Category: american-literature

Plain Truth
All Aunt Hagar’s Children stories by Edward P. Jones. Harper Perennial. 399 pp. ***** Edward P. Jones, it would seem, can write about anything, and anybody. He published his first book of stories, Lost in the City, in 1992 (otherwise known as half-a-lifetime ago). It was a bit of a late arrival on the literary scene; ...
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Academics as a Blood Sport
Stoner a novel by John Williams. From John Williams: Collected Novels. Daniel Mendelsohn, editor. Library of America. pp. 257-486 **** William Stoner, after growing up on a hardscrabble farm in rural Missouri, has two major epiphanies in his early adulthood. The first occurs when he attends the University of Missouri as an agricultural student, and takes ...
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I’d Call Them Battlefields
The Groves of Academe a novel by Mary McCarthy. From Mary McCarthy Novels & Stories 1942-1963. Library of America. pp. 289-508. ***** I’ve always loved novels of academic life. I love the academy, as bonkers as it often is, and love reading about the odd, distorted presences that inhabit it. I would also say that, in ...
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Drag Queen to Bodhisattva
Street Zen: The Life & Works of Issan Dorsey by David Schneider. Shambhala. 246 pp. ***** I resisted reading this book for a long time. Back in the early nineties, when my wife was in divinity school and we began meditating, she worked one summer at an AIDS hospice in Boston and continued to work with ...
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He Debuted as a Master
Lost in the City stories by Edward P. Jones. Amisted. 243 pp. $15.99. ***** There was a time when I read book reviews the way, as a kid, I used to read the sports pages. At my house we got the Sunday New York Times and Saturday Review, also the New Yorker. It wasn’t as if ...
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The Vanity of Human Wishes
Butcher’s Crossing a novel by John Williams. Library of America. John Williams, Collected Novels. Daniel Mendelsohn, editor. pp. 1-255. ***** There was a moment in Butcher’s Crossing when I was strongly tempted to stop reading. Our protagonist, Will Andrews, had staked a man named Miller to a project that Miller claimed could not fail. Though buffalo ...
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The Alice Munro Conundrum
A Disturbing Truth I regard Alice Munro as an almost unparalleled short story writer. I can’t think of anyone whose stories I admire and enjoy more. A major part of what she writes about is the odd byways of the female psyche, women who think in ways they shouldn’t and go on to wayward behavior. Women ...
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The Critic as Artist
The Company She Keeps and The Oasis from Mary McCarthy Novels & Stories 1942-1963. The Library of America. pp. 1-287 **** In everything I’ve read by Mary McCarthy so far, it seems that a social critic/satirist is in charge and an artist is struggling to be set free. The Company She Keeps, her first book, is ...
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She’s Ours
Runaway stories by Alice Munro. Vintage. 335 pp. $15.95 ***** I first heard of Alice Munro in the early eighties, when I had hooked up with my agent and first editor and they were both enthusiastic fans; my agent, Virginia Barber, was also Munro’s, and my editor, Sherry Huber, was an avid reader who constantly recommended ...
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Master of the Form
Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories by Loren Groff. Hachette Books. 306 pp. ***** Before reading Lauren Groff’s first book of short stories, I saw her as a novelist who had apprenticed on the shorter form. Her first novel was big in various ways, did well both commercially and critically. She followed with two massive, ambitious ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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, ...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Embodied Mystic
This author deeply understands mystical spirituality, true religion, in a way that few people do.
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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.
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