Petterson patiently maps the filaments that bind his characters’ interior lives and the exterior world, walking them not just through their surfacing memories of the past, but through their mundane muscle memories in the present. Milking a cow, cleaning a house: these acts provide physical cathexis for psychological pain, allowing his characters to organize and reorder a life dislocated by death. More…
Four years ago after writing twenty-one books about vampires, witches, mummies, psychic humans, and pleasure slaves (there were five books of erotica, under pseudonyms), she progressed one step further on the ladder of heroes. She announced that she was abandoning her vampires. From now on, all her books would be for and about “the ultimate outsider, the ultimate immortal of all”: Jesus Christ. More…
“In literature,” said Henry James, “we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which also everything is saved by it.” What James blesses, Bolaño damns: his style ensures that we know little beyond our own ignorance, that his locales lack all plausible density, that everything seems always far away. More…
Christine Schutt, the author of two short story collections and two novels, was one of the last writers Gordon Lish published before he left Knopf. Her early books bear the strong imprint of the Lish method; her later books tell a story of evolving from it. More…
In Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, the young sociologist Neil Gross has tried to use Rorty’s intellectual biography—his transformation from a philosopher working primarily within the narrow Anglophone analytic tradition to a digressive, itinerant intellectual on the model of his pragmatist hero, John Dewey—as a case study in an argument against certain kinds of piety. More…
Enthusiastic photoshopping has aided a transformation: Gone are the freckles and downy arm hairs of the predecessors. Breasts are surgically standardized; gym routines and spray tans produce identically toned and tinted bodies. Girls of all ethnicities blend together into one latte-colored woman, and the result looks computer-generated. More…
You don’t have to be Christian to appreciate Robinson—her work, while close to theology, comes down on the side of poetry, aspiring only to assent, not ultimate truth—but a knowledge of the faith’s dying words and urgent messages may well be required to get her meaning. More…
You would be forgiven, upon reading the negative reviews of Tony Judt’s Reappraisals, for thinking that Judt’s latest book was a Kassam rocket of scorn and derision directed at the state of Israel. Imagine your surprise when on cracking the spine of Reappraisals you find all of three essays, out of twenty-four, dedicated to Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More…
Bolaño’s canonization has taken place so rapidly and completely, and with so little demurral, that one can only reluctantly pile aboard the bandwagon. But Bolaño is the real thing, as urgent, various, imaginative, and new as any writer active in the last decade. The question is: why not canonize anyone else? Why reserve for him the once-in-a-decade beatification? More…
In Bright Shiny Morning, James Frey tries to convey the full horror of Los Angeles. He does so by writing four, possibly five books, four of them current-day romances, one—apparently for context—a history of the place. But it doesn’t quite add up to an entire whole, nor does it convey that horror. More…
As a whole, The View from the Seventh Layer conveys the impression of an author who writes out of an impulse to congratulate his characters, his readers, and himself for being pure of heart in a cynical world—or for having emotions at all. It is through the combination of the fantastic and the sentimental that the work may be passed off as “literary.” More…
Yet as I read I could not help but think that the work he began has not continued, it has languished; that one of the unexpected effects of the civil rights movement on black culture was to distance us from any commitment to producing work in the highest realms. Ellison took a controversial position in the ’60s and after, by which he lived his life. His side lost. More…
This season brings two new high-profile dispatches, novels by Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) and Englander (The Ministry of Special Cases). Both have been justifiably praised. Both have been dissected for how Jewishness provides themes, artistic precedent, and color. Yet the blind spot remains: almost no one has asked what these books say about Jewishness—that fluid state—today. More…
Schine’s heroines are smarter and also older than is typical of the genre. They write biographies, own bookstores, and go on Darwin-themed cruises to the Galapagos to celebrate their divorces. But, more crucially, they suffer from the standard chick-lit problem and receive the universal chick-lit cure: marriage or at least sex with a charmingly cardboard male lead. More…
“When you go abroad,” I say, because my students need convincing to read the work of a traitor, “you will talk to Americans and Europeans who know the names of two Turks: Hrant Dink and Orhan Pamuk. And if you can’t participate in an intelligent and well-informed conversation about both of them, you will be at a disadvantage.” . . . I don’t say, “You may also look evil.” More…
A spate of recent books and articles and counter-articles and letters about the articles has declared that American women are in crisis. They’ve been dropping out of prestigious jobs and taking on all the housework; the accomplished ones can’t get a date; and then there are the kids, those black holes of endless need. More…
The familiar vegetarian “conversion” narrative relies on epiphanies: that moment when, staring at the lamb bourguignon, one suddenly imagines the live lamb within the cooked meat. Gandhi gave up meat for a time after suffering nightmares of animals he had eaten bleating and squealing within him. More…
Is it odd to begin liking a poet on the basis of a pair of lines? This happened to me with the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. And though I eventually found that I did my liking on a semierroneous basis, the affinity was secure. I loved these two lines, from a slim untitled poem out of Robertson’s 2001 collection, The Weather. More…
Misha Vainberg, the narrator of Gary Shteyngart’s second novel, Absurdistan, has two girlfriends: Rouenna in the Bronx and Nana in the fictional Central Asian country of Absurdsvanï. This is not a problem for Misha, but it is a problem for Absurdistan. Misha’s frequent, fervent declarations of love for both women make him hard to believe about either one. More…
Miéville is both inside and outside the fantasy genre. He’s won two Arthur C. Clarke awards, but he also received mention in Granta‘s most recent Best of Young British Novelists exercise, before eventually being consigned to the Salon des Refusés for disreputable genre connections. Miéville’s novels are politically aware, but not in a way that tries to expose fantasy as an ideological confection. More…
Last April, when everyone else was sick of post-election punditry, it seemed to the New York Times like “a stroke of genius” for the Atlantic Monthly to hire “distinguished French philosopher, journalist and gadfly” Bernard-Henri Lévy to follow Tocqueville’s journey through America, writing a reflective essay in each issue of the magazine “for several months.” More…
George Orwell wrote, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.” Not a problem for Frey. But there is something suspicious, too, about a memoir that pummels you with disgrace: “At fourteen I stole a moped and pushed it off a cliff. . . . I told a pregnant Teacher I hoped her Child was born dead. . . . At fifteen I sold drugs to Kids.” More? More…
Empire of the Spirit is an important reminder to liberal thinkers to pause before dismissing the current visibility of popular, evangelical Christianity as merely part of a popular reaction to the Administration’s fear-mongering. Perhaps America was Methodized from its very beginnings. More…
In No Country For Old Men, the storm of metaphysics has blown over, and the high style is relaxed. The book was written in a six-month jag, and the prose arrives in bursts, like a pile of telegrams. Its scenes are brisk and well-constructed. But the efficient action and mounting body count offer little pause for reflection, and most scenes fade quickly from memory. More…
In this the Freakonomist is only a symptom of a pervasive metaphorical creep that has been underway for some time now. The trend toward understanding human beings as maximizers of gain and avoiders of loss has a longer history than Freakonomics‘ eight-week residency on the bestseller list. Indeed, it is difficult to think otherwise of ourselves these days. More…
Javier Marías’s books do not move forward, or in any event, they do not move forward very quickly, and when they do, the movement forward is not the movement that truly matters but rather the movement that marks a kind of compromise, a nod to convention and practical constraints. More…
Jonathan Coe has spent years demonstrating and investigating the particular brand of fucked-upness unique to Britain. His series of novels examines the national character, marrying filmic historical sweep to intricate characterization and some very good jokes. Above all his first novels were distinguished by an unyielding, magnificent rage. More…
Toni Bentley has written a memoir about her three-year experience of sexual awakening via anal intercourse with a man. Given that the most likely audience for Bentley’s book veers to the left, the intended surprising counterintuition is that her “subjugation” through anal sex was satisfying for her. But is there any way—scientifically, we mean—to prove that anal sex is unfair to women? More…
The novel makes a sustained argument for human equality, Jonathan Strange countering Norrell’s elitism with the idea that magic can be taught to anyone. There’s a leveling streak here, and—behind the magic—the novel retells the story of England’s 19th-century movement from oligarchy toward democracy. More…
Where to go after Infinite Jest? David Foster Wallace’s 1996 opus now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit. More than that: even the writers from whom he borrowed and stole are coming to seem like satellites. More…
Dale Peck cuts a figure both tragic and ludicrous. He posed for the New York Times in flannel shirt, clutching a woodsman’s ax, staring wildly into the camera with hooded eyes. On the jacket of his book, a second photograph announces his slow fade into knowing self-parody. There he seems to slip away from the camera in coy profile, the ax held lazily over one sleeve of his pastel blue t-shirt. More…
