Category: american-literature

Let It Ring
Telephone a novel by Percival Everett. Graywolf Press. 216 pp. **** I had thought of Percival Everett as an offbeat comic novelist who sat down to write a novel with no idea where it was headed (see . I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Even Erasure, though a biting satire, had a comic premise, and the novel ...
Read more
Yes You Can Go Home Again
The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff. Penguin Books. 460 pp. **** The Monsters of Templeton is Lauren Groff’s tribute to her hometown, Cooperstown, New York. Apparently it was founded by the father of James Fenimore Cooper, it’s most famous citizen (but not, at this point, its finest novelist; Groff has far surpassed him), and includes ...
Read more
You Need to be Writing
Crowded by Beauty: The Life and Zen of Poet Philip Whalen by David Schneider. University of California Press. 352 pp. $23.92. ***** Goods Short Stories by David Schneider. Cuke Press 168 pp. $13.00 **** Philip Whalen was what used to be called a Man of Letters, back in the days when there were such people. In fact, ...
Read more
The Other Side
Whereas Huck Finn gives us an idyllic vision of life in 19th century America, James gives us the other side, in all its brutality. It’s a necessary and important corrective.
Read more
The River is Freedom, the Raft Paradise
Twain, on the other hand, wrote a prose that seemed entirely American and utterly his own. It seemed to roll off his pen.
Read more
The Nothing of God
She was scorned, kicked around, physically abused, sexually abused, told that she doesn’t count, that she barely even exists. Somehow it is these very things that give her the resources to undertake this adventure.
Read more
We Are Stardust We Are Golden
This novel isn’t just about the commune. It’s about the whole Sixties dream, and what it did to someone who was raised in it.
Read more
A State of the Union and a State of Mind
This Lauren Groff-type character is the one who interests me most (I’m always trying to get at the person behind the stories, even when she is totally absent). It is her spirit that hovers over this collection.
Read more
Embodied Mystic
This author deeply understands mystical spirituality, true religion, in a way that few people do.
Read more
What Is Sex?
Lauren Groff seems to be gently suggesting that sex is a human energy that doesn’t necessarily interfere with a religious life. They can co-exist. They should co-exist.
Read more
Portrait of Genius
This is the most compulsively readable book I’ve encountered in many a moon. I couldn’t wait to pick it up every night.
Read more
Book to Movie
Director Cord Johnson is a huge Percival Everett fan, and American Fiction seems perfectly to capture the spirit of Erasure. I was astounded.
Read more
Slippery Slope
Crook Manifesto a novel by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday. 319 pp. ***** There is the pleasure of reading a great crime writer, someone like Elmore Leonard at his best, who makes any other storyteller I know look like a rank amateur. There is the somewhat different pleasure of reading a great contemorary novelist, like Jonathan Franzen or ...
Read more
Pandemic Without Panic
The Vulnerables a novel by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 242 pp. **** Early reviewers of Sigrid Nunez’ The Vulnerables are linking it to her most recent novels (The Friend, which won a National Book Award, and What Are You Going Through, which was equally deserving of that award), seeing the three books as a trilogy. The ...
Read more
The Story of Her Time
Machine Dreams a novel by Jayne Anne Phillips. Vintage. 331 pp. $16.00. ***** This is a masterpiece of American fiction. I’ve been asking myself why I didn’t read it years ago, and I think there are two reasons. Jayne Anne Phillips was getting her start in the literary world at the same time I was, in ...
Read more
Who Can You Trust?
Out on the Rim a novel by Ross Thomas. Thomas Dunne Books. St. Martin’s Minotaur. 340 pp. ***1/2 I used to think I’d like to be a writer like Ross Thomas. He was an accomplished stylist, had an insider’s knowledge of the world of international intrigue and crime (I’m not sure where he got that), a ...
Read more
Master of Crime
Chinaman’s Chance by Ross Thomas. Mysterious Press. 334 pp. ***** It’s been years since I’ve read a mystery/crime novel, except for the work of Elmore Leonard, which I reread avidly when it came out in the Library of America (no one told a story better than Elmore Leonard. No one). Some years ago I read such ...
Read more
The Spirit Behind the Story
The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother by James McBride. Riverhead Books. 295 pp. ***** I was so overwhelmed by The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store that I decided to reread James McBride’s memoir of life with his mother, The Color of Water. I knew his own situation influenced the novel, ...
Read more
Utopian Realist
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store a novel by James McBride. Riverhead Books. 385 pp. ***** James McBride has written award-winning and bestselling novels in the past—The Good Lord Bird and Deacon King Kong—also a highly acclaimed memoir, The Color of Water, but The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store—is a different kind of book altogether, beyond ...
Read more
And Coming Out the Other Side
Passing Through Veils a novel of dread by John Harrison. WordFire Press. 229 pp. ***** Psychologist B.F. Skinner said there are three things human beings fear: death, their own minds, and other people. That seems to cover the ground. But I sometimes think our mind is what we’re most afraid of. Meditation teacher Larry Rosenberg once ...
Read more

...