Category: creative-process
- The Whiteness of the WhaleMelville: His World and Work by Andrew Delbanco. Vintage. 415 pp. $18.00. ***** I’m tempted by the first line of The Good Soldier, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” I don’t suppose that’s literally true, but it’s plenty sad. I’m reminded of a moment in James Atlas’ biography of Delmore Schwartz, when Schwartz ...Read more
- Life and WorkThe Life of William Faulkner Volume 2: The Alarming Paradox 1935-1962 by Carl Rollyson. University of Virginia Press. 622 pp. $34.95 I can’t possibly say how much, through the years, I have liked and admired the work of William Faulkner. After Hemingway, he was the first author I read in earnest, going back to when I ...Read more
- Everything Slightly OffNorwood from Charles Portis: Collected Works Library of America. pp. 1-110. $45.00 (unless you get a bargain, as I did) ***** I will now take on the impossible task of saying what is great—or at least addictive—about a Charles Portis novel. Probably the least of his books is the most famous (and most conventional), True Grit. ...Read more
- Blind AmbitionUp With the Sun a novel by Thomas Mallon. Knopf. 337 pp. $28.00. ***** It’s a horrible thing to say, but I like Dick Kallman better when he’s dead. That’s partly because author Thomas Mallon has chosen to tell Kallman’s story from dual viewpoints, one in the first person, told by Dick’s occasional piano-accompanist Matt Liannetto; the ...Read more
- Brilliant Young ManThe Dream Life of Balso Snell and Miss Lonelyhearts from Nathaniel West: Novels and Other Writings. pp. 1-126. Library of America. $40.00. **** Reading the early work of Nathanael West brings to mind David Somerville, a friend I haven’t thought about for fifty years. He lived in the room beside mine in my freshman dorm at ...Read more
- One of a KindNovelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami. Knopf. 224 pp. $22.99. *** Haruki Murakami is a novelist of indescribable genius. I mean that literally: I’ve read five of his novels, including the famous 1Q84, and can’t say what any of them was about (I don’t even know how to verbalize that title). His novels are like ...Read more
- Human ConsciousnessMrs. Dalloway a novel by Virginia Woolf and The Hours a novel by Michael Cunningham. A Combined Edition. Picador. 417 pp. (more or less). $20.00. ***** I haven’t read much Virginia Woolf and don’t have any particular excuse. She was all the rage in the seventies and eighties, when her diaries and letters were coming out. ...Read more
- Portrait of the Artist as a MegalomaniacTar a film by Todd Field. With Cate Blanchett, Noemie Merlat, Nina Hoss. In theaters and available for an arm and a leg on Prime Video. Well worth the money. ***** Tar begins brilliantly, with its protagonist Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett) calming herself for a performance, fidgeting, doing special breathing and relaxation exercises, readying herself in ...Read more
- He Found It. Repeatedly.The Search for the Genuine: Nonfiction, 1970-2015 by Jim Harrison. Grove Press. 339 pp. $28.00. ***** I was mildly amused by this title for Jim Harrison’s nonfiction. Harrison has to be the most genuine writer who ever lived. (What other writer, in the middle of an article about a fishing expedition, would talk about going to ...Read more
- It Ain’t WorkThis Is How I Spend My Holidays My family and I just spent a week in Pittsburgh. The purpose of the visit for me was to see my brother and his wife, to re-engage in the conversation that he and I have been having for the last sixty years or so, taking up where we left ...Read more
- Far Out, ManTripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book from Maxine Hong Kingston Library of America. Viet Thanh Nguyen, editor. pp 479-864. **** This novel, published in 1989, is the quintessential Sixties novel (and seems to be the only novel that Maxine Hong Kingston has published, though she was a famous writer by the time it came out, having published ...Read more
- Inventing the BookThe Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. From Kingston Library of America. Viet Thanh Nguyen, editor. pp. 1-180. ***** China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston. From Kingston. Library of America. Viet Thanh Nguyen, editor. pp. 181-477. ***** I’ve heard this said about other writers but was never sure what it meant: Maxine Hong Kingston writes as if ...Read more
- All VoiceTrain Whistle Guitar from Albert Murray: Collected Novels & Poems Library of America pp. 1-141. The Spyglass Tree from Albert Murray: Collected Novels & Poems Library of America pp. 141-309. Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as told to Albert Murray. Random House. 399 pp. I haven’t posted in some time for a variety of reasons: ...Read more
- Snob AppealThe Elegance of the Hedgehog a novel by Muriel Barbery. Europa Editions. 325 pp. $17.00 *** The Elegance of the Hedgehog concerns two people who, for different reasons, have cut themselves off from humanity. Renee is the concierge of a large wealthy apartment building in Paris, and she looks the part. Dumpy, unkempt, in her early ...Read more
- He Got a D in English at Ole MissThe Life of William Faulkner, Volume One: The Past Is Never Dead 1897-1934. By Carl Rollyson. University of Virginia Press. 476 pp. $34.95 ***1/2 This is the third biography of William Faulkner I’ve read, and I should mention right off the bat—something I don’t remember ever saying before—that I didn’t read every word. I read Joseph ...Read more
- Voices of New YorkLush Life a novel by Richard Price. Picador. 455 pp. $15.00 **** Two guys from the projects in New York, Little Dap and Tristan, have a scheme to make money. They’ll go out late and mug some bar hoppers in the East Village to get cash, go uptown and buy cocaine in quantity, come back, divide ...Read more
- Me EitherI Am Not Sidney Poitier: A Novel By Percival Everett. Graywolf Press. 234 pp. $16.00 **** There is a kind of writer who plans out his books in great detail. No less a literary eminence than P.G. Wodehouse, for instance, spent weeks planning and taking notes and writing outlines in order to write one of his ...Read more
- Portrait of a MarriageHamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell. Vintage. 305 pp. $16.95 ***** I was absolutely stunned by this novel. I’d read that it was about Shakespeare’s son Hamnet dying of the black plague (though no one knows how he died, and Shakespeare never mentioned the plague in all his writing), then a few years ...Read more
- Pass the BottleAll My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers a novel by Larry McMurtry. Liveright. 277pp. $15.95 **** Everybody loves a story about a fuck-up. When you read about a guy who is as likely to spend the night on a couch in the university library as he is in his bed at home (he has a ...Read more
- Two People TalkingDrive My Car a film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With Hidetosha Nishijima, Toko, Miura, Reika Kirishima, Park YuRim. Streaming on HBO Max. ***** Drive My Car is so fundamentally strange a movie that it’s hard to know how to talk about it. The full credits, for instance, don’t appear until forty minutes in. There are still two ...Read more
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You Need to be WritingThe Other SideThe River is Freedom, the Raft ParadiseThe Nothing of GodWe Are Stardust We Are Golden
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (114)American literature (197)art (109)Buddhism (163)Christianity (119)creative process (232)death and dying (128)meditation (118)movies (152)music (36)race (95)religion (180)sex (157)spirituality (167)the art of narrative (238)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)