A nice
article on winning the Booker Prize, by Hilary Mantel.
I'm liking Ron Charles more and more and more, and
this video review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom makes just makes me giddy.
Over at Critical Mass, the blog for the NBCC, Wyatt Mason
writes about Roth's "tenth, short, and perfect novel, The Ghost Writer." I agree with Mason; this is one great novel, and a great place to start if you're looking to get to know Roth. Here is
my review. It wasn't my first Roth, but it is the book that made him one of my favorite writers of all time (if not my favorite).
This promises to get interesting. Anis Shivani of
The Huffington Post has posted his list of the
fifteen most overrated contemporary American authors. As usual, he makes some great points. Often when I see these, though, I think, "Okay, so they are bad. Now, tell me who is good -- and why the difference." Shivani promises to follow-up with the most
underrated contemporary American writers. Followed with similar lists for American writers of the past century, and going further to include lists for the global writers.
Patricia Zohn interviews Jennifer Egan at
The Huffington Post. I still think
A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of the best books of the year.
New York Magazine has a nice
look at independent bookstores in the City, which are rising "against all odds."
At Reading Matters, Kim has featured my blog on her
Triple Choice Tuesday. My choices?
The Ghost Writer,
So Long, See You Tomorrow, and
Butcher's Crossing. Pop on over and see my fresh, brief write-up of each title.
For Independence Day, the Huffington Post has a slide show of
fifteen great independent publishers, featuring a few of my favorites --
Open Letter,
Archipelago -- and a few I didn't know about.
New Directions is a model of perfection, and I agree. I have stacks and stacks of books from these three presses, and I'm anxious to see what the others have to offer.
Michiko Kakutani's
review of Jacob de Zoet is surprising in its lack of substance. It's mostly just a plot rehash (which I think gives away a bit too much). It's boring to read and insightless, where I usually enjoy her reviews even if I disagree (as I do here). I'm not saying my reviews are better, surely, but this is pretty poor for
The New York Times daily and from a Pulitzer-winning critic.
In the new issue of
The New Yorker, James Wood
takes a look at The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: "This is to argue not that David Mitchell should be more like Tolstoy or Conrad or Beckett but, curiously, that he might be more Mitchellian—that the reader wants a kind of moral or metaphysical pressure that is absent, and that has ceded all the ground to pure storytelling."
The Paris Review blog has a
Q&A with Jennifer Egan, author of
The Goon Squad, a piece of which was published in
The New Yorker and discussed
here.
Click
here for the
Never Let Me Go trailer. I didn't like the book as much as I hoped I would, but the trailer makes the film look good.
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Click 
New fiction forum up.
I am one of those readers who quite liked The Corrections. While I don’t think it is a great novel — and can appreciate the views of those who do not like it — I found it highly readable, with many cogent observations.
And I like this story, subject to the same qualifications. One of the things that I think Franzen does very well is contemplate the screwed-up order of things and ponder why that takes place.
The major event of this story should be the rape of Patty but for every character, including her, it becomes secondary — it challenges what they stand for, but everyone finds a way to leverage the disgrace to support their going-in bias. The coach wants to exploit it, her parents want to find a way around it, the perpetrator’s parents want to deny it ever happened. As for Patty, the physical effects were not much more than a rough game (Ethan did wear a condom, after all) and, while she moves into a more involved mode for a while, she retreats quickly in face of the social pressures around her.
I think that is a fair set of observations, delivered in more than adequate prose. Critics of Franzen say he is glib and obvious and those criticisms could certainly be applied to this story. I’m willing to go with his flow — I thought it was quite good.
I think Franzen gets a bit of a bum rap. I thought, as you did, Kevin, that it was considerably ‘clairvoyant’ (to pinch Bellow’s term) about family, society, the parameters and gradations of inter-relationships amongst those that know each other too well etc and I thought it was a tight, admirable effort.
I’m with you, Kevin. I liked this story a lot, and it has indeed convinced me that I should pull down my copy of The Corrections for a read — finally. I really liked Franzen’s story last year too. I heard these are both excerpts from his new novel, though I’m at a loss to figure out how they might go together.
Also, this is one of the exceptions to my bias against excertps being published in place of genuine short stories. This was presented nicely.