Category: the-art-of-narrative
- All Stories Are Made UpMoonglow by Michael Chabon. Harper. 430 pp. $28.00 Voss by Patrick White. Penguin. $18.00 The great Pittsburgh writer John Edgar Wideman—whom I wrote about in a recent post—once published a book entitled All Stories Are True. I thought it a brilliant and fascinating title, but it could just as easily have been All Stories Are False. Even ...Read more
- Uncle NutcaseManchester by the Sea. A film by Kenneth Longegan. With Casey Affleck, Kyle Chandler, Michelle Williams, Lucas Hedges. ***** Early in Manchester by the Sea, while the credits are rolling, there is a scene that continued to haunt me after the movie was over. Two brothers were out on a commercial fishing boat with the son ...Read more
- Black Boys Looking BlueSouth to a Very Old Place, Stomping the Blues, The Blue Devils of Nada, From the Briarpatch File from Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray. The Library of America. 1049 pp. $45.00. Moonlight, a film by Barry Jenkins, with Mahershala Ali, Duan Sanderson, Naomie Harris. ***** I haven’t finished the last few pieces from Collected Essays ...Read more
- My First Teacher Was a RabbiA Buddhist Reads the Bible: the Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. Various things are conspiring to make me read the Bible, which I last read—a rather thorough reading—in 1966-7, when I was a freshman at Duke. At a recent sesshin, I did dokusan with Shohaku Okumura and he mentioned ...Read more
- Gusto and a Sense of EleganceThe Omni-Americans from Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray. The Library of America. 1048 pp. $45.00 The Omni -Americans was at least partly prompted by the Moynihan Report (The Negro Family: The Case For National Action) from 1965, and author Albert Murray states his central thesis in the introduction, “Someone must at least begin to try ...Read more
- Maggie’s FarmChronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan. Simon & Schuster. 293 pp. $16.00 I’ve been fascinated by the reactions to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, which was announced as I was heading to Pittsburgh for my 50th high school reunion. A number of Baby Boomers seemed to regard it as a validation of their whole lives, as if ...Read more
- Not Little EnoughA Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Anchor Books. 816 pp. $17.00. I began this book with great enthusiasm and sped through the first two hundred pages. Hanya Yanagihara is a wonderfully skilled novelist and pulled me right into the story. But by the last two hundred I was seriously tired of the book, almost dreaded reading. ...Read more
- Glug GlugSully, a film by Clint Eastwood. With Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney. I’ve always thought of Clint Eastwood as the King of the Grade B movie. One sure sign of Grade B is prolonged footage of a car driving somewhere, and there was ample such footage in Play Misty for Me, the first movie he ...Read more
- Who Are Your People?The Sympathizer a novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Grove Press. 385 pp. $16.00 This novel won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and is a remarkable work of art—I’m stunned at the way this younger novelist projects himself back into this tumultuous time—but I’m more interested in it as a human document than as a ...Read more
- Where the Boys AreWo Es War, Soll Ich Werden, the Restored Original Text by Guy Davenport. The Finial Press in Champaign, Illinois. $525.00 Once before on this website I reviewed a book that I was sure none of my readers would ever see, an obscure Buddhist text that had been out of print forever and that I was quite ...Read more
- Train to NowhereThe Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday. 306 pp. $26.95 This is one of the most wrenching and difficult books I’ve ever read. It’s a work of art, and its sheer artistry gives pleasure. At the same time, I didn’t look forward to reading it every night. People will say the subject is slavery, or racism, but ...Read more
- Equal Rights to Live in HellEquity a film by Meena Menon and Amy Fox. With Anna Gunn, James Purefoy, Sarah Megan Thomas, Alysia Reiner.****1/2 This is the best movie about Wall Street I’ve ever seen. It’s probably the first one I ever understood. That doesn’t have to do with the fact that it’s about women. It has to do with expert ...Read more
- Fleeing the Beauty of LifeThe Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese. Harper Perennial. 345 pp. $15.99. I found this book disturbing, unnervingly so, and I’m still trying to figure out why. Writing about it may help. Nevertheless, it has all the Abraham Verghese virtues. It’s beautifully written, full of interesting detail about Verghese’s life, about medicine and his medical practice, about the ...Read more
- AIDS Comes HomeMy Own Country: A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese. Vintage. 432 pp. $16.00. I’m full of admiration for this book, and there’s no single reason. It’s an AIDS memoir, told from the standpoint of the doctor who cared for the patients, and who just happened to be a gifted writer who would later write a bestselling ...Read more
- Exquisitely DivineBorder Town by Shen Congwen. Harperperennial. 169 pp. $13.99 Border Town is what reviewers call a quiet novel, so quiet it might not be heard at all. It is the story of a Chinese girl and her grandfather who live near a town named Caodong in the early part of the twentieth century. The grandfather operates ...Read more
- Doctoring the StoryCutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. Vintage. 667 pp. $15.95. The one time I formally studied creative writing, in a class with Reynolds Price my freshman year at Duke University, he encouraged us to pay special attention to openings. “It doesn’t have to be ‘Rape!’ screamed the Duchess’ every time,” he said, “but you want to ...Read more
- Mommy and I Are So Damn BrilliantThe Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. New Directions. 484 pp. $18.95 I can’t remember when I’ve had such mixed feelings about a novel. There is an assumption behind this book that people with higher IQ’s, or people who have more knowledge, are superior individuals, who don’t have to deal with the rest of us. There is ...Read more
- No But I Saw the BookBrooklyn a novel by Colm Toibin. Scribner. 262 pp. $15.00 Even I, a person who loves reading above all other pleasures, who believes the novel is the Great Bright Book of Life, was thinking I didn’t need to go back and read Brooklyn because I’d seen the movie. I loved it, figured the book couldn’t add ...Read more
- Hammerin’ HenryThe Master by Colm Toibin. Scribner. 338 pp. $14.00. I bought this book because I saw it in a used bookstore where I had a lot of credit, so it was free. Some months back I started and couldn’t get into it. But my reading buddy Sally Sexton recommended it highly, along with Toibin’s Brooklyn—so I ...Read more
- Free to Be MeFreedom by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar Straus Giroux. 562 pp. $28.00 Jonathan Franzen is the novelist I always wanted to be. Like The Corrections, Freedom essentially dissects one dysfunctional family, really just four people—maybe five or six, if you include important friends—and does so at exhaustive length, yet never seems dull, or overly long. Franzen sees so ...Read more
Recent Evening Mind Posts
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)
Print
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)