Category: the-art-of-narrative
- 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
- The Texture of Every DayJim Harrison 1937-2016 I’ve been haunted this week by the death of Jim Harrison, whom I’ve described for years as my favorite living writer and whose books I bought as soon as they came out, without reading a review or glancing through them. Only once did he let me down. I’ve wondered specifically if The Ancient ...Read more
- True FilthOld Filth by Jane Gardam. Europa Editions. 290 pp. $15.00. I wish I could put into words what is so great about Old Filth, which I impulsively bought because I’d read a brief review somewhere. (That provocative second word in the title is an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong.) The style is impeccable, ...Read more
- Old Warbler Hitting Some False NotesThe Ancient Minstrel by Jim Harrison. Grove Press. 255 pp. $25.00 I’d like to say I’m Jim Harrison’s greatest fan, though there’s a lot of competition for that spot. I began reading him back in the eighties when my fellow clerks at the local bookstore raved about him. I started with Sundog and went through the ...Read more
- I Used to Think I Wanted to Be PromiscuousA Severed Head by Iris Murdoch. Penguin. 205 pp. $15.00 Everything about my reading of Iris Murdoch has changed since I read Dwight Garner’s review of her new volume of letters and A.N. Wilson’s marvelous memoir. Wilson was right in his introduction; I had perhaps unconsciously reduced her in my mind to the dotty old woman ...Read more
- She Wasn’t Just a Dotty Old LadyIris Murdoch As I Knew Her by A.N. Wilson. Arrow Books. 276 pp. Those Brits do keep writing, don’t they? I look at the titles by A. N. Wilson, who is my rough contemporary (two years younger than I, actually) and I’m astonished, and somewhat ashamed, to see thirty books. (Compared to six for me. Eight ...Read more
- For the Holidays You Can’t Beat Home Sweet Home. Dad’s Demented. Mom’s Nuts.The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Picador. 566pp. $17.00 The Corrections is the ultimate dissection of a dysfunctional family. It’s 566 pages and basically concerns only five people, who are locked in an epic family battle that seems never to end. Chip is the brilliant brother who had a substantial and flourishing career as a professor until ...Read more
- Life Is Grand IV (Then You Have a Lonely Old Age and Die. If You’re Lucky)The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante. The Fourth and Final Neapolitan Novel. Europa Editions. 473 pp. $18.00. “I’d have to say it was my least favorite of the four.” I was startled when a friend of mine spoke those words, when I told her I was in the middle of the fourth of Elena ...Read more
- The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name Just SpokeCarol a film by Todd Haynes Carol is an almost unbelievably stylized, artful film. It isn’t just that the movie is a work of art, or that every scene is a work of art; every shot is a work of art. A shot of Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) riding away in a rain-sprinkled cab is full ...Read more
- Life Is Grand III (You Slept with my Husband You Whore I’ll Smash Your Face In)Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Book III, the Neapolitan Novels, Middle Time by Elena Ferrante. Europa Editions. 418 pp. $18.00. In some ways this is the most aptly titled of the three novels I’ve read in Ferrante’s brilliant quartet. Really there is only one person who has left, at least semi-permanently, and that is ...Read more
- Life Is Grand II (Touch My Wife and So Help Me God I’ll Slit Your Throat)The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante. Book Two of the Neapolitan Novels. Europa Editions. 471 pp. $18.00. I thought when I began the Elena Ferrante novels that I would read one volume, read a couple of other books, then come back and read another. I figured I’d eventually read all four. But each ...Read more
- Life Is Grand (as long as You Keep Your Hands off My Sister)My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Europa Editions. 331 pp. $17.00. I stand in awe at the power and variety of literature that I can read two novels consecutively that are so great—I don’t think the word is an exaggeration—and so completely different as Infinite Jest and My Brilliant Friend, which is the first novel of ...Read more
- Dispatches from the Abyss IVFinal Reflections on Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Back Bay Books. 1079 pp. $18.00. I don’t know how I expected this novel to end, some massive climax where Wallace tied up loose ends and brought it to a satisfactory conclusion, but of course I got no such thing. It ends in an orgy of addictive ...Read more
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All Shook UpWhat's in a Song? IIWriting for his LifeWhat’s in a Song?Mixed Feelings
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (127)American literature (226)art (123)Buddhism (171)Christianity (132)creative process (262)death and dying (144)meditation (125)movies (167)music (42)race (110)religion (196)sex (187)spirituality (174)the art of narrative (266)Uncategorized (21)world literature (23)