A friend recommended Ali Smith’s Artful, commenting on its ease of style and sharpness of perception. The novelist, he told me, had taken on serious topics in this work, a published version of a series of lectures, and that she had somehow made theory a pure joy as well as a “pure good.”
MORE
What is to be gained by showing the apparent theatrical mechanics of stage production in a film adaptation of a novel? Joe Wright’s direction of Tom Stoppard’s screenplay of Anna Karenina asserts repeatedly that the social life of late 19th Century Russia is a spectacle. They achieve this by
MORE
Mater dolorosa is certainly a title that can be applied to the Mary of Colm Toibin’s Testament of Mary, but the sorrow in her voice rests on a fulcrum of anger and fear. Permit, please the metaphor, to let me say the balance tips towards rejection, and the traditional role she rejects rises away
MORE
Chance will have us discover patterns, but then we also believe that there are no coincidences. Do those two statements demand the admission that we read what we have to? To be less riddling: I posted admiring comments on Richard Ford’s Canada over a week ago. In particular I admired the
MORE
I reckon we all lay great store in compelling fictional voices. Coleridge summons this up in his Ancient Mariner who fixes the Wedding Guest with “his glittering eye . . . He cannot choose but hear.” The artistry of great story tellers lies in their ability to establish not simply a credible
MORE
I suspect that each of us wishes to pick up a book without being overly prejudiced one way or another about its worth. True, there is little hope of approaching a favorite author without positive expectations. A Booker prize winner is likely to have the same effect. But what happens when an
MORE
I found myself a few weeks ago recounting a bit of family history to a friend. I tried to give a sense of the four sisters and one brother (along with estranged mother and father) who arrived in New York in the 1890s from Germany. My grandmother and great aunts and uncle, especially to the eyes of
MORE
“I don’t want to beat it and I don’t want to leave him here alone, and so I quickly do the only thing I can think of and put my arms around him, pull him close to me and hold him tight. Very tight. . . . Arvid loves his father. It has never occurred to me. . . I don’t know if I dare let him
MORE
I listen to audio books daily. I find them, in part, a type of ear-blinker, a vocal filter for the noise about. They (almost) replace (almost all of the time) the voice of the monologist inside my head – but inadvertence, a disturbance like a falling leaf or an acorn dropping on my shoulder, can
MORE
Condition of England novels were a recognized genre in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Works such as Hard Times captured the social tensions of the country, sampling the spectrum of class, industry, education and mores. The subtitle of Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo, is tellingly, “State of England.
MORE
When a book advertises itself as a police procedural and a psychological thriller, you can assume that you will be taken, step by step, through an investigation of a crime and an exploration of a criminal mind. Who-done-it? is not displaced by aberrant psychology, but the latter often provides a
MORE
One might quip that A Hologram for the King is a “state of the States” novel except for the fact that it is set in Saudi Arabia – and in the mind of the book’s protagonist, Alan Clay. David Eggers’ new novel, has a thematic force that places Clay between Willie Loman and Vladimir and
MORE
Philip Carey is so prolific and assured a writer that any new work of his must be a source of happy expectation. His latest novel, The Chemistry of Tears, does not disappoint. As he did in his early Oscar and Lucinda, Carey recreates Victorian times and shows himself effortlessly at ease with that
MORE
The book jacket of the recently reissued, Crusoe’s Daughter, asserts that the author Jane Gardam is the “best British novelist you never heard of.” This is a fair comment in that Gardam has published eighteen works of fiction (and three children’s books) to critical acclaim, but she has a
MORE
Sometimes we are simply lucky. I was, fifty years ago, when I heard William T. Noon S.J. speak on David Jones (1895 –1974), the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist. Some years later I was fortunate to have Jones as a correspondent. I was also lucky to become an early member of the David Jones Society,
MORE
The Screwtape Letters – they appear in memory flagged by the red devil slash on the paperback cover. That diabolical light glimmers in a cavernous basement (temporary lunch room) of a church abutting my Manhattan high school. The book, assigned fifty years ago for summer reading, seemed an
MORE
I suppose we must all ask ourselves in reading history, what distinguishes the historian’s task from that of the novelist, the historical novelist in particular. The simple question, “Is it true?” leads inevitably into philosophical waters. In a note at the end of her new novel, Bring Up the
MORE
There are so many intriguing aspects to Peter Cameron’s latest novel, Coral Glynn, that I have no reservations in recommending it enthusiastically. Yet, my immediate response upon finishing it was to attempt to explain the strange sense of distance, estrangement even, that his characterization
MORE
A prose poem, a lyrical appreciation of the shape-dissolving powers of darkness and London fog, begins the final chapter of William Boyd’s new novel, Waiting for Sunrise. If the title suggests that there is hope in the dawn to follow the book’s end, the conclusion assures us that such hope is
MORE
Marilynne Robinson is an eloquent polemicist. I nod in agreement with her prose even as I half wonder over the target of her attacks. Every essay in her new collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books, asserts the mystery of divine creation and admits no place for the reductive force of modern “
MORE
I have been rereading Anna Karenina ( the Constance Garnett translation) and had to stop over a chapter that connected a recourse of novelists and theories of mind. The scene is one in which Anna’s husband, Alexey Alexandrovitch, visits a lawyer (unnamed) to begin divorce proceedings. The lawyer
MORE
Henning Mankell, the Swedish mystery writer, appears to have brought his dark, gifted and melancholic hero, Kurt Wallender, to a tired end. One wonders if the burden of success – and the Wallender series has been very successful – increased the desperation with which the detective in the Ystad
MORE
Robert Harris (author of Pompeii, The Ghost Writer, the Cicero trilogy, and others) has published a new novel, The Fear Index, which is as much a primer in hedge funds and computer controlled algorithmic trading in stocks as it is an engrossing thriller. The particular conflict that the book raises
MORE
Forty years ago, I sat, afternoon after afternoon, for almost two years, in the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library. I was purportedly pursuing literary research (I had done the serious work before lunch, honestly!), but really I was reading novels that were loosely connected to the time
MORE
The pleasures of indulgence yield the worry of surfeit. To have too much is to lose appreciation of what is particular. Reading five or six works by Justin Cartwright, seriatim, has driven home this too obvious truism. The book jacket notes that Cartwright is South African by birth, and that he
MORE
There is an art to reading book blurbs and my wife has mastered it. She has an astute way of working through the new book shelves at the library and finding authors we will both find so good that we read them exhaustively. The key for her is remembering which of the blurb writers are reliable
MORE
I have been listening to two unsettling men, Fabian Vas and Wyatt Hillyer. Both seem to filter the violence and passion of their lives through a distance in time and expectation that works oddly against the events they relate. The mismatch is the more effective in that they offer little, if any,
MORE
There is a pedigree that gives authority to certain dogs who are narrators of novels – at least that is a point made by Maf, the autobiographical speaker in Andrew O’Hagan’s The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his Friend Marilyn Monroe. Among the many virtues of this novel are Maf’
MORE
“Have we read . . .?” is a question that my wife sometimes asks me. The meaning of the question is clear enough. She wants to know if I recall a book that she or I might have read. The form of the question suggests something else: the custom in some golden, earlier time when one spouse might
MORE
Julian Barnes and Colm Toibin have both recently released books of short stories (Pulse and The Empty Family respectively). They appeared on the New Book shelves of the local library more or less at the same time. (This handy expedient often determines what I find myself reading.) Both writers,
MORE
Too often the easy response (“I liked the book better.”) to television or film adaptation of a novel comes about through dissatisfaction: it seems that the richness of the original cannot be reproduced in a different medium. But since I had not read the book, I could not make even this
MORE
“Experimental” or innovative fiction can have peculiar effects. The novel is aimed at going beyond story-telling, and it generally broaches philosophical themes or makes inroads into the structure of language and notions of “theory” that can be as puzzling as the various forms and oddities
MORE
No less a Shakespeare critic than Stephen Greenblatt, writing in the New York Times in early May, praised Arthur Phillips’s, The Tragedy of Arthur, as a remarkable production, especially the penning of a so–say lost “Shakespeare” play which bears the book’s title. I mean in no way to
MORE
I came belatedly to the reading of A.S. Byatt, beginning with her recent novel, The Children’s Book, and moving to Angels and Insects, and then to the Frederica Potter Quartet. (The omissions, mea culpa, are many.) The latter, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling
MORE
Ismail Kadare, an Albanian novelist with a long and distinguished career, writes with a dizzying, evocative style in the recently published The Accident. The novel has a constraining impact: it catches you up in worlds that don’t make sense, but which the novelist apparently forces open to
MORE
I have an unshakable memory of Charles Donahue, a professor of Ancient Germanic and Celtic literatures at Fordham University; this was over forty years ago. He was explaining to me, after a close reading of an Old English text, the nature of the heroic “boast” or brag, the preliminary challenge
MORE
