Category: american-literature

Gusto and a Sense of Elegance
The Omni-Americans from Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray. The Library of America. 1048 pp. $45.00 The Omni -Americans was at least partly prompted by the Moynihan Report (The Negro Family: The Case For National Action) from 1965, and author Albert Murray states his central thesis in the introduction, “Someone must at least begin to try ...
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Maggie’s Farm
Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan. Simon & Schuster. 293 pp. $16.00 I’ve been fascinated by the reactions to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, which was announced as I was heading to Pittsburgh for my 50th high school reunion. A number of Baby Boomers seemed to regard it as a validation of their whole lives, as if ...
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Not Little Enough
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Anchor Books. 816 pp. $17.00. I began this book with great enthusiasm and sped through the first two hundred pages. Hanya Yanagihara is a wonderfully skilled novelist and pulled me right into the story. But by the last two hundred I was seriously tired of the book, almost dreaded reading. ...
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Who Are Your People?
The Sympathizer a novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Grove Press. 385 pp. $16.00 This novel won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and is a remarkable work of art—I’m stunned at the way this younger novelist projects himself back into this tumultuous time—but I’m more interested in it as a human document than as a ...
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Where the Boys Are
Wo Es War, Soll Ich Werden, the Restored Original Text by Guy Davenport. The Finial Press in Champaign, Illinois. $525.00 Once before on this website I reviewed a book that I was sure none of my readers would ever see, an obscure Buddhist text that had been out of print forever and that I was quite ...
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Train to Nowhere
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday. 306 pp. $26.95 This is one of the most wrenching and difficult books I’ve ever read. It’s a work of art, and its sheer artistry gives pleasure. At the same time, I didn’t look forward to reading it every night. People will say the subject is slavery, or racism, but ...
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The Roaring Fifties
Indignation, a film by James Schamus. With Logan Lerman, Sarah Gadon, Tracy Letts, Linda Emond. Reviewed by David Guy. ****1/2 Indignation is a remarkable movie that completely stunned me and that I can’t recommend too highly. The problem is that it’s taken from a Philip Roth novel—even the title sounds rather Philip Roth—and as I describe ...
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AIDS Comes Home
My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese. Vintage. 432 pp. $16.00. I’m full of admiration for this book, and there’s no single reason. It’s an AIDS memoir, told from the standpoint of the doctor who cared for the patients, and who just happened to be a gifted writer who would later write a bestselling ...
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Doctoring the Story
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. Vintage. 667 pp. $15.95. The one time I formally studied creative writing, in a class with Reynolds Price my freshman year at Duke University, he encouraged us to pay special attention to openings. “It doesn’t have to be ‘Rape!’ screamed the Duchess’ every time,” he said, “but you want to ...
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Hammerin’ Henry
The Master by Colm Toibin. Scribner. 338 pp. $14.00. I bought this book because I saw it in a used bookstore where I had a lot of credit, so it was free. Some months back I started and couldn’t get into it. But my reading buddy Sally Sexton recommended it highly, along with Toibin’s Brooklyn—so I ...
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Free to Be Me
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar Straus Giroux. 562 pp. $28.00 Jonathan Franzen is the novelist I always wanted to be. Like The Corrections, Freedom essentially dissects one dysfunctional family, really just four people—maybe five or six, if you include important friends—and does so at exhaustive length, yet never seems dull, or overly long. Franzen sees so ...
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The Texture of Every Day
Jim Harrison 1937-2016 I’ve been haunted this week by the death of Jim Harrison, whom I’ve described for years as my favorite living writer and whose books I bought as soon as they came out, without reading a review or glancing through them. Only once did he let me down. I’ve wondered specifically if The Ancient ...
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Old Warbler Hitting Some False Notes
The Ancient Minstrel by Jim Harrison. Grove Press. 255 pp. $25.00 I’d like to say I’m Jim Harrison’s greatest fan, though there’s a lot of competition for that spot. I began reading him back in the eighties when my fellow clerks at the local bookstore raved about him. I started with Sundog and went through the ...
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For the Holidays You Can’t Beat Home Sweet Home. Dad’s Demented. Mom’s Nuts.
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Picador. 566pp. $17.00 The Corrections is the ultimate dissection of a dysfunctional family. It’s 566 pages and basically concerns only five people, who are locked in an epic family battle that seems never to end. Chip is the brilliant brother who had a substantial and flourishing career as a professor until ...
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The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name Just Spoke
Carol a film by Todd Haynes Carol is an almost unbelievably stylized, artful film. It isn’t just that the movie is a work of art, or that every scene is a work of art; every shot is a work of art. A shot of Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) riding away in a rain-sprinkled cab is full ...
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Dispatches from the Abyss IV
Final Reflections on Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Back Bay Books. 1079 pp. $18.00. I don’t know how I expected this novel to end, some massive climax where Wallace tied up loose ends and brought it to a satisfactory conclusion, but of course I got no such thing. It ends in an orgy of addictive ...
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Dispatches from the Abyss III
Infinite Jest: The Blessing at the Heart of Addiction Various threads of the novel come together when Hal Incandenza—whom I’ve been thinking of as the protagonist, despite the massive cast, and the many scenes where he isn’t present—tries to go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, and winds up instead at a Men’s group, where men are holding ...
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Dispatches from the Abyss II
Halfway through Infinite Jest I’m beginning to think I understand the title, which hasn’t appeared in the first 500 pages of text. But in addition to text, this novel has footnotes (footnotes! In a novel?), or more accurately endnotes, in an even smaller font than the already small font of the text; in addition to 981 ...
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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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