Jeffrey Eugenides wants readers to think about how the marriage plot must complicate itself in the twentieth-century novel; but the book’s end seems too cleverly rigged and self-delighting. 

Nicholson Baker’s Splendid Digressions

Beautiful & Pointless, by the poet David Orr, is a short, lively guidebook that proposes to conduct the “general reader” about the landscape of contemporary poetry—what Orr refers to more than once as Poetryland. 

More than once in this collection of vigorous letters, Bellow apologizes for his unsatisfactory epistolary habits: “I’ve never enjoyed writing letters,” he tells Ralph Ellison. “It’s part of some disagreeable reticence in me—laziness; worse; something very nasty.”

A review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

That this critic, at age ninety, should have produced such an extraordinarily packed, balanced, and wise book gives us heartening evidence of his staying power as well as E. M. Forster’s.