Category: the-art-of-narrative

  • Academics as a Blood Sport
    Stoner a novel by John Williams.  From John Williams: Collected Novels.  Daniel Mendelsohn, editor.  Library of America.  pp. 257-486 **** William Stoner, after growing up on a hardscrabble farm in rural Missouri, has two major epiphanies in his early adulthood.  The first occurs when he attends the University of Missouri as an agricultural student, and takes ...
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  • I’d Call Them Battlefields
    The Groves of Academe a novel by Mary McCarthy.  From Mary McCarthy Novels & Stories 1942-1963.  Library of America.  pp. 289-508.  ***** I’ve always loved novels of academic life.  I love the academy, as bonkers as it often is, and love reading about the odd, distorted presences that inhabit it.  I would also say that, in ...
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  • He Debuted as a Master
    Lost in the City stories by Edward P. Jones.  Amisted.  243 pp. $15.99.  ***** There was a time when I read book reviews the way, as a kid, I used to read the sports pages.  At my house we got the Sunday New York Times and Saturday Review, also the New Yorker.  It wasn’t as if ...
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  • The Vanity of Human Wishes
    Butcher’s Crossing a novel by John Williams.  Library of America.  John Williams, Collected Novels.  Daniel Mendelsohn, editor.  pp. 1-255.  ***** There was a moment in Butcher’s Crossing when I was strongly tempted to stop reading.  Our protagonist, Will Andrews, had staked a man named Miller to a project that Miller claimed could not fail.  Though buffalo ...
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  • The Critic as Artist
    The Company She Keeps and The Oasis from Mary McCarthy Novels & Stories 1942-1963.  The Library of America.  pp. 1-287  **** In everything I’ve read by Mary McCarthy so far, it seems that a social critic/satirist is in charge and an artist is struggling to be set free.  The Company She Keeps, her first book, is ...
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  • She’s Ours
    Runaway stories by Alice Munro.  Vintage.  335 pp.  $15.95 ***** I first heard of Alice Munro in the early eighties, when I had hooked up with my agent and first editor and they were both enthusiastic fans; my agent, Virginia Barber, was also Munro’s, and my editor, Sherry Huber, was an avid reader who constantly recommended ...
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  • Master of the Form
    Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories by Loren Groff.  Hachette Books.  306 pp. ***** Before reading Lauren Groff’s first book of short stories, I saw her as a novelist who had apprenticed on the shorter form.  Her first novel was big in various ways, did well both commercially and critically.  She followed with two massive, ambitious ...
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  • Let It Ring
    Telephone a novel by Percival Everett.  Graywolf Press.  216 pp.  **** I had thought of Percival Everett as an offbeat comic novelist who sat down to write a novel with no idea where it was headed (see .  I Am Not Sidney Poitier.  Even Erasure, though a biting satire, had a comic premise, and the novel ...
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  • You Need to be Writing
    Crowded by Beauty: The Life and Zen of Poet Philip Whalen by David Schneider.  University of California Press.  352 pp.  $23.92. ***** Goods Short Stories by David Schneider.  Cuke Press  168 pp.  $13.00 **** Philip Whalen was what used to be called a Man of Letters, back in the days when there were such people.  In fact, ...
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  • The Other Side
    Whereas Huck Finn gives us an idyllic vision of life in 19th century America, James gives us the other side, in all its brutality.  It’s a necessary and important corrective.
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  • The River is Freedom, the Raft Paradise
    Twain, on the other hand, wrote a prose that seemed entirely American and utterly his own.  It seemed to roll off his pen.
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  • The Nothing of God
    She was scorned, kicked around, physically abused, sexually abused, told that she doesn’t count, that she barely even exists.  Somehow it is these very things that give her the resources to undertake this adventure. 
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  • We Are Stardust We Are Golden
    This novel isn’t just about the commune.  It’s about the whole Sixties dream, and what it did to someone who was raised in it.
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  • A State of the Union and a State of Mind
    This Lauren Groff-type character is the one who interests me most (I’m always trying to get at the person behind the stories, even when she is totally absent).  It is her spirit that hovers over this collection.
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  • Embodied Mystic
    This author deeply understands mystical spirituality, true religion, in a way that few people do.
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  • What Is Sex?
    Lauren Groff seems to be gently suggesting that sex is a human energy that doesn’t necessarily interfere with a religious life.  They can co-exist.  They should co-exist.
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  • Portrait of Genius
    This is the most compulsively readable book I’ve encountered in many a moon.  I couldn’t wait to pick it up every night. 
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  • Book to Movie
    Director Cord Johnson is a huge Percival Everett fan, and American Fiction seems perfectly to capture the spirit of Erasure.  I was astounded.
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  • Slippery Slope
    Crook Manifesto a novel by Colson Whitehead.  Doubleday.  319 pp.  ***** There is the pleasure of reading a great crime writer, someone like Elmore Leonard at his best, who makes any other storyteller I know look like a rank amateur.  There is the somewhat different pleasure of reading a great contemorary novelist, like Jonathan Franzen or ...
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  • Pandemic Without Panic
    The Vulnerables a novel by Sigrid Nunez.  Riverhead Books.  242 pp.  **** Early reviewers of Sigrid Nunez’ The Vulnerables are linking it to her most recent novels (The Friend, which won a National Book Award, and What Are You Going Through, which was equally deserving of that award), seeing the three books as a trilogy.  The ...
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