and true and unvarnished and strange, its own kind of outsider
art."
- Maslin on Free by Chris Anderson (and Cheap by Ellen Ruppel Shell): "But after beating the drum for giveaways throughout most of his book,
Mr. Anderson eventually acknowledges that his idea is in fact not
viable. Such are the perils of his sloppily constructed sweeping
argument. No, he doesn’t envision an economy based entirely on
giveaways. 'Free may be the best price, but it can’t be the only one,'
he says. He advocates the balancing of differently priced versions for
different markets, acknowledging that this tricky balance is not easily
achieved." [Not to keep picking on Maslin here, but what she claims as a reluctantly confessed exception to his "sweeping argument" is, in fact, his argument.]
Washington Post:
- Marie Arana on The Ascent of George Washington by John Ferling: "Once in a while a book comes along to remind us that history has no
gods, that the past is less fossil than textbooks suggest and America
more vibrant than a mere list of principles. John Ferling's 'Ascent of
George Washington' is just such a book: a fresh, clear-eyed portrait of
the full-blooded political animal that was George Washington.... It's as if a trusted historian with ample laurels were taking us aside,
speaking to us like adults, letting us in on the very grown-up
information that the father of our country may have been a great man in
very many ways, but was also as cunning and as complicated as any
modern-day politician."
- Charles on A Monster's Notes by Laurie Sheck: "Gorgeously printed by New York's premier publishing house, here is a
baffling 500-page book about Frankenstein's creation that defies
description and shreds any expectations you might have for a novel.... I'm sure somewhere there's a reader smart enough (or dishonest enough)
to enjoy this novel in all its rich allusiveness, but I spent the
entire ordeal lurching along about 50 IQ points behind. Having survived
the encounter, though, I'm eager to brag about it, and even if 'The
Monster's Notes' is nothing you want to experience firsthand, it's a
remarkable creation, a baroque opera of grief, laced with lines of
haunting beauty and profundity."
Los Angeles Times:
- Joanna Smith Rakoff on Heroic Measures by Jill Ciment: "Given that Jill Ciment's 'Heroic Measures' opens in the months
following Sept. 11, it's hardly surprising that one of her geriatric
heroines should find 'the anxiety of being left alone in the apartment
became too much for her . . . particularly as dusk fell and nocturnal
shadows grew menacing, and her sense of loneliness and old age became
inseparable.' What is surprising -- like much in this brave, generous,
nearly perfect novel -- is that this particular character, Dorothy, is
a dachshund. And yet, Ciment manages to pull off this risky,
sentiment-baiting maneuver, an accomplishment previously attained only
by the likes of Tolstoy."
- Wendy Smith on Camus: A Romance by Elizabeth Hawes: "Misjudged first as an avatar of existentialism, then as an out-of-touch
reactionary, he was in fact, Elizabeth Hawes reveals in her intimate
study, a deeply private man propelled into the public arena by the
tides of history and his sense of responsibility.... What Hawes does brilliantly is bring to life Camus the human being: the
charming friend, the seductive womanizer, the lifelong outsider 'from
somewhere else.' ... We get a bit too much of Hawes in her frankly confessional narrative,
but perhaps that's what she needed to do to give us so much of Camus
with such perceptiveness and warmth."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Katie Roiphe on A Vindication of Love by Cristina Nehring: "'With our cult of success,' Nehring writes, 'we have all but
obliterated the memory that in pain lies grandeur.' There is a
romanticism here that could look, depending on where you stand, either
pure or puerile, either bracing or silly, but it is, either way, an
original view, one not generally taken and defended, one most of us
could probably use a little more of. Nehring takes on our complaisance,
our received ideas, our sloppy assumptions about our most important
connections, and for that she deserves our admiration."
- Maslin on Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr.: "What these opening passages also announce is that Mr. Currie is a
startlingly talented writer whose book will pay no heed to ordinary
narrative conventions. His thoughts on cosmic doom somehow take the
form of a joyride. He survives the inevitable, apt comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut
and writes in a tenderly mordant voice of his own. He seems equipped to
succeed at almost anything, in fact, except giving his books decent
titles."
- Garner on Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath: "Tears in the Darkness' is authoritative history. Ten years in the
making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino
and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The
book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many
individual participants. And at this book’s beating emotional heart is
the tale of just one American soldier, a young cowboy and aspiring
artist out of Montana named Ben Steele.... All along you are glued, out of the corner of your eye, to one story,
Ben Steele’s. [SPOILER!] If you aren’t weeping openly by the book’s final scenes,
when he is at last able to call home and let his family know that he is
still alive after more than three years 'missing in action,' during
which time this thin young man lost 50 pounds, then you have a hard
crust of salt around your soul."
- Toni Bentley on The East, the West, and Sex by Richard Bernstein: "Unfortunately, but perhaps of necessity, Bernstein does a certain
amount of apologetic tiptoeing around his subject — with phrases like 'it could be argued' — owing to the extremely politically incorrect
nature of the facts: voracious males and compliant females are his
subjects. The result of this journalistic diplomacy is that his writing
has little edge, while his subject is all edge.... Bernstein has let us know all along that he is a decent sort of fellow,
and just in case we suspect he’s a little too pro-harem he tells us
that 'wisdom, of course, teaches that the greatest sexual pleasure for
a man comes in a healthy monogamous and loving relationship with one
woman.' Whose wisdom is this? Dr. Phil’s? It’s not the wisdom of
anybody who tells the truth."
- Ross Douthat on Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin: "'Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto,' is a
vindication of the aphorism about the perils of wrestling with a pig.
(You get dirty; the pig likes it.) Helprin can be a wonderful
wordsmith, and there are many admirable passages and strong arguments
in this book. But the thread that binds the work together is hectoring,
pompous and enormously tedious." (Want more? There's Lawrence Lessig's "insanely long" evisceration of Digital Barbarism in the HuffPost...)
Washington Post:
- Charles on Border Songs by Jim Lynch: "The story unfolds as a series of brief, absorbing episodes that involve
a rich ensemble cast. Tender, sad and leavened with wit, 'Border Songs'
reads like something written by a more efficient Richard Russo.... In a sense, Lynch has written an anti-thriller thriller, not just a
liberal critique of the war on terror but also a moving, optimistic
rebuttal of our paranoia that encourages us to imagine, with Brandon,
the possibility of flying over everything that divides us."
- Christopher Shea on The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton and Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford: "For those who don't know de Botton's books, the author of the bestselling 'Architecture of Happiness'
is a writer of long, elegant sentences and Anglo wit. Forever flirting
with preciousness, he is rescued from it 87 percent of the time by his
intelligence. He is not a reporter (though he reports) so much as a
marvelous muser. Yet Crawford's is the better, if lumpier, text. It's
the one that may upend your preconceptions about labor and, just maybe,
cause you to rethink your career (or how you spend your weekends)."
Los Angeles Times:
- Laurie Stone on The Essays of Leonard Michaels: "Reading this collection feels less like an encounter with a book whose
positions have been carved and sanded than a conversation with a guy in
a cafeteria, his hands waving to catch an image, pieces of Danish
flying from his fast mouth.... His love of maybe makes his essays works of art rather than
polemics. It makes him a comedian and a theorist of comedy -- the form
most attuned to limits rather than to transcendence."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Leah Hager Cohen, with one of the biggest (and most convincing) raves I've read this year, on A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert: "Her writing wears both its intelligence and its ideology lightly. No
manifesto, this is a gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work
of art.... Now I must throw up my hands in despair: I’m running out of space, and
the only thing I’ve addressed in a modicum of detail is the first
chapter — a mere dozen pages! The trouble is that each chapter is like
a slice of exquisite cake. But the reviewer’s predicament is the
reader’s pleasure. I found myself going back time and again to reread
whole paragraphs, not because they’d been obscure, but in the way one
might press a finger to the crumbs littering an otherwise cleaned
plate: out of a desire to savor every morsel."
- Kathryn Harrison on Byron in Love by Edna O'Brien: "Thank the gods of literature that George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born
in 1788, well out of the reach of psychopharmacology. 'Byron in Love,'
the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien’s compact and mischievously complicit
biography of the great Romantic poet and enfant terrible,
skates over its subject’s literary career to showcase the dissolute
behavior Byron’s critics decried as that of a 'second Caligula.'
Arguably, Caligula was the more moderate soul."
- Christopher Hitchens on Bite the Hand That Feeds You by Henry Fairlie: "The word 'raffish' might have been coined for him.... Both pushed and pulled across the Atlantic (he was captivated by the
spaciousness and generosity of America on his first visit in 1965 and
also needed a refuge from libel suits, jealous husbands and maddened
creditors back home), he began to produce the reflections and polemics,
many of them first published in The New Republic, that are the meat of
this new volume. Written in (almost) unfailingly superb English, they
retain their appeal mostly because they display a sort of romantic
Toryism and traditionalism, with its guarded attitude toward commerce
and capitalism, and yet contain a celebration of American individualism."
Washington Post:
- Daniel Mallory on Darling Jim by Christian Moerk: "And so Niall sinks into his chair, sure 'he wouldn't move until he'd reach the last page.' Neither will the reader of 'Darling Jim,' the spellbinding new novel
from Danish-born, Brooklyn-based Christian Moerk. Aglow with fairy-tale
inflections, this hypnotic, neo-Gothic suspense story unfolds like a
hothouse bloom, lush and pungent; it's a sprig of nightshade, all
petals and poison. And it heralds the arrival of an astonishingly
gifted storyteller."
- Charles on The Scenic Route by Binnie Kirshenbaum: "The hard-to-believe pleasure of this novel depends entirely upon the
wit and poignancy of Sylvia's digressive patter -- a Jewish woman's
version of Colson Whitehead's recent 'Sag Harbor.'
Her quirky, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic stories flow one after
another, anecdotes nested in anecdotes, interrupted by asides and
parenthetical observations, and punctuated by historical footnotes
about Shalimar perfume, Raisinets or martinis.
I can't imagine what Kirshenbaum told people who asked, 'So, what's
your novel about?' and yet it's continually engaging, the illusion of
artlessness that only the disciplined artist can carry off."
Los Angeles Times:
- Paula L. Woods on Black Water Rising by Attica Locke: "'Black Water Rising' is a near-perfect
balance of trenchant social commentary, rich characterizations and an
action-oriented plot that, after it kicks in, moves rapidly toward some
explosive revelations well-suited to the growth-crazed Houston that
Locke so accurately evokes. Maybe it's her screenwriting chops (Locke
has written scripts for several studios and is currently working on an
HBO miniseries) on display, but I couldn't help seeing Locke's taut
scenes of campus dissent, union showdowns and Houston politics spooling
out across a screen, keeping me awake long past bedtime. But it's Jay
Porter, a bruised and broken former radical reaching for redemption,
who makes the most lasting impression in 'Black Water Rising' and marks
Attica Locke as a writer wise beyond her years."
- Ed Park's notes on A Monster's Notes by Laurie Sheck: "I started this review before finishing the book, in the form of notes.
I didn't know I was writing the review yet. I have another file just as
long. Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent." [His notes weren't really revelatory for me--what do you think?]
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Paul Berman on Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Gerald Martin: "García Márquez’s readers sometimes imagine that supernatural events and
folk beliefs in his novels express an all-purpose spirit of
primitivist rebellion, suitable for adaptation by progressive-minded
writers in every region of the formerly colonized world.... But I think
that, on the contrary, magical events and folk beliefs in the writings
of García Márquez show how powerfully the [Spanish] Golden Age has lingered in
memory. Instead of a postcolonial literary rebellion against Western
imperialism, here is a late-blooming flower of the Spanish high
baroque. Gongorism disguised as primitivism. And, being a proper son of
Darío, García Márquez has gone on to embrace in his mad spirit the
glories of Spanish rhetoric at its most extreme."
- T.C. Boyle on My Father's Tears by John Updike: "Here lies both the triumph and the limitation of these stories: the
obsessive recollection of detail for its own sake.....
Among all the writers of our time, he was the most gifted in
illuminating the phenomenological world. But in these stories, like
David Kern at his reunion, he presents details in a testimonial way, as
a feat of recollection, and sometimes — as in 'Kinderszenen' and 'The
Guardians,' which both present a young child’s perspective on Updike’s
familiar world — the details tend to overwhelm the artistry of the
stories themselves."
- Garner on Arthur Miller by Christopher Bigsby: "The book moves inexorably toward Monroe’s appearance; her magnetism
sucks everything rapidly toward it. Miller’s long life (1915-2005) can
be cleaved neatly into B.M. and A.M. — before Marilyn and after.... Suddenly, there is the U.S.S. Monroe on the horizon, and it’s all
narrative hands on deck. She capsizes this book the way she capsized,
for a while, Miller’s life. We are, like him, happily pulled under.
It’s good theater."
- Francis Fukuyama on Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford: "'Shop Class as Soulcraft' is a beautiful little book about human
excellence and the way it is undervalued in contemporary America.... The fact of the
matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge,
come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of
material objects — loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or
backing a semi rig into a loading dock. All these activities, if done
well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about
yourself, and your own limitations. They can’t be learned simply by
following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge
that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty
and failure. In this world, self-esteem cannot be faked: if you can’t
get the valve cover off the engine, the customer won’t pay you."
- Douglas Wolk on You'll Never Know: Book 1 by C. Tyler: "‘You’ll Never Know’ unfolds like a rambling reminiscence, except
without the boring parts. It skitters around in time, every observation
setting off another memory or meditation or visual flourish. Tyler’s
artwork flutters between representation, fantasy and symbolism,
sometimes even in the same panel, but her stylistic virtuosity is a
steadfast guide through her chronology’s loops and pivots."
Washington Post:
- Charles on The Signal by Ron Carlson: "The latest addition to this burgeoning category of high-quality macho
novellas comes from Ron Carlson, who writes like Hemingway without the
misogyny and self-parody. If there's a smart man in your life who might
still be tempted into the pleasures of contemporary literary fiction, 'The Signal' could be just the gateway drug you're after. (Father's Day
is June 21, and let's face it: Dad's not going to get through Bolano's '2666' no matter what you tell him.) ... Carlson never drops an extra word or a false phrase, even as 'The
Signal' accelerates like an avalanche, suspicion rolling into fear and
then roaring down with a conclusion that shakes the ground. If men
can't be brought back to fiction by books as fine as this one, it's
their own damn fault."
- Wendy Smith on The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman: "It's a rare year that doesn't bring a novel from Alice Hoffman, and
those who follow this maddeningly uneven writer have learned to cast a
wary eye on each new offering. Will it be Good Alice, poser of
uncomfortable moral dilemmas and marvelously rich portraitist of family
life ('Blue Diary,' 'Skylight Confessions')? Or will it be Bad Alice,
blatantly careless plotter and outrageous overdoer of the
magic-beneath-the-surface-of-our-lives shtick ('The Probable Future,' 'The Third Angel')? 'The Story Sisters,' actually, is In-Between Alice: excessive and
over-determined but ultimately so moving that it overwhelms these
faults."
Los Angeles Times:
- Deborah Vankin on The American Painter Emma Dial by Samantha Peale: "'The American Painter Emma Dial' is a more than impressive debut, with
a complicated, vulnerable central character who's courageously living
out the universal creative struggle. These are rich, ambitious ideas
that Peale takes on -- questions of art and identity, commitment versus
personal sacrifice, the precarious and charged student-mentor
relationship, sexism in the art world, boundary issues of all stripes;
she deep-dives into all this, yet her novel never feels heady or
forced. Instead, it's a graceful personal journey, an intimate snapshot
of a young woman at a seminal point in her life, on the brink of either
discovering her true self or becoming unhinged."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Liesl Schillinger on When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen: "It’s with an odd sensation of unexpected, wakening connection that you
understand, as you read 'When I Forgot,' a first novel by the Finnish
journalist and filmmaker Elina Hirvonen, that 9/11 'happened' in
Finland too.... In 'Mrs. Dalloway' ... Woolf embarked on a great experiment, showing how a
lifetime may be contained and revealed in small, seemingly
inconsequential details. Hirvonen repeats this experiment, differently
yet deftly, and Douglas Robinson’s translation is so smooth that, but
for the foreign names, one could forget the book was not originally
written in English. The novel’s quiet clockwork encompasses a long,
reflective 'moment in April,' a single day in Helsinki unlike yet akin
to Woolf’s 'life; London; this moment of June.'”
- Maslin on Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard: "Ordinarily the writer who turns to his own pages for inspiration risks
looking lazy. But Mr. Leonard’s crime stories are packed with players
who deserve curtain calls. And there’s nothing remotely wheezy about
his way of throwing together Foley, Cundo and Dawn (as they’re known in 'Road Dogs'). Foley has the brains, Cundo the machismo and Dawn the
shamelessness to make this one of Mr. Leonard’s most enjoyably sneaky
stories."
- Kakutani on American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America's Pastime by Teri Thompson, Nathaniel Vinton, Michael O'Keeffe, and Christian Red: "By focusing on Clemens and the people around him, the authors have
turned the sprawling story of steroid-use into a sleek narrative that
reads like an investigative thriller, peopled by a Dickensian cast of
characters, from big-name ball players and their high-powered lawyers
to small time bodybuilders and gym owners, from federal investigators
and members of Congress to denizens of 'the violent criminal underworld
of muscle-building drug distribution.'"
- David Means on Nobody Move by Denis Johnson: "To give much more of the plot away would be to betray this hugely
enjoyable, fast-moving novel.... One senses that
Johnson took great pleasure in writing on a deadline, keeping the story
tight to the bone, honing his sentences down to the same kind of
utilitarian purity he demonstrated in 'Tree of Smoke.' ... If 'Tree of Smoke' — intricately plotted, embracing the entire Vietnam
era and bringing it up alongside the war in Iraq — was a huge piece of
work, a 'Guernica' of sorts, then 'Nobody Move' is a Warhol soup can, a
flinty, bright piece of pop art meant to be instantly understood and
enjoyed."
Washington Post:
- Charles on The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Rief Larsen: "I fell in love with 'The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet' on the first
page, and so did the New York publishers who pushed the bids for this
enchantingly illustrated novel toward $1 million.... Beware the bookstore display: If you pick this novel up and
page through it, you'll be taking it home.... There's a problem, though, when you actually sit down to read it
through: 'The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet' loses its way about
halfway to Washington.... I can't remember the last
time my initial affection for a novel was so betrayed by its
conclusion. It's maddening that somebody didn't help this young author
polish 'The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet' into the genre-breaking
classic it could have been."
- Benjamin Carter Hett on The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans: "Evans is clearly up on all the latest research on Nazi Germany, no
mean achievement in a field in which tens of thousands of books have
been published. But his goal is to appeal to the general reader rather
than the professional historian, and he succeeds brilliantly, producing
a book that is beautifully written and, despite its length and grim
subject matter, easily digestible, even gripping....This is history in the grand style, the kind of large-scale
narrative that few historians dare to write these days. It is difficult
to imagine how it could be improved upon, let alone surpassed."
Los Angeles Times:
- Sarah Weinman on The Way Home by George Pelecanos: "Now, in his early 50s, it is only right that Pelecanos is thick in his
middle period. The prose isn't as loose but the edges aren't as sharp.
The musical soundtrack plays, but it blends better into the scene.
Urban D.C. remains the setting, but with history dispensed with, social
concerns are contemporary and do not resort to a younger man's
righteous bombast.... 'The Way Home' remains true to its titular purpose; as a result, the
structure is perhaps less weighted toward a classic narrative arc and
more toward the journey itself. As with his last two novels, Pelecanos
demonstrates that redemption, if it comes at all, is hard-won."
- Susan Carpenter on A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi: "The clean, orderly style is the work of a fully realized artist who's
spent 60 years honing his craft, and 'A Drifting Life' represents the 'dramatic pictures' (gekiga) for which Tatsumi is best known --
emotional and realistic renderings of a hard-knock life told from an
underdog perspective. Rather than jokes and action, the emphasis is on
character and narrative.... 'A Drifting Life' is a beautiful portrait of a dark time during which
Tatsumi's artistic experimentation was clearly a guiding light for a
fledgling movement. Even at 800-plus pages, it seems to end too soon,
stopping in 1960. One can only hope that Tatsumi pens the rest of his
illustrious life story."
- Jon Fasman on Wanting by Richard Flanagan: "Richard Flanagan has written an exquisite, profoundly moving,
intricately structured meditation about the desire for human connection
in its many forms -- that commingling of compassion, curiosity, care,
lust, attraction, intrigue, selfishness and selflessness that is
clumsily grouped under that most perilous of all abstract nouns: love."
Continue reading "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."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Review editor Sam Tanenhaus on How It Ended by Jay McInerney: "'How It Ended' reminds us how impressively broad McInerney’s scope has
been and how confidently he has ranged across wide swaths of our
national experience. It reminds us too that for all the many literary
influences he has absorbed, McInerney’s contribution — and it is a
major one — is to have revitalized the Irish Catholic expiatory
tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara, with its emphasis not only on guilt but also on shame:
on sins committed and never quite expunged, always in open view of the
sorrowing punitive clan."
- Maslin on Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead: "'Sag Harbor' isn’t about much more than the hilariously trifling
intricacies of this self-discovery process. Credit Mr. Whitehead with
this: He captures the fireflies of teenage summertime in a jar without
pretending to have some larger purpose. 'Sag Harbor' is not a book
about that special summer when everything changed, when this boy became
a man, when the scales fell from his eyes about adult life, or even
about when he experienced the balmy joys of first love. Its plot is so
evanescent that the removal of Benji’s braces counts as a milestone."
- Mark Ford on Our Savage Art by William Logan: "The most obvious advantage of Logan’s Diogenes-like approach to much of
the contemporary poetry he writes about is that it transforms the
normally rather stultifying genre of the poetry review into something
more akin to a blood sport. Logan’s hounding and slashing, parodying
and chastising, make for what editors call good copy. Occasionally he
exempts a passage, or a complete particular poem, from his mocking
strictures, but in general one learns to expect — and even, in a
slightly shameful way, like a member of the crowd at a Roman circus, to
demand — the final turning of the emperor’s thumb down, and the
consigning of another poet to oblivion."
- Joan Silber on Once the Shore by Paul Yoon: "The beauty of these stories is precisely in their reserve: they are
mild and stark at the same time. By mild I do not mean cozy. Harshness
is always close at hand here, and no one is surprised by betrayals,
thefts, brutal mistakes of war. Nor do the stories entirely lack acts
of will. A couple whose son has probably been killed in a bombing test
resolutely set off at sea to search for him. A child whose family farm
has been sold tells the buyer’s wife to go home. But even these
resolves feel not altogether voluntary. Most of the collection’s
characters move through events with a resignation or forbearance rare
in contemporary fiction. 'Once the Shore' is the work of a large and
quiet talent."
Washington Post:
- Dirda on Endpoint and Other Poems by John Updike: "In their last years, many artists cast aside all their usual
flourishes, dismiss the circus animals and simply set down, as directly
as possible, the realities and inevitabilities of old age. So John
Updike has done in this moving book of poems."
- Yardley on The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez: "I quote that passage at length because I like it a great deal and
because everything it says is true. Latin America is simultaneously
desperate and hypnotic, and Henríquez gets this aspect of it exactly
right, not only in this passage but elsewhere in the novel as Mira
gradually comes to love this place that is, in part, her own. For all
its implausibility, 'The World in Half' is engaging and touching."
Los Angeles Times:
- Taylor Antrim on Whitehead's Sag Harbor: "You can't help but admire Whitehead's writerly gifts, but there's
something idling and indolent about his method here. 'Sag Harbor'
reminded me, not in a good way, of 'The Colossus of New York,'
Whitehead's book-length love letter to his home city: stylistically
virtuosic but stubbornly hard to finish. It's poor form to speculate, but I'll go ahead: Whitehead seems uneasy
with the confessional demands of autobiography. For that's surely what
this is -- memoir masquerading as a novel.... Perhaps novels don't require plots, but it seems to me they do need
something: a sense of excavation, some deeper fathom of character
attained. For all its amusements and felicities of language, 'Sag
Harbor' never dives very far below the surface. Emotionally, it's a
low-stakes affair, which is another way of saying it's a little too
much like summer for its own good."
- Susan Salter Reynolds on Follow Me by Joanna Scott: "Joanna Scott has one of those imaginations that recasts details in her
own image.... You feel the strong powers of
observation and imagination at work in her writing, crashing and
working against each other: This is true, this can't be true; how could
that happen? Of course that's what happened. You feel forces bigger
than us swirling around her plots, especially this one, but you don't
know what to call them. You think it must be her story, the story of
her ancestors, but then you remember she's an accomplished fiction
writer. She knows how to ride and break a good, feisty story. After
it's broken, and the pieces lay all around, you realize that you could
not, in a million years, ever reconstruct it, even though, in so many
ways, it has become your story too."
- Ben Ehrenreich on News from the Empire by Fernando del Paso: "'What happens,' writes the Mexican novelist Fernando del Paso, 'when an
author can't escape history? . . . what can you do . . . when you don't
want to avoid history, but do want to achieve poetry?' ... Del Paso's answer consists of the page on which those
words appear and all the many pages of 'News From the Empire,' his
variously fascinating, frustrating, hilarious, dull, mesmerizing,
maddening, absurd and tragic novel, which, in its breadth and depth and
massive reach, manages to achieve something of the noise and sweep of
history itself."
Continue reading "Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers" »
