New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Garrison Keillor on Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes: "Julian Barnes, an atheist turned agnostic, has decided at the age of 62 to address his
fear of death — why should an agnostic fear death who has no faith in
an afterlife? How can you be frightened of Nothing? On this simple
question Barnes has hung an elegant memoir and meditation, a deep
seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind
for weeks thereafter.... I don’t know how this book will do in our hopeful country, with the
author’s bleak face on the cover, but I will say a prayer for retail
success. It is a beautiful and funny book, still booming in my head."
- Maslin on Serena by Ron Rash: "'Serena' is Ron Rash’s fourth novel. For those unfamiliar with the
elegantly fine-tuned voice of this Appalachian poet and storyteller, a
writer whose reputation has been largely regional despite an O. Henry
Prize and other honors, it will prompt instant interest in his first,
second and third."
- Alex Kuczynski on A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce by Alec Baldwin: "As brilliant an actor as Baldwin can be, his comic acuity may be so
keen partly because we associate him in real life with a darker, more
dolorous personality. His new book, 'A Promise to Ourselves,' is a
treatise on how the family law system in America is broken, and why it
should be changed. It is a serious book, masquerading as a manifesto
but eventually turning into a desperately sad memoir, layered beneath
the polemic, about the failure of Baldwin’s marriage and his
estrangement from his only child. It’s the curse of the comic not to be
taken seriously when he or she wants to be serious."
- James Traub on Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq: "'Tell Me How This Ends' is the first book about this
new Iraq. It’s a first-rate piece of work, probing and conscientious,
though reading a good-news book about one of America’s all-time
bad-news stories can take some getting used to.... You cannot help being struck by the radical difference between Bush and
his world, and Petraeus and his. The 55-year-old general is a
superachiever who took on all the toughest training assignments and
came away with the medals, a perfectionist who demands as much from
others as from himself and a deeply reflective figure — he has a Ph.D.
in international relations from Princeton — who continually adapts to
the lessons of experience. Petraeus puts no special store by his gut
intuitions; in Iraq, he surrounded himself with junior officers as
analytical, and as driven, as he is. Robinson singles out as his
greatest gift not leadership but 'intellectual rigor,' which compelled
him 'to mount a sustained effort to understand the problem.'"
Washington Post:
- Jonathan Yardley on A Most Wanted Man by John le Carre: "As one who has reviewed his work for more than three decades, always
with admiration and at times with unfettered enthusiasm, I'd place A Most Wanted Man
toward the lower end of the 21 novels he has now written. It is
intelligent, of course, and immensely informative about espionage and
the people who engage in it, but its prose occasionally is flabby
(especially when the heroine is involved), the feelings its central
characters have for each other are utterly unconvincing, and it ends on
a note of clichéd, knee-jerk anti-Americanism that I find repellent.
Now in his late 70s, le Carré perhaps has earned the right to phone a
novel in, and phoned-in is what this one is."
- Amy Wilentz on Michelle: A Biography by Liza Mundy: "It's an odd beast, neither tabloid nor tome, less a biography than a
clip-job that incorporates interviews and profiles by many other
journalists, along with interviews that Mundy did in Chicago.... Even though this is a quickie book meant to
capitalize on the public's current interest in Michelle Obama, it also
manages, quietly and implicitly, to discount the paranoid fulminations
that she has often inspired, especially among right-wing commentators."
Los Angeles Times:
- Laurel Maury on The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones: "[C]ritics and pundits were weighing in on a work that almost no one had seen. So what exactly is the book like? 'The Jewel of Medina' is a second-rate bodice ripper or, rather, a
second-rate bodice ripper-style romance (it doesn't really have sex
scenes). It's readable enough, but it suffers from large swaths of
purple prose. Paragraphs read like ad copy for a Rudolph Valentino
movie.... I suspect Jones wanted to write a feminist text, sort of Islam 101 for
the post-'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' generation. I can't say whether,
from a religious point of view, 'The Jewel of Medina' is worth the
anguish it's caused, but as literature, it's a misstep-ridden,
pleasant-enough mediocrity."
- Thane Rosenbaum on What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire by Antonio Lobo Antunes: "Lobo Antunes has taken stream of consciousness to a new extreme. 'What
Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?' is a rushing river of interior
reflection, piercing imagery and excruciating shame. The debt owed to
Faulkner is apparent, with his cerebral self-awareness and utter
disregard of narrative and grammatical convention. Yet, this is most
assuredly not your grandmother's Faulkner -- Lobo Antunes is Faulkner
on crack. 'What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?' is a novel of abundant
ambition and astonishing grace, reaffirming the author's reputation as
a master stylist with a uniquely original voice."
Wall Street Journal:
- David M. Shribman on Reputation: Portraits in Power by Marjorie Williams: "Reputation: Portraits in Power,' ... only confirms our sense of
Ms. Williams as the Lytton Strachey of our time. This volume might have
been called 'Eminent Washingtonians.' 'Reputations' provides wonderful sketches, superb examples of a
silky stylist at the top of her art. If I had time enough or treasure I
would hand a copy to every freshman journalism student and say: Make
sure this genre does not die amid a flurry of podcasts and Twitters,
and while you're at it look up Lytton Strachey -- in the library, not
on Wikipedia."
Globe & Mail:
- Margaret Cannon on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: "Yet again, Scandinavia produces a brilliant, gifted author. Swede Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
is a dazzling debut with marvellous characters and a wonderful story
built around the most difficult of all plots, the locked room, although
here, it's remote island. This novel, a runaway bestseller in Europe,
will thrill North American readers as well."
The Guardian:
- Sean O'Hagan on John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman: "Norman is brilliant at evoking the postwar world from which the Beatles
emerged and to which their unprecedented global success signalled the
end. He vividly recreates Lennon's childhood in Liverpool, and his
often tumultuous family environment, providing in the process what is
the most rounded portrait to date of Lennon's wayward father.... This is the best life of Lennon to date ... if only for its
brilliant evocation of his childhood in postwar England, that repressed
and essentially Victorian society that shaped him and that he, more
than any other British pop star, helped tear down."
The New Yorker:
- Thomas Mallon on Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon by Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, and Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr.: "Among the nearly fifteen thousand books published on Lincoln since his
death, this one, which will appear next month, is an oddly magnificent
downer, lavish and pictorial, but more wince-inducing than anything
else, covering a post-Reconstruction era that prompted Frederick
Douglass to pronounce emancipation, in its actual practice, 'a
stupendous fraud' against Southern blacks and Lincoln himself."
--Tom
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Jill Abramson on The War Within by Bob Woodward: "Woodward’s evolving consciousness furnishes the true drama of these
books. There is damning material in all four volumes, but in the first
two, Woodward was unable or unwilling to fully acknowledge this. As the
war turned sour and Bush’s flaws overwhelmed his strengths, Woodward
began to reassess both Bush and his own earlier views. He ends by
providing readers not just the material to draw their own judgments but
a harsh judgment of Bush himself. In so doing, he has stepped much
closer to the role of biographer, not just stenographer."
- Maslin on The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder: "Mr. Buffett made a smart choice when he chose Alice Schroeder as his
Boswell. Yes, he found an appreciative biographer with whom he seems to
have a warm rapport. But he also found a writer able to keep pace with
the wild swerves in the Buffett story and the intricacies of Mr.
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway business empire. Ms. Schroeder is as insightful about her subject’s
precise anticipation of current financial crises as she is about his
quirky personal story. And she is a clear explicator of fiscal issues.
This sprawling, colorful biography will mesmerize anyone interested in
who Mr. Buffett is or how he got that way."
- Rachel Donadio on Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg: "Greenberg’s refusal — or inability — to think positively, or
reductively, is one of his best qualities. What sets 'Hurry Down
Sunshine' apart from the great horde of mediocre memoirs, with their
sitcom emotions and too neatly resolved fights and reconciliations, is
Greenberg’s frank pessimism, dark humor and fundamental incapacity to
make sense of his daughter’s ordeal, let alone to derive an uplifting
moral from it."
Washington Post:
- Elizabeth Hand on The Other Side of the Island by Allegra Goodman: "Allegra Goodman alludes to a number of children's classics in The Other Side of the Island, including Bridge to Terabithia , The Wizard of Oz and The Secret Garden.
It's a risky ploy, inviting comparison to beloved books. But in
Goodman's case, it pays off, as this gripping, beautifully written
novel may one day join their ranks. A dystopian page-turner, The Other
Side of the Island evokes other YA favorites -- in particular, Lois
Lowry's The Giver-- books that use well-worn tropes of science
fiction and coming-of-age tales to confront adult issues such as
authoritarian governments and global warming."
- Jonathan Yardley on American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, Movie-Making, and the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum: "The crime and its aftermath make for a compelling story, but you'd
scarcely know that from this dreadful book, a thoroughgoing dud from
first page to last.... What he's written
(and written badly...) is a piece
of hack journalism that attempts to fabricate connections between three
interesting men of the day but almost entirely fails to do so. My own
hunch is that Blum thinks he's written a nonfiction variation on the
themes played in E.L. Doctorow's celebrated novel Ragtime, but
such magic as Doctorow managed to extract from the same point in
American history is utterly absent in this contrived, plodding,
self-infatuated 'tome.'"
Los Angeles Times:
- Erin Aubry Kaplan on Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough: "Tough's book is about the magnitude of the task undertaken by one man
and his staff of acolytes, but Tough is more interested in what that
monumental task reveals about the rest of us. He lauds Canada's efforts
to give poor black children the opportunity he deeply believes they
deserve, but he also questions why society as a whole seems not to
share Canada's view. One thing Tough puts in stark relief is the fact
that the goal of equality in education has been replaced with
exhortations for excellence, a nice way of saying that every community
is on its own, including communities of poor black kids who need the
most help and suffer the worst effects of isolation."
New York Sun:
- I'm sorry to report that this will be the last time I'll be able to include the New York Sun in my weekly survey: after failing to find the necessary new investors to keep the upstart daily afloat, they will close
after seven years following tomorrow's issue. It is a bad time for
newspapers, and an even worse time to find investors. I know the paper
mainly through its book pages, and I'll be sorry to miss Adam Kirsch,
Benjamin Lytal, Laura Collins-Hughes, Eric Ormsby, and others whose
bylines always promised smart, thoughtful reviews.
- Adam Kirsch on The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed: "Ms. Gordon-Reed's greatest strength is her sense of justice, unimpaired
by piety toward a founding father. Reading 'The Hemingses of
Monticello,' it is impossible to ignore the vanity, complacency, and
racism that allowed the author of the Declaration of Independence to
treat the Hemingses as he did. But her sense of historical irony, of
the infinitely contradictory and perverse ways human beings can live
together and treat one another, is less vivid. 'The Hemingses of
Monticello' is better at judging the past than at entering into it,
which is why it is an easier book to admire than to enjoy."
- Alberto Manguel on The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges's Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Block: "Mr. Bloch notes in his preface that the ideal reader of his book is
Umberto Eco. Unworthy as I am to aspire to the condition of the great
polymath (with whom I share nothing but the girth and the beard), I was
delighted and instructed by the book's wit and wisdom, and grateful for
the guided tour through the mathematical foundations on which both the
Library of Babel and its mirror, our universe, are so delicately
balanced."
Wall Street Journal:
- Mark Skousen on The Gone Fishin' Portfolio by Alexander Green: "The financial crisis is so frustrating -- and so unpredictable from day
to day -- that you may want to hang it all up and go fishing. Please
do. In 'The Gone Fishin' Portfolio, Alexander Green -- a seasoned
analyst and former stockbroker -- outlines an investment strategy that
urges a kind of restfulness. He makes a case for a simple 'sleep well'
portfolio that, he says, entails less risk than many other strategies.
It requires no active management of an investor's account and no
forecasting."
Globe & Mail:
- Daryl Whetter on Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh: "In paraphrase, Ghosh's plot may seem designed to dramatize the opium trade, but Sea of Poppies
is in fact intricately woven and resolutely entertaining, with
escalating action and the self-motivated interaction of crisply
demarcated characters.... Reading the dynamic, energetic Sea of Poppies
is like playing three-dimensional chess. Each chapter or scene advances
a plot and then is followed by a new chapter or scene which advances
another plot. Not only that, the various plots combine, and they do so
to raise resonant questions. At the heart of this novel - the first in
a trilogy - are inquiries into how and why people are bound to one
another, to what extent an adult can change, and one's obligations to
fellow citizens."
- Martin Levin on The People on Privilege Hill by Jane Gardam: "Although all 14 stories have this magical and antic quality, the
emotional vibrations vary enormously. Befitting her age, Gardam more
than teases at infirmity and death, but the prospect of morbidity is
never morbid. This is an oddly cheerful collection, always hovering on
the fringes of belief, with healthy doses of skepticism."
The Guardian:
- Hari Kunzru on A Most Wanted Man by John le Carre: "As ever, Le Carré is particularly good at portraying the quiet
ruthlessness of intelligence organisations, and the terror of the
moment when an unsuspecting person drops through the trapdoor that
separates the everyday world from the secret one.... The exploitation of
human weakness both fascinates and disgusts him, and he is able to
weave the familiar elements of his fictional universe into a plot that
unwinds satisfyingly and with a certain sickening inevitability. A Most
Wanted Man is an uneven book, but despite its flaws it stands as one of
the most sophisticated fictional responses to the war on terror yet
published, a humane novel which takes on the world's latest binarism
and exposes troubling shades of grey."
- Christopher Brookmyre on Anathem by Neal Stephenson: "Weighing in at 800 head-stretching pages, Anathem demands a near-avout
level of commitment, but rewards those who enter its concent with
bounteous gifts of wisdom, beauty and 'upsight'. The only catch to
reading a novel as imposingly magnificent as this is that for the next
few months, everything else seems small and obvious by comparison."
The New Yorker:
- Adam Gopnik on John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand by Richard Reeves: "Certainly no one has ever been so right about so many things so much of
the time as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century English
philosopher, politician, and know-it-all nonpareil who is the subject
of a fine new biography by the British journalist Richard Reeves, 'John
Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand'. The book’s subtitle,
meant to be excitingly commercial, is ill chosen; a firebrand should
flame and then die out, while Mill burned for half a century with a
steady heat so well regulated that it continues to warm his causes
today—''Victorian Low-Simmering Hot Plate' might be closer to it."
--Tom
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: David Gates on Indignation by Philip Roth: "'Everyman' and 'Exit Ghost' both have a mood of sorrowful resignation;
this book goes about its grieving savagely. And of all Roth’s recent
novels, it ventures farthest into the unknowable. In his unshowy way,
with all his quotidian specificity and merciless skepticism, Roth is
attempting to storm heaven — an endeavor all the more desperately
daring because he seems dead certain it’s not there." On Tuesday, Kakutani was grouchier: "It’s a joke that Mr. Roth delivers with consummate poise and a couple
of bravura touches, but a joke, in the end, that doesn’t amount to a
full-fledged novel."
- Maslin on The Given Day by Dennis Lehane: "No more thinking of Mr. Lehane as an author of detective novels that
make good movies ('Gone, Baby, Gone') and tell devastatingly bleak
Boston stories ('Mystic River'). He has written a majestic, fiery epic
that moves him far beyond the confines of the crime genre. Shades
of Doctorow and Dreiser surround Mr. Lehane’s choice of 1919 as the
time for this expansive story. It is not simply the relatively
unexplored eventfulness of that year that makes 'The Given Day' so far
reaching; it’s the relentless fierce-terrible nature of the turmoil on
parade."
- A.O. Scott on Home by Marilynne Robinson: "She is somehow able to infuse what can sound like dowdy, common words —
words like courtesy and kindness, shame and forgiveness, transgression
and grace — with a startling measure of their old luster and gravity.
Phrases many of us have heard and known since childhood come in her
hands to have the depth of dark sayings, and her parable of a family’s
partial restoration is also a story to trouble your sleep and afflict
your conscience."
- James J. Sheehan on Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe by Mark Mazower: "'Hitler’s Empire' is a useful antidote to the argument — most recently advanced in Nicholson Baker's 'Human Smoke' — that World War II was neither necessary nor just. While
we should never underestimate or forget the appalling cost, Mazower’s
eloquent and instructive book reminds us what the world would have been
like if Hitler’s enemies had been unwilling or unable to pay the price
of defeating him."
Washington Post:
- Jonathan Yardley on Lehane's Given Day: "Lehane has done something brave and ambitious: He has written a
historical novel that unquestionably is his grab for the brass ring, an
effort to establish his credentials in literary as well as commercial
terms.... Meticulously researched and rich in period detail, it
pulls the reader so rapidly through its complex and interesting story
that it's easy to lose sight of its shortcomings. But they are there,
and they arise from the uneasy balance Lehane strikes (whether
consciously or not) between the conventions of suspense fiction and his
larger literary ambitions, as well as from his awkward attempt to
connect a famous historical figure of the period to his fictional
characters."
- James Mann on Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman: "Until now, I assumed it would take decades, the eventual
declassification of documents and considerably more historical
perspective for an author (say, some future Robert Caro ) to uncover and describe Cheney's secretive role. But Barton Gellman's outstanding new book, Angler, could well turn out to be the most revealing account of Cheney's activities as vice president that ever gets written.... There will almost certainly be no vice president as powerful as Cheney
for decades, and no account of what he has wrought that is as
compelling as this book."
Los Angeles Times:
- Sarah Weinman on Lehane's Given Day: "Despite its length and gargantuan scope of emotion and sociological
ramifications, 'The Given Day' is a smooth read. In that respect,
Lehane is as much like contemporaries George Pelecanos and Richard
Price as he is like the bygone Boston-based John P. Marquand, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who understood the masses could absorb
complex thought by turning the pages. 'The Given Day' may not pack the
devastating wallop of Marquand's masterwork 'Point of No Return,' but
it should draw unintended strength from the latter's title. From here
on in, Lehane should proceed as a novelist, without genre boundaries
imposed on him."
- Susan Salter Reynolds on Miss Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum: "'Ms. Hempel Chronicles' is a deeply affecting book because it reveals
that human beings, because we are human, often feel many different
emotions at once. We take on roles we are not always, strictly or
bureaucratically speaking, qualified to perform. And yet, our
vulnerability, our confusion often makes us infinitely more capable of
empathizing with and relating to others."
New York Sun:
- Benjamin Lytal on Kieron Smith, boy by James Kelman: "It is hard to imagine another boy narrator this realistic. Others,
like that of 'Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha,' would at least resolve their
narration into thoughts and scenes, but Mr. Kelman's runs on, showing
more than he tells.... What is realistic about it is the
extent to which it does not feel crafted. That means, however, that as a novel, 'Kieron Smith' can be less
than satisfying. Though a remarkable narrator, Kieron is not much
concerned with his listener's interests — he could not fathom them,
ostensibly. Though he grows throughout the book, and though the complex
relations within his family and his neighborhood provide ample material
for a plot, the resultant novel is not nearly as impressive as the
tissue from which it is made — Kieron's voice."
- James Panero on Antoine's Alphabet by Jed Perl: "In its oddity, the book gambles and wins. I hope that 'Antoine's
Alphabet' will become a cult classic among artists, a call to caprice,
in the way that Dave Hickey's 'Air Guitar,' a critic's libertarian
riff, gave license to a generation of artists to forego politics for
the rapture of the marketplace. In this capricious cross-pollination of
history and memoir, Jed Perl does not merely show us how to live. Like
Watteau, he illuminates the struggle to feel fully alive."
Wall Street Journal:
- Alan Pell Crawford on Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin by Bill Kauffman: "God, we're told, chooses the foolish to confound the wise, and the wise
men who guided America's founding ... were, to a man,
confounded by Luther Martin.
They were mistaken to take their
obstreperous opponent lightly, however, though foolish he could be. In
"Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet," a short and engaging biography
of Luther Martin, Bill Kauffman shows us a sot, a
quarrelsome bore, a butcher of the English language, an outspoken
abolitionist who himself owned slaves -- and a man who advanced
opinions at the Constitutional Convention that desperately needed to be
heard."
Globe & Mail:
- Michel Basilieres on Blackstrap Hawco by Kenneth J. Harvey (no US edition listed yet): "Harvey covers every period of Newfoundland history, illuminates
everything individual and characteristic about it, encompasses its very
being in these pages. Though more than 800 pages, it's a weightier tome
than that. By virtue of its sheer size and scope, it's a deep source of
impression, reflection and consideration. Its meticulous construction
and control contain a breadth of incident and characterization seen
only in the most ambitious and imposing novels. At the same time, Harvey's careful portrayal of detail in
Blackstrap's every move and all his senses brings the character's life
overwhelmingly to light. His mastery of an almost limitless array of
technique anchors this novel firmly in our time."
The Guardian:
- Veronica Horwell on Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez: "If there is to be any hope of persuading people to make perfume as much
a quotidian reward as wine and food have become these past 30 years,
there has to be a way to write about it that excites us, makes us
curious, makes us laugh. Turin has found it.
I've just blown all my
pocket money on sampling an unknown five-star wonder, Guerlain's Habit
Rouge, and it's Turin's fault for describing it as 'soft and rasping,
like stubble on a handsome cheek'." [Ed.: Yes! This is one of my
favorite books of the year, and I had never given this stuff a second
thought before.]
- Joanna Briscoe on The Believers by Zoe Heller (out in the US in March): "The Believers is an astonishingly well-observed slow burner, its virtuoso prose compressed and beautiful.... As a large, intelligent and stunningly written novel of a dysfunctional
New York family, The Believers is strongly reminiscent of Claire
Messud's The Emperor's Children. The Litvinoffs' knee-jerk 60s
radicalism could be an easy target for mockery, but Heller's touch is
light, and she reserves her more vicious satire for the bit-part
players. This is a subtle, funny and dark family farce about faith and
identity. It fails to satisfy completely, but in its thundering
confidence and lyricism, The Believers is the work of a writer at the
top of her game."
The New Yorker:
- Louis Menand on Lionel Trilling: "He did not consider himself a critic, either, and was surprised when he
heard himself referred to as one. His ambition was to be a great
novelist; he regarded his criticism as 'an afterthought.' He disliked
Columbia; he disliked most of his colleagues; he disliked teaching
graduate students—in 1952, after a routine disagreement over the merits
of a dissertation, he refused to teach in the graduate school again. He
was depressive, he had writer’s block, and he drank too much. He did
not even like his first name. He wished that he had been called John or
Jack."
--Tom
Note: with the Wall Street Journal putting more of their content online, I've added them to my weekly circuit.
New York Times:
- Sunday Book Review cover: Robert Stone on The Forever War by Dexter Filkins: "Now, in the tradition of 'Dispatches,' with the publication of Dexter
Filkins’s stunning book, 'The Forever War,' it seems the journals of
the brave correspondents assigned to the Middle East will take their
place as the pre-eminent record of America’s late-imperial adventures,
the heart of these heartless exercises in disaster, maybe some
consolation to those maimed and bereaved in them.... The contrast of his eloquence and humanity with the shameless snake-oil
salesmanship employed by the American government to get the thing
started serves us well."
- Jennifer Szalai on City of Refuge by Tom Piazza: "If all of this sounds both well intentioned and schematic, that’s
because it is. 'City of Refuge' seems to have been planned as a novel
about the triumph of virtue in the face of disaster; not a novel
concerned with what may or may not happen to virtue in the lives of
particular characters, but a novel in which the characters are deployed
to show that virtue will, in the end, prevail.... The haste with which so many lines seem to have been written, the
plucking of sentimentality’s low-hanging fruit, suggests a novelist who
assumes he can neglect literary possibilities in his pronouncement of
what he takes to be a Greater Truth."
- Maslin on Goldengrove by Francine Prose: "Her modest-sounding book turns out to be beautifully wrought.... 'Goldengrove' is one of Ms. Prose’s gentler books — far more so than
the bitingly satirical 'A Changed Man.' But it’s not a sentimental one.
It draws the reader into and then out of 'that hushed and watery border
zone where we live alongside the dead,' and it does this with mostly
effortless narrative verve. And it scorns the bathos of its genre, so
it does not become an invitation to wallow in suffering. It prefers the
comforts of strength, growth and
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