Category: american-literature

Why Books Are Better Than Movies
The Wife a novel by Meg Wolitzer. Simon and Schuster. 219 pp. $16.00. **** They aren’t always better. The Godfather is a case in point, though it was a better book than it gets credit for. But The Wife is a much better book than movie not ...
Read more
Right Star, Wrong Prize
The Wife a film by Bjorn Runge. With Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Max Irons, Christian Slater. ***1/2 The reason to see this movie is for the performances, especially the one by Glenn Close, but also Max Irons and Christian Slater. Jonathan Pryce plays a nebbish named Joe Castleman and does a creditable job, but the man ...
Read more
You’ve Just Paid the Artist a Wonderful Compliment
Now Go to Hell I wrote recently about Samuel R. Delany’s Dark Reflections, a novel in which Delany seems completely present, but has given himself another life. Instead of being a science fiction writer, Arnold Hawley is a poet. Instead of living in New York and teaching at Temple, he lives in New York and teaches ...
Read more
Full and Starving
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay. Harper Perennial. 306 pp. $16.99. **** I’ll never look at a fat person the same way again. I use the word fat because that’s the word Roxane Gay uses; in fact she insists on it. She doesn’t like the euphemisms for her situation. She tells it like it ...
Read more
Portrait of the Artist as a Befuddled Old Man
Dark Reflections by Samuel R. Delany. Carroll & Graf. 295 pp. $15.95. ***** There’s nobody quite like Samuel R. Delany, and every now and then I have to read one of his books, often one I’ve read before (this is either my third or fourth time with Dark Reflections). He had an early career as a ...
Read more
Stumble He Did
The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha by Stephen T. Asma. HarperOne. 256 pp. $14.99 ***1/2 Talk about your feeble excuses for reading a book: I was getting my computer worked on when I noticed this book on a nearby work desk. I picked it up and flipped through ...
Read more
The Other Side of Addiction
Now What? Reading Sabbath’s Theater has gotten me started on the subject of addiction again. I’ve read books about sex maniacs before, I’ve even written one, but never have I come across a character like Mickey Sabbath, who masturbates on his mistress’ grave, showed up at her house (when he was alive) with an erection already ...
Read more
Addict
Sabbath’s Theater from Novels 1993-1995 by Philip Roth. Library of America. 842 pp. ****1/2 Where does all the bitterness come from? I kept asking myself as I read this—brilliant, in many ways—novel by Philip Roth. I understand that Roth was creating a character, that he was speaking through that character, that Mickey Sabbath is not Philip ...
Read more
Not Quite Persuaded
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer. Riverhead. 456 pp. $28.00 **** When I heard that Meg Wolitzer had written the first #MeToo novel, I figured that either the woman was prescient or just writes very quickly. The Female Persuasion does open with a classic #MeToo moment: the protagonist, Greer Kadetsky, has only just gotten to Ryland ...
Read more
Prison Is When You Can’t Get Out
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner. Scribner. 338 pp. $27.00. ***** A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. Viking. 462 pp. $27.00 **** “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” –Mephistopheles, in Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Rachel Kushner writes at a different level of intensity from the rest of us. She’s one of those ...
Read more
Limits of Memory
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. Modern Library. 298 pp. $17.00. ***** Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. Harper. 264 pp. $27.99. ***1/2 The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout. Bantam. 178 pp. $7.99. **** Austerlitz presents an interesting aesthetic question. It’s told by one man (named Austerlitz) to another, who narrates the novel. I first bought the book because it included ...
Read more
Murder Will Out. And Then Some
The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Vintage. 559 pp. $16.95 **** The first thing to say about The Secret History is that it is a drunk novel. Not since the days of Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Hemingway have I read a book where so much booze is consumed, at such odd hours and so unwisely. I’m not ...
Read more
Evil Is in the Doing
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Scribner. 530 pp. $17.00 ***** All the Light We Cannot See is so unusual a novel that it’s hard to know how to write about it. Compounding my difficulties is the fact that it’s been a couple of weeks since I finished it, but events (mostly basketball ...
Read more
The Deep Blue
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. Scribner. 438 pp. ***1/2 I was wildly enthusiastic about Jennifer Egan’s previous novel, A Visit from the Good Squad. That book was aesthetically stunning, every chapter from a different point of view, a narrative that was wildly distorted in time, a set of characters that only vaguely related to one another ...
Read more
To Nowhere
On the Road from Road Novels 1957-1960 by Jack Kerouac. Edited by Douglas Brinkley. Library of America. 864 pp. It’s an odd feeling to reread On the Road after just reading The Dharma Bums for the first time. In a way it’s the same book all over again, Jack Kerouac on a mad dash around the ...
Read more
Drunken Saint
The Dharma Bums from Road Novels 1957-1960 by Jack Kerouac. Edited by Douglas Brinkley. Library of America. 864 pp. ***1/2 Jack Kerouac is the spiritual father of every whacked-out hippie who ever stumbled his way through the Sixties, head bobbing in mild agreement, mouth perpetually grinning, a beard flowing around his collar. Kerouac himself was a ...
Read more
Choosing Life
The Light That Shines Through Infinity: Zen and the Energy of Life by Dainin Katagiri. Shambhala. 229 pp. $16.95. Jesus’ Son Stories by Denis Johnson. Picador. 133 pp. $15.00 It was unnerving for me to read Denis Johnson’s excellent but disturbing book of stories at the same time I was reading the new book of lectures by ...
Read more
Problem Solved
Tishomingo Blues from Four Later Novels by Elmore Leonard. Library of America. 961 pp. $40.00. No sooner do I complain about a problem in Elmore Leonard’s work—the fact that every novel seemed to feature a monstrous guy who killed people casually and unnecessarily, as if such people don’t need explaining—than it disappeared. Tishomingo Blues includes plenty ...
Read more
My Elmore Leonard Problem
Out of Sight from Four Later Novels by Elmore Leonard. Library of America. 961 pp. $40.00. I’m coming to the end of my Elmore Leonard period. I never thought, when I decided to look into his Detroit novels because my son now lives in Detroit and I’ve gotten to know the place a little, that I ...
Read more
Time is a What?
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Anchor Books. 340 pp. $16.00. ***** I’m aware as a writer that many people I read are more talented than I, but now and then I’m pulled up short by a writer who does something I couldn’t even aspire to. I felt that way about War and ...
Read more

...