Category: american-literature
- Hammerin’ HenryThe 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 ...Read more
- Free to Be MeFreedom 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 ...Read more
- The Texture of Every DayJim 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 ...Read more
- Old Warbler Hitting Some False NotesThe 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 ...Read more
- 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 ...Read more
- The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name Just SpokeCarol 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 ...Read more
- Dispatches from the Abyss IVFinal 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 ...Read more
- Dispatches from the Abyss IIIInfinite 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 ...Read more
- Dispatches from the Abyss IIHalfway 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 ...Read more
- Dispatches from the Abyss IReading 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 ...Read more
- The Burning BuildingThe 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 ...Read more
- White Like MeThe 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, ...Read more
- Not Much of a Father EitherMotherless 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, ...Read more
- Things Are Not as They Seem, Nor Are They OtherwiseChronic 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 ...Read more
- They Beg to DifferDissident 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 ...Read more
- The Real Fifty Shades of GrayLoving 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 ...Read more
- Lost SoulsHome 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 ...Read more
- Beer Sodden Part II (Professional Class): The Mystery of Charles BukowskiRun 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 ...Read more
- GileadGilead 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 ...Read more
- Two Quick ReadsLila 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, ...Read more
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All Shook UpWhat's in a Song? IIWriting for his LifeWhat’s in a Song?Mixed Feelings
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (127)American literature (226)art (123)Buddhism (171)Christianity (132)creative process (262)death and dying (144)meditation (125)movies (167)music (42)race (110)religion (196)sex (187)spirituality (174)the art of narrative (266)Uncategorized (21)world literature (23)