Issyvoo

Robert Towers’s opinions on others

• Anne Tyler

  Like the Rabbit novels of John Updike, her books expertly render a familiar world in which our own observations are played back to us, slightly magnified, and with an enhanced clarity.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Robert Towers New York Review of Books 1988
• Breathing Lessons

  I can think of no one who captures the flavor of car travel in America today better than Anne Tyler…

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Robert Towers New York Review of Books 1988
• The Cement Garden

  Though their collective pathology and deprivation are indeed extreme, the four children are made to seem entirely credible—in their avoidances as well as in their speech and overt behavior. Nor have sympathy and implicit pity been withheld.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Robert Towers New York Review of Books 1979
• Slaughterhouse-Five

  …the fact that Billy Pilgrim periodically becomes “unstuck” in time provides a lively device for dramatizing that poor schlemiel’s non-progress through life both before and after the Dresden firebombing; on the other hand, Billy’s abduction to the planet Tralfamadore and his experiences there are a tiresome intrusion, a failed invention that never gets off the ground but does get in the way of the war experiences, which are often vivid and occasionally moving.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Robert Towers New York Review of Books 1976