Category: the-art-of-narrative
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Murder Will Out. And Then SomeThe Secret History by Donna Tartt. Vintage. 559 pp. $16.95 **** The first thing to say about The Secret History is that it is a drunk novel. Not since the days of Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Hemingway have I read a book where so much booze is consumed, at such odd hours and so unwisely. I’m not ...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
- No But I Read the ComicBlack Panther a film by Ryan Congler. With Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira. **** I hate comic book movies, and almost never go to them. I don’t like movies with super heroes, and people with spectacular special powers. I don’t enjoy the special effects of modern movies, and get tired of preview ...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
- To NowhereOn the Road from Road Novels 1957-1960 by Jack Kerouac. Edited by Douglas Brinkley. Library of America. 864 pp. It’s an odd feeling to reread On the Road after just reading The Dharma Bums for the first time. In a way it’s the same book all over again, Jack Kerouac on a mad dash around the ...Read more
- Drunken SaintThe Dharma Bums from Road Novels 1957-1960 by Jack Kerouac. Edited by Douglas Brinkley. Library of America. 864 pp. ***1/2 Jack Kerouac is the spiritual father of every whacked-out hippie who ever stumbled his way through the Sixties, head bobbing in mild agreement, mouth perpetually grinning, a beard flowing around his collar. Kerouac himself was a ...Read more
- Is That a Promise?Ruminations on Star Wars: The Last Jedi a film by Rian Johnson. With Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega. ***1/2 For the critics who are now active and influential, the Star Wars movies were their first epics, the movies they grew up on and worshiped. I’m trying to think of what might ...Read more
- Ain’t Got OneThe Shape of Water a film by Guillermo del Toro. With Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer. ****1/2 The Shape of Water is a tribute to movies from the fifties, men in suits and fedoras, women in dresses, the Red Menace hovering everywhere, monsters emerging from the deep. Two of its primary characters, Elisa ...Read more
- Problem SolvedTishomingo Blues from Four Later Novels by Elmore Leonard. Library of America. 961 pp. $40.00. No sooner do I complain about a problem in Elmore Leonard’s work—the fact that every novel seemed to feature a monstrous guy who killed people casually and unnecessarily, as if such people don’t need explaining—than it disappeared. Tishomingo Blues includes plenty ...Read more
- Who You Really Are (You Knew All Along)Coco a film by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina. With Anthony Gonzalez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach. ***** I went to this movie as an act of desperation. Every day I read in the New York Times about the marvelous movies that are arriving for the holiday season and the great reviews they’ve gotten, ...Read more
- My Elmore Leonard ProblemOut of Sight from Four Later Novels by Elmore Leonard. Library of America. 961 pp. $40.00. I’m coming to the end of my Elmore Leonard period. I never thought, when I decided to look into his Detroit novels because my son now lives in Detroit and I’ve gotten to know the place a little, that I ...Read more
- Time is a What?A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Anchor Books. 340 pp. $16.00. ***** I’m aware as a writer that many people I read are more talented than I, but now and then I’m pulled up short by a writer who does something I couldn’t even aspire to. I felt that way about War and ...Read more
- Bitch on Wheels Careens out of ControlThree Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a film by Martin McDonagh. With Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Lucas Hedges. ****1/2 If I could sue a trailer for false advertising, I would sue the one I saw for Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri, which seems to promise a hilarious comedy in which Frances McDormand releases her ...Read more
- Grad Student from HellThe Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy. Grove Press. 338 pp. $16.00. The Ginger Man was one of the famous dirty books from my youth, published by Olympia Press and occupying the shelves alongside Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and My Life and Loves. My freshman college roommate in 1966 showed up with everything trendy in ...Read more
- The Father and I Are OneA Buddhist Reads the Bible (and Finds the Buddha): The Gospel of John One of the more interesting reactions to my piece on Jesus the Jew was from my brother Bill, a scholar of languages and the Bible who reads in both Greek and Hebrew. He said that the Synoptic Gospels were about the Galilean Jesus, ...Read more
- The Whiteness of the WhaleMoby Dick by Herman Melville. Library of America. 638 pp. I’ve recently expressed my admiration for the Library of America and its beautiful editions, but I was disappointed by the Melville Chronology in this volume, which seemed positively paltry. Elmore Leonard gets 27 pages and Herman Melville gets five? My brother tells me there’s a famous ...Read more
- Master Craftsman Having FunFour Novels of the 1980’s: City Primeval, LaBrava, Glitz, Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard. Library of America. 1010 pp. $37.50. Elmore Leonard began to relax into his craft when he entered the decade of the eighties, when he would turn 60. He had stopped drinking, for one thing, spoke openly about how that affected him. He ...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)