Category: american-literature

Dispatches from the Abyss I
Reading Infinite Jest Despite my admiration for David Foster Wallace as a writer, I figured I would never read Infinite Jest. I’d read collections of his stories and essays, and didn’t think I could take his intensity at such length (1079 pp. in my paperback). I’m a ploddingly slow reader, and figured a book like that ...
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The Burning Building
The End of the Tour A film by James Ponsoldt I’ve always felt two ways about David Foster Wallace. Like Jonathan Lethem—whom I’ve been reading lately—he’s a major writer from a generation younger than mine. A few years ago I met a young writer who was wildly enthusiastic about Wallace, so I read a couple of ...
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White Like Me
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Vintage. 509 pp. $14.95 In reviewing the fourth of the Jonathan Lethem novels that I’ve read in the past couple of months, I’m thinking two things. I’m somehow glad I waited to read this one last. It feels like a culmination, the most deeply personal work in Lethem’s oeuvre, ...
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Not Much of a Father Either
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. Vintage. 311pp. $13.95 I’m asking myself the question critics always ask when a mainstream writer publishes a thriller: does Motherless Brooklyn succeed as a mystery? It has one of the mystery features that I think of as amateurish, a substantial chapter at the end to tie up all the loose ends, ...
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Things Are Not as They Seem, Nor Are They Otherwise
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem. Doubleday. 467 pp. $34.00 Chronic City is a book about all those little New York people who live in the city but you don’t know what they do. You see them having coffee and a Danish at a diner at 3:00 in the afternoon (or the morning for that matter); you ...
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They Beg to Differ
Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem. Doubleday. 366 pp. $27.95. Jonathan Lethem is the official novelist of my son’s neighborhood in Brooklyn. Now known as Boerum Hill, it was North Gowanus when Lethem grew up there, and is the setting for the first of his books that I read, a wonderful novel called Motherless Brooklyn. Lethem, like ...
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The Real Fifty Shades of Gray
Loving Day by Mat Johnson. Spiegel & Grau. 287 pp $26.00 The issue of race is so fraught these days that I’m almost afraid to write about it. I am afraid to write about it. Anything I say will offend somebody. Of course, there’s something liberating about that. I know I can’t do it right, so ...
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Lost Souls
Home by Marilynne Robinson. Picador. 325pp. $14.00 I have now read all three novels of what I suppose might be called the Gilead trilogy, Gilead itself, Home, and Lila. I unfortunately read them out of order, Lila first. I also read them when I was moving out of a tiny apartment and back into our renovated ...
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Beer Sodden Part II (Professional Class): The Mystery of Charles Bukowski
Run with the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader by Charles Bukowski. HarperPerennial. 512 pp. $16.99. In the midst of making my way through the novels of Marilynne Robinson, heavy with the taint of Midwestern Protestantism (I enjoyed those books, I really did. Sometimes I wanted to throw them on the floor and stomp on them, but ...
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Gilead
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Picador. 247 pp. $16.00 This novel has an almost irresistible premise for me: an older father writing to his son about the past life that he’ll never have a chance to discuss with him, since he expects to have died by the time then son gets interested. My own father died when ...
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Two Quick Reads
Lila by Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 261pp. $26.00 It’s odd that I even read this book. I’m one of the few people in the world who didn’t like Housekeeping, Robinson’s first novel, and I am a renegade from Protestant Christianity and fiction about it. I haven’t read Robinson’s much beloved books Gilead and Home, ...
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Heaven All the Way
In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen Riverhead Books 250 pp $16.00 Peter Matthiessen’s final novel—it was published right around the time of his death in 2014—concerns a group of people who come together to do a meditation retreat at Auschwitz. Matthiessen’s Zen teacher, Bernie Glassman, conducted such a retreat, perhaps more than one, and I don’t know ...
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Too Much Faux, Too Little Mystery
The Big Seven: A Faux Mystery by Jim Harrison. Grove Press. 341 pp. $26.00. Jim Harrison is my favorite novelist, probably of all time; I’ve read many of his books multiple times and would happily read most of them again. He has a unique style, marvelous powers of observation; he tells a great story and is ...
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The Utopian Theology of Guy Davenport
The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, The Bicycle Rider, Wo es war, woll Ich warden, The Ringdove Sign. Stories by Guy Davenport from The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing. Shoemaker & Hoard. 379 pp. $16.00. When I was a student at Duke University in the late Sixties, we sometimes got together to argue about who ...
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Everyman Wants Every Woman
Maybe not Every Man, but Every Philip Roth Protagonist Everyman by Philp Roth. Vintage. 182 pp. $12.40. **** The novel opens in a startling way, with the unnamed protagonist’s funeral. That opening is apt, because the novel’s focus is an unabashed look at the fact of our mortality, with no blinders on and no consolation. In that sense ...
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Apology to Peter Matthiessen
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen. Modern Library. 912 pp. $18.00. For some years—having read a few things avidly—I avoided the work of Peter Matthiessen. I devoured his book of Zen Journals, Nine-Headed Dragon River, which featured some of the most important figures of American Zen, read it two or three times. I also loved my first ...
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