Category: the-art-of-narrative
- Portrait of a Lunatic (You Wrote About the Wrong Cousin, Iris Murdoch)The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch. Penguin Classics. 495 pp. $20.00 ***** The Sea, the Sea has everything going for it. It’s large and expansive, beautifully written; it contains a wealth of fascinating characters; it traces a wild plot, where things keep happening that you can’t believe, and it comes to an emotionally satisfying confusion. ...Read more
- I Like IkeThe Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer Volume II: A Friend of Kafka to Passions. Library of America. 856 pp. ***** Back in the days when Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories appeared in the New Yorker, I never missed one. It was a thrill to read the work of a man who wrote so vividly, who seemed ...Read more
- Gone Fishin’Haven’t Posted in a While I wanted to drop a line to my loyal readers to say that the reason I haven’t posted in a while is that I recently got an idea for a longer writing project and want to take a look at that. I never know if a longer project is going to ...Read more
- She Never MellowedThe Last of Her Kind a novel by Sigrid Nunez. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 375 pp. $25.00. In one of her novels—I think it was What Are You Going Through—Sigrid Nunez quoted the famous first line of The Good Soldier, though I don’t think she identified the book by name: “This is the saddest story I ...Read more
- Clearing the DecksA Feather on the Breath of God a novel by Sigrid Nunez. Picador. 192 pp. $14.39 **** One puzzle about Sigrid Nunez is why this excellent writer didn’t publish her first book until she was 44 years old. She was writing from the time she was in college; we know that from Sempre Susan, in which ...Read more
- The Height of her PowersThe Friend a novel by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 224 pp. $10.39. I don’t know how Sigrid Nunez does it. She seems to begin her novels any old place, with whatever event comes to mind, and moves on from there. She doesn’t tell stories chronologically or in any particular way, but they fall right into place. ...Read more
- What Finally MattersWhat Are You Going Through: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 224 pp. $19.59. ***** The idea sounds grim beyond belief. Our narrator—living in New York—has a friend in a nearby town who is dying of cancer. At first the woman seems to be in remission, but then the cancer comes back with a vengeance, ...Read more
- Damned Is RightDamned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson. Grove Press. 800 pp. $22.00. **** Four Men Shaking: Searching for Sanity with Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and My Perfect Zen Teacher by Lawrence Shainberg. Shambhala. 134 pp. $16.95 ***** The story told in the first half of James Knowlson’s excellent biography is thrilling and fascinating. ...Read more
- Don’t Say Can’tMy Second Shrink I don’t remember what compelled me to see a therapist the second time, but I suspect it was the depression I felt while rejections came in on my second novel. It took me two years to write that book, riding to the library every morning on my bike, staying home on the days ...Read more
- Portrait of the Artist as a Nervous WreckDamned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson. Grove Press. 800 pp. $22.00. I don’t know what I expected from a biography of Samuel Beckett, but it wasn’t this. I actually owned the Deidre Bair bio, but couldn’t get into it. In more recent years, I read—and was stunned by—Beckett’s famous Three Novels, ...Read more
- And Another ThingMy First Shrink II The most valuable thing my first therapist did for me was to suggest I could rearrange my life to do the thing I loved, that I didn’t have to stay in a job just because I was good at it or because it seemed safe. I could completely upend my life. It ...Read more
- Jane Austen He’s NotPierre, or The Ambiguities by Herman Melville. Library of America pp.1-421. **1/2 It’s a bad sign when you finish the book and breathe a huge sigh of relief. I have enormous admiration for Herman Melville. Of all the 19th century American novelists, his career has the largest span. He began with popular books like Typee and Omoo, ...Read more
- The Itch to WriteNotes During a Pandemic One of the great pleasures of talking to my brother frequently—which I’ve been doing lately–is hearing of writers I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. Bill mentioned to me, for instance, that he had just bought two volumes of the reviews of Marjorie Perloff, a name I’d never heard. She writes regularly for the ...Read more
- Born WriterWhat Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young. Harper Collins. 320 pp. $15.99 Damon Young is famous as a blogger, co-founder of the website Very Smart Brothas, and in What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker has done something deceptively difficult: pulled together a collection of essays all of which stand perfectly well on ...Read more
- Young Master Surpasses His IdolThe Durrell Miller Letters 1935-80. Edited by Ian S. MacNiven. New Directions. 528 pp. ****1/2 In 1935, 23-year-old Lawrence Durrell wrote Henry Miller a fan letter about his novel Tropic of Cancer, which he had either found discarded in a public lavatory (the story he told) or was lent by a friend. “It strikes me as ...Read more
- ExeuntClea book four in the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. Dutton. 287 pp. ***** It’s hard to know what to say at the end of the Alexandria Quartet, a “word continuum” that has occupied so much time during an intense period. Reading is a vital part of my life, and for however many weeks it’s been, ...Read more
- The Night Everything ChangedA Single Scene from the Alexandria Quartet Even now that I’ve finished, I continue to be obsessed with the Alexandria Quartet. I would love to know how much Durrell envisioned when he began the work. He had supposedly been planning what he called his Book of the Dead (his early working title) for years, before he ...Read more
- Darley Takes a BreakMountolive volume three of the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. Faber. 884 pp. ***** The most startling thing about Mountolive is that all of a sudden we have no narrator. Darley—who told his own story in the first volume, then absorbed corrections from Balthazar in the second—is nowhere in evidence, though he’s mentioned occasionally in passing. ...Read more
- He Can’t Get StartedNormal People a Hulu Original Series by Lenny Abramson and Hettie Macdonald. With Daisy Edgar-Jones, Paul Mescal, Desmond Eastwood, Sarah Greene. *** I thought this series would be right up my alley. It’s a coming of age story about a young Irishman who wants to be a writer; we see one year of high school and ...Read more
- You Got It All WrongBalthazar book two of the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. Faber. 884 pp. $16.95. This is a brilliant idea for a series of novels. Kudos to Lawrence Durrell for even thinking of it. But then for the man who conceived it to have a superb poetic style, an interest in religion and psychology and just about ...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)