Category: creative-process
- Colette Before ColetteColette a film by Wash Westmoreland. With Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Fiona Shaw, Denise Gough. ***1/2 Colette was a great hero of mine when I was young, because she wrote both fiction and nonfiction, she always seemed to write about herself, she wrote about transgressive subjects, and she seemed to discover herself through writing. She made ...Read more
- Go For the MusicA Star Is Born a film by Bradley Cooper. With Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliott, Andrew Dice Clay, Dave Chappelle. **** The first thing I should say is that—somewhat to my surprise—I liked this movie from beginning to end. Bradley Cooper’s Jack was a warm and compelling character; the entire cast was great, including various ...Read more
- Saul Learning to BellowThe Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. Penguin Classics. 586 pp. $17.00 ****1/2 When I was a teenager in Pittsburgh in the Sixties, I made up my mind that I wanted to be a writer (without telling anybody, in case I failed), and set about trying to educate myself. The writers we studied at school ...Read more
- Why Books Are Better Than MoviesThe 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 PrizeThe 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
- How Then Should We Live?The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund De Waal. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 418 pp. $40.00 (the illustrated edition) **** Crazy Rich Asians a film by Jon M. Chu. With Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, Awkwafina. **** Scott Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from you and me.” Ernest Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.” Fitzgerald ...Read more
- Ditching the DipshitJuliet, Naked a film by Jesse Peretz. With Rose Byrne, Chris O’Dowd, Ethan Hawke, Azhy Robertson. ****1/2 There are all kinds of nutcase people on the Internet, pursuing this or that weird obsession (like Buddhism, Books, Movies, Life). Now and then I’ve stumbled across someone whose Internet presence resembles a weird rabbit hole. Duncan (Chris O’Dowd) ...Read more
- You’ve Just Paid the Artist a Wonderful ComplimentNow 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 StarvingHunger: 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 ManDark 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
- Most Terrifying Movie Title EverEighth Grade a film by Bo Burnham. With Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Emily Robinson, Jake Ryan. ***** By some weird coincidence, in the past two weeks I have watched two movies about single fathers raising thirteen-year-old daughters. I think these are the only two such movies I’ve ever seen in my life. And though I absolutely ...Read more
- AddictSabbath’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
- Communion of Saints[1]Won’t You Be My Neighbor? a film by Morgan Neville. With Fred Rogers, Joanne Rogers, Joe Negri, Francois Clemmons. ****1/2 Fred Rogers was one weird dude. In all of show business, people on television, people who perform, who work with children, I’ve never seen anyone like him. He had a television show in which, for all ...Read more
- Prison Is When You Can’t Get OutThe 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
- Trusting the MindThe Buddha’s Ultimate Message Some years ago, a publisher asked me to write a Young Adult biography of the Buddha. It was an obvious assignment in a way; two of my novels had been published as YA’s (though I hadn’t written them that way), and I’d written a fair amount about Buddhism as well. I could ...Read more
- Limits of MemoryAusterlitz 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
- Arf ArfIsle of Dogs a film by Wes Anderson. With (among many others) Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand. ***** My friend Sally (whom I seem to be mentioning all the time here) recently wrote me the following sentence in an e-mail: “I was trying to think of books, current and always current, ...Read more
- Fiction Flirting with RealityWar & Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans. Vintage. 286 pp. $16.95. ***** How Should a Person Be? By Sheila Heti. Picador. 306 pp. $17.00. *** War & Turpentine is an absolutely stupendous novel which I can’t recommend highly enough; it had me rapt the whole time I was reading it, and I would happily have gone on reading ...Read more
- Evil Is in the DoingAll 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 BlueManhattan 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
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Yes You Can Go Home AgainHow to Live Your LifeYou Need to be WritingThe Other SideThe River is Freedom, the Raft Paradise
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (114)American literature (198)art (110)Buddhism (163)Christianity (120)creative process (232)death and dying (128)meditation (118)movies (153)music (36)race (95)religion (181)sex (158)spirituality (168)the art of narrative (238)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)