Issyvoo

The Dead Father is described by its publishers as “a novel,” and although that’s not quite right, still it is a more connected work of fiction than anything Barthelme has yet written. The connections are admittedly rudimentary: a recurring set of characters with ordinary names like Thomas, Julie, and Emma, who embark on a quest, broad comedy alternating with pathos, intimations of “larger” significances that are decently obscured by some attention to what’s human and social.

Edith Wharton might be brusque and aloof in person—with a mouth, an unkind observer said, “shaped like a savings box”—but she was a writer of unstinting empathy.

But the novel’s parallel between public, political madness and private breakdown seems artificial and heavy-handed. Violence and violation—always Oates’s favorite subjects—are more powerfully acted out in Mudwoman’s secret, internal drama.

Charlotte Rogan is not unfriendly to cliché, but at her best she writes her way through hackneyed and archetypal situations with such conviction that she refreshes them and gives them the power of myth.

Although realistically set in the present or recent past, these fictions have a particular timeless quality—almost an old-fashioned air. India itself is portrayed as a place of decay and confusion, a country that, in its race for the future, has lost sight of its past and of its natural splendor.

Graham Greene placed his own distinctive copyright on shabby little equatorial police states infused with self-pitying melancholy—Greeneland.

Desai is only a quiet writer if you aren’t properly listening.

The Lifeboat is both an enthralling story of survival at sea and a novel that is satisfyingly concerned with the character of its own storytelling… the book is an ambiguous document, at once self-exculpatory and incriminating, and this page-by-page doubleness forces the reader to weigh Grace’s words with unusual care and caution.

The daughter of a prominent forest entomologist at the University of Toronto, and an undergraduate at that university in the heady era of Northrop Frye, Atwood is more concerned with taxonomy than most writers…

… Banks solves the problem of the Kid’s lack of education and experience by allowing his interior monologues sometimes to imperceptibly slide into the author’s, or by description so skillfully done that we never object that the Kid identifies a sophisticated list of Everglade birds without having ever read the bird guides of Roger Tory Peterson.

Banks makes the point in a number of his novels that our notions of manhood are self-destructive, and that this is a serious problem in American society.

The deliberate elegance of the prose makes a certain point. Style, in Hollinghurst’s work, is the great leveler—it brings within the orbit of serious fiction subjects and acts that other writers, even gay writers, might “tastefully” elide.

You find yourself performing a parody of scholarship as you shuttle between the text and the endnotes, and reach for the dictionary to look up “imbricate,” “annulation,” or whether “amonymous” is a misprint or a word in its own right. (It is, I think, the former—unless it’s a coinage deriving from Amon, the goetic demon and a marquis of Hell.)

If my summary seems to suggest that some elements in 1Q84 are trashy, so be it. Murakami is a great democrat when it comes to subject matter and plot development. Digressions on the St. Matthew Passion, The Brothers Karamazov, and Chekhov’s book on Sakhalin vie for air time with observations on, and citations from, Sonny and Cher and Harold Arlen.

Solar is full of accidents on the level of plot that are crafty strokes of intention on the level of plotting.

Banville is most appealing to those who appreciate style, who relish the music of exquisite diction and imagery, who regard the novel as a controlled performance.

But Franzen, judging from the evidence of this novel, doesn’t want to be Jane Austen; he wants to be Tolstoy. Courtship and marriage comprise only a part of his book. […] Freedom’s ambition is to be the sort of novel that sums up an age and that gets everything into it, a heroic and desperate project.

For the most part Franzen writes as if literary modernism and experimental postmodernism had never occurred.

One cannot read Lethem without sensing this solitude, its muted suffering, its desperate cheerfulness and claustrophobia, along with the other compensatory mechanisms employed to deal with it.

But panic about signification, about representation, gradually takes over both Perkus Tooth and the novel itself, so that its closing pages begin, almost literally, to start gasping for breath—to be drawn in, I think, by their own emptiness.

…Sea of Poppies is an allegory, though unlike Moby-Dick, the greatest seafaring book of all, the allegory is political and, too often, obvious. Still, Ghosh’s description of this period in India’s history as an epic adventure story is not only extremely engaging, it is at the heart of what the author is doing. Sea of Poppies is the downstairs to Kipling’s upstairs.

The Great Railway Bazaar re-invested railway travel with the interest and romance of Twain’s day, replacing that age’s thrill of the modern with the appeal of the neglected and quaint.

Theroux seems rather disenchanted with the kind of personality his first book did so much to encourage. The traveler’s worst nightmare, he writes, isn’t the secret police or malaria “but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.”

The problem for the later biographer will be separating the invention in his nonfiction and the fact in his fiction, two categories of the literary form that Theroux has always chosen (in that excusing word) to “subvert.”

Indeed, much of Auster’s dramatis personae is made up of character actors playing various stock eccentrics and oddballs, while his male protagonists usually resemble one another, being clones of Paul Auster.

In Banks’s world, geography is a kind of grim destiny, with character—more specifically, his people’s incomplete grasp of their own—reliably finishing the job.

James’s language in his fiction was both mask and pure revelation; he played with the drama between circumlocution and bald statement.

Ellison was splendid as a brilliant, boldly pro-American Negro writer who declined to believe that another black person could write or had written a novel as deserving as his of a place in the front rank of modern American literature.

O’Hagan’s strategy—his use of David as the unreliable first-person narrator—is all the more successful for the degree of risk involved. With the exception, of course, of his conversations with others, we see David’s world only through his own eyes, willfully blind though they often are.

There are few writers currently at work who are so genuinely and unfashionably engaged with literature’s big, old questions—aesthetics, ethics, politics, religion, authenticity.

DeLillo the novelist prepared us for September 11, but he did not prepare himself for how such an episode might, in the way of denouements, instantly fly beyond the reach of his own powers.

Many of DeLillo’s novels are propelled by an acute sense of communal dread—of crowds, of surveillance, of the desperate “creativity” of the terrorist, of an “airborne toxic event”—and long before living history affirmed a number of his paranoid presumptions, his novels were making the case for America as a place where nothing very much was reliably innocent or safe.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres did much to spread a violent and gloomy picture of the period in which Romanesque and Gothic art was produced.

As a product of that drab decade (born 1929), I am here to attest that it was nothing like as inhibited as McEwan makes out. Practical experience may have been difficult to acquire before the Pill, but sexual ignorance as profound as that of Edward and Florence seems hard to credit in an era when most college students, even those who weren’t literary, worshiped D.H. Lawrence, believed in his cult of orgasm, and measured themselves accordingly.

Where Oates excels is in her ability to inhabit her doomed or depraved people—she calls it being “haunted” by them—even as they take us into some very dark places.

The plot can verge on the melodramatic—the bleak cemetery, the tyrannical father, the cruel townfolk, the young girl fleeing with her baby—but similar elements can be found in the great novel-tragedies of Dostoevsky and Zola. […] Oates is never merely a realist; she’s also an artist of the sublime, conveying both awe and grandeur.

He was fearless in his depiction of the play of [Isabel’s] consciousness; her high ideals, her need for freedom were dramatized against repression and dark restriction. In concentrating on her fate in the world, he created one of the most magnificent figures in the large and sprawling house of fiction.

You will have to keep on reading the delicious prose. Everything fits inside with a satisfying snap, like the hasp on a jewel box or the folding of a fan. And left in the air, like smoke, are ghosts and grace notes.

A number of younger writers saw in him an example of how to escape the crabbed confines of English letters, and sought to write with a similar freedom, irreverence, and energy. Money did for the writers of the 1980s what Lucky Jim had done for their counterparts a generation earlier.

Thanks to McPhee’s elegant prose and his close observation, we learn a great deal about the machines, but even more about the people who operate them. The author takes almost boyish pleasure in describing how to actually operate a towboat, or a mile-long coal train, and it is the pilots, engineers, and skippers he encounters who are the true “uncommon carriers” of his title.

It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. […] No immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place. Something of the kind seems to have happened here.

He writes about the mind’s ability to notice and speculate, desire and understand, with an old-fashioned novelist’s ease. He writes wonderfully about changes in mood, a new arrival in a room, the aura around an object, the power of weather.

No American novelist of the twentieth century has done more than Doctorow—now in his seventy-fifth year and the author of nine novels in addition to short stories, critical essays, screenplays, and a play—to enliven the historical novel, already by the 1930s a musty sideline in American literature.

The March is stylishly written—his model, here as elsewhere, is F. Scott Fitzgerald—but it seems, despite its considerable length, a smaller, less ambitious book than one might have expected in view of his subject.

Rather than invent some implausible Indian characters, Farrell confined himself to describing the insular British and their claim to rule justly a country they, like Farrell, didn’t, or couldn’t, much understand.

…the girl is transformed, over the course of the novel, from a virtual blank slate crudely scribbled upon, first by her brutish father and brothers, then by an abusive boyfriend, into something of an earth mother.

…His Dark Materials ends not as a riposte to Lewis or a crushing indictment of authoritarian dogma but as an invocation of the glory, and a lamentation for the loss, which I fear is irrevocable, of the idea of childhood as an adventure, a strange zone of liberty, walled, perhaps, but with plenty of holes for snakes to get in.

The Adventures of Augie March is not the summing-up of a life but a mid-term report. By the end of the report Augie is still not sure whether he is for or against the hotel, for or against the American dream.

The appealing fantasy of a restaurant where strangers come as if to family meals is rebuked by Ezra’s own difficult family, who continually upset the meals he so painstakingly tries to arrange, and constitutes an apt metaphor for the fiction of Anne Tyler, which manages to be both comforting and gently rebuking.

Tyler’s favored characters are not slow-witted so much as quietly subversive, refusing to behave as others wish them to behave. They tend to seem, or to be, sexless, with the defiance of overgrown children.

Hosts of reviewers have thrown up their hands at her ever-expanding body of work and criticized her for writing too much, or revising too little, and for other actual or imagined literary infractions.

Three witty sentences on a page may delight; a dozen witty sentences on a page is torture, a constant check to Garrison Keillor’s occasional surges of narrative power.

…his own voice is effectively hidden by his mischievous choice of Aaron Burr, the bad boy among the Founders, as his protagonist and narrator, whom he allows to skewer the national heroes with devastating wit.

The ability to look critically, even cruelly, at beloved friends and relatives is extended to Vidal’s appraisal of historical figures with whom he has become intimate in the way that historians can.

People today read Democracy not as a roman à clef but as a gallery of political types and as a novel of political ideas. […] The cast of Adams’s Democracy populates Washington today, which is why the book is still in print.

A novelist’s responsibility to her characters is not at all the same thing as her responsibility to other, real, people. Atonement is an ethical rather than an aesthetic idea; it doesn’t make sense to talk about atoning to a fictional being. Briony seems not to notice this—which is in character, since her sense of other people’s existence was always weaker than her wish to have the world “just so.”

…self-questioning produced at least one work of unsurpassed brilliance, Marc Bloch’s Étrange Défaite.

I don’t know of any other case where literary characters have aroused such animosity, and where a writer of fiction has been so severely censured for failing to understand the offensiveness of his creations. In fact, Salinger understood the offensiveness of his creations perfectly well.

Their shared breakdown, depression, and loneliness suggest that perhaps Sebald sees Austerlitz as his doppelgänger, “mon semblable, mon frère,” the person he might have been, had he been Jewish.

Reading Look Homeward, Angel is today a recovery of time or a visit to the bygone in the manner of nineteenth-century fiction with its blacksmiths, ragmen, people on foot for seven miles after returning from the sea.

He was outsize in every respect; hugeness is his dominating iconography. Six feet four-and- a-half inches tall; awkward, handsome, impressive, and intimidating. A prodigious drinker and brawler, sleepless to produce the pages that arrived at the publisher in a crate, or so it was said.

Infinite Jest is, to my knowledge, the longest novel about tennis ever published.

The abrupt down-tumble of the diction exemplifies one of the novel’s central devices—the clash between one or another of Ireland’s constricting gentilities and the sordid actuality which it conceals. Or rather, which it used to conceal.

…a fine writer—too ambitious, perhaps, at times too portentous about history and Ireland, but in these times ambition is too rare to require apology.

… we observe the transformation of the narrator from the impoverished and outcast child in the Ireland of the Sixties into obsessed killer, while remaining fairly cheerful. It is as though Stephen King had learned how to write.

The structure of Roth’s fiction is based often upon identifying tirades rather than actions and counter-actions, tirades of perfervid brilliance, and this is what he can do standing on his head or hanging out the window if need be. The tirades are not to be thought of as mere angry outbursts in the kitchen after a beer or two, although they are usually angry enough since most of the characters are soreheads of outstanding volubility.

Roy stretches the English language in all directions.

In describing Bernhard Landauer in Goodbye to Berlin, furthermore, he was alert enough to notice something he called “the arrogant humility of the East.” This is hugely preferable to the abject credulity he manifests in the presence of the Swami.

American Pastoral is a sort of Dreiserian chronicle of the Levov family. Their painfully built fortune, even without the disgrace, might have declined owing to obsolescence, slower than a bomb, but going by the name of bankruptcy.

[Prater Violet] is a satirical miniature about the absurdity of the early movie industry, with that same absurdity thrown into even sharper relief by the imminence of war and fascism.

Ellen Olenska is one of the splendid women of American fiction—alluring, conflicted, vulnerable, blithely and touchingly truthful—and we see her entirely through his eyes, in a few hurried encounters; she speaks a sibylline modicum of words in the course of the novel.

Carver’s people are like artists or inventors alone in knowing how their systems work. They lose track of what else they know. If it wasn’t in their design, it must be random. Carver sees both the destructive and creative results of their bad timing.

Of the major books, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres seems to me an even greater achievement than The Education of Henry Adams, if only because the feeling it yields to, its exultation in the invoked presence of the Virgin, floats free of Adams’s irony, which in the other books is repetitive.

… I wish I were surer here that McCabe sees what Francie does not, that insofar as he punishes other people for feeling bad himself, he is only repeating his father’s beastliness.

Lewis maintained that the idea for a novel whose subject would be a small midwestern market town came to him in 1905. I should suspect that it was always there. Village life was the first thing that he had known and, sooner or later, writers usually deal with their origins.

Babbitt was intended to be the account of a single day in the life of the eponymous protagonist […] from the moment that he awakens with, significantly, a hangover to the end of the day, but by that time Lewis had decided that one day wasn’t going to be enough for him to do his stunts in, so the story continues another year or two, and a Mid-western Bloom was not to be.

Although I know nothing about her personal convictions, her handling of spiritual matters has a wry, temperate feel. […] Saint Maybe winds up being something of a curious creation: a secular tale of holy redemption.

While still an Oxford undergraduate, he had repeatedly played Russian roulette, in search of a permanent holiday from the world. The world gets a grim report in his fiction. For Pinkie in Brighton Rock, “the world never moved: it lay there always, the ravaged and disputed territory between two eternities.”

The first puzzle of Henry Adams’s poised and urbane book is its crackpot ending. After pages of erudite sidlings and ironic doublings back, Adams finally whips out a placard and joins the nutty parade that says The End Is Near.

The strange thing is that the book is not at all like a detective story, with its buildup, ready-made psychology, the careful selection of detail. This is the real thing, whether because of the chill of the atmosphere […] or the sheer skill of the author, who has managed to avoid any of the merely vivid banalities that are the stock in trade of sensationalist and murder fiction.

In a nation that thinks of itself as having a special destiny, [Billy] can only stay true to his own sense of balance by refusing to be absorbed in the communal myths of destiny—that of the gang as well as that of “one’s country.” He remains the only one who can appreciate his own performance, can be the juggler and the juggled, the judge and the judged.

The more he saw of medieval France in that golden time when Americans of his class were the happy few to enjoy Europe for its monuments, landscapes, food, and wine, the more his almost too supple imagination fastened on the thirteenth century as a drama of genius, taste, aspiration.

Professor Eco is a word man, and when his always incipient logorrhea takes over, there’s nothing to do but step aside and let the spate run its course.

Like the movies of Ingmar Bergman, which also suggest many “profound” speculations but which fade overnight into a memory of impressive commonplaces, the novel of Umberto Eco is a structure of impressionistic illusions. Or would be, if it weren’t for the blessed injection of a blunt, tough sense of humor.

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

Because I had to memorize most of Genesis, my first consciousness was that of a cosmos, and in that cosmos I was a Jew.

The tragic force of this ambitious early novel—early in her career at least—has to do with the broadness of conception, the immediacy of the strokes and scenes, rather than, as was so often later the case, a concentration upon details of manners…

Today, of course, ‘popular’ means bad writing that is widely read while good writing is that which is taught to involuntary readers.

…Powell was that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less final, down payment on Love or The Family; she saw life with a bright Petronian neutrality, and every host at life’s feast was a potential Trimalchio to be sent up.

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

Powell sets the A Time (Magazine?) to be Born in that time not to be born, the rising war in the West […] I know of no one else who has got so well the essence of that first war-year before we all went away to the best years of no one’s life.

Tanizaki’s dynamic blend of dissatisfaction and openness, his heightened sense of the contrary pulls of tradition and innovation, gave him an ideal vantage for analyzing the shifting of his own culture.

White Noise is a meditation on themes of whiteness—the pallor of death, and white noise, the sound, so emblematic of modern life, that is meant to soothe human beings by screening out the other, more irritating noises of their civilization.

After many readings, Myra Breckinridge continues to give wicked pleasure, and still seems to have fixed the limit beyond which the most advanced aesthetic neopornography ever can go.

His novels have all the unpredictability and changeability of mountain weather, and are marked by an almost compulsive disregard for the laws of genre.

Indeed, at the risk of sounding prim, I would guess that most, perhaps all of this character’s life crises would melt away like mist if he stopped getting drunk, cut back on casual sex, stopped gluttonous consumption of unappetizing food, and took exercise.

The witches act as moral agents of someone else, whether of the author it would be impertinent to speculate, dispatching the foolish, the feeble, the left-wing, or the merely irritating according to their deserts, or worse, you may feel, for the standards by which people are judged are severe.

Ryszard Kapuscinski has delivered to us what may be the last message from a time when societies did not change, when the life of one generation was the life of the next.

I remember well, incidentally, that when the explosion of 1980 finally arrived and the government was obliged to sign the series of revolutionary social agreements with the workers, Mr. Kapuscinski coined a phrase that for a few weeks was on the lips of every official. “In the past, we have learned only from our mistakes. Now we are learning from our experience.” I have brooded on this apothegm ever since, concluding that—especially in a country whose experience consists mostly of its own mistakes and those of other powers—it means nothing whatever.

…the accumulation of sadistic flourishes only serves to distance us from the experience, to turn it into a virtuoso literary exhibition—a novelistic form of knife-juggling.

We judge South African writers less by their quality than by the risks they take in putting the wall of their own dissidence between ourselves and the black Africa we praise and fear. We love them for being South African for us.

It is a very long time since I read a book of more than five hundred pages with no awareness of its length, beyond a wish at the end that it was longer.

The common man abides most curiously in Bound for Glory as the hero of a bright future and the villain of a dark past.

Ragtime, comic and working with simpler material, risked less and succeeded, but one could complain of the stately and ambitious Loon Lake that by attempting to look more broadly at American history, it seems the more constrained by an ideology which explains or convokes the experience of only some Americans, without having the exemplary power of an ambiguous fictional world to expand the experience of others.

For years he thought he had a subject, a big book about the Salinas valley that only he could write. But all that came of this was East of Eden, a bloated, pretentious, and uncertain book.

Like any other idealistic and perceptive person, Doctorow has a complaint about history, that it contained brutality and villainy. The indignation which breaks through the lyricism or funny bits in all his work suggests despair about human nature itself (and why not?), but also a demand for some sort of apology…

All the Murdoch sleight-of-hand is brought into play here: exotic scene-setting, intricate patterns of coincidence and relationship, ambivalent sexual currents, a seemingly unlimited supply of plot…

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.

It is a kind of chorale for Alaskan voices, and gives the reader a strong sense of the kind of original, skeptical, resourceful people who have come here. With what patience McPhee records, and with what fascination one reads…

John McPhee, a writer who is able to be interesting on almost any subject, is particularly skilled at presenting the dynamics of those complicated conflicting forces. An outdoorsman, romantic but also astute and accepting, he understands the wilderness, he appreciates naïveté, and he also sees who will sell out whom.

There is a sense in which the use of myth is evasive. Morrison’s effect is that of a folktale in which conventional narrative qualities like unity and suspense are sacrificed to the cumulative effects of individual, highly romantic or mythic episodes, whose individual implausibility, by forcing the reader to abandon the criteria of plausibility, cease to matter

…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.

…one feels that Jhabvala has conveyed the sense of a failure to reconcile individual lives with the social order—a failure registered impassively, almost incuriously. All that mitigates this conclusion is her hint that women, with a feeling that men do not have for the peculiar hierarchy of sex and spirit, might come to terms with the Indian mysteries.

I am not sure that my progress through all these dull little sentences has been entirely justified […] but there is no doubt that beneath the mannerisms, the infantile chic, the ill-digested culture of an alien world, Barthelme does have a talent for, of all things in this era, writing. Shall I quote an example? I think not. Meanwhile, Barthelme himself says, “I have trouble reading, in these days. I would rather drink, talk or listen to music…. I now listen to rock constantly.” Yes.

Henry James in a short story set in Washington describes a distinguished figure based on Henry Adams. As the character draws up a guest list for a party, he says, finally, wearily: Well, why not be vulgar? Let us ask the President.

There was more than a degree of sourness in Henry’s old age; after all, he was living across the park from the White House where grandfather and great-grandfather had presided. As compensation, his beautiful memoir is filled with a good deal of mock humility, confessions of “failure,” and a somewhat overwrought irony.

Like all the Adamses the sons were voluminous writers and Henry was a writer of genius even though his brother Charles wrote rather better prose.

There is a wavering of style running through the book […]: a note of what ought to be parody but actually reads like fine writing smuggled in behind the shifts of narrative point of view.

It’s hard to make a whole book out of what Doctorow does best here; it’s excellent in vignettes and short passages but unsuited for plots where we come to know the characters too well. […] After the story gets into full swing Doctorow can’t keep us from relaxing with his fictions, and as a result story makes his history predictable and easy just as politics makes Dos Passos’s history predictable and easy in U.S.A.

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, is a dreadful mess. There are some excellent scenes, but much wasteful floundering, too.

During the last quarter century Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found that special place but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere.

It has the true charm of insolence, what Nietzsche must have meant when he wrote that after reading the New Testament he had to reread the “prankish mocker Petronius” to become clean again.

One takes one’s chances with Iris Murdoch.

Slaughterhouse Five tells us time is an eternal present tense, so that no one dies, but merely seems to be in bad shape at the moment of death.

…prior apologists for Burr have been loyal enough to the tedious orthodoxies of our history to limit their imaginations to the portrait of a virtuous man misunderstood by almost as virtuous but inexplicably antagonistic contemporaries. Vidal is an altogether more enjoyable strategist; and, if he cannot quite get the rope off Burr’s neck, he can at least get it around Jefferson’s and Washington’s.

Whatever else it is or isn’t, U.S.A. is an epic of modern American loneliness, of people in transit from somewhere that hasn’t worked out to somewhere else, where things may be better.

Some of the gags […] are so lamentable that they amount almost to a metaphysical proposition, a late form of Vonnegut statement: life has degenerated to a level beneath that of a lousy joke.

I am tempted to think a writer should just not write, or at least not publish, under these circumstances, and certainly that would be tactful. But on further thinking I find I admire Vonnegut for going ahead. A writer’s business is writing, after all, and maybe even terrible jokes do some good; or maybe some of the jokes are not as bad as all that.

The model for Burr seems to be Henry Adams; and, since Vidal can dress for any part, we ought not to be surprised at how alike they turn out to be. […] The difference is that Adams was generally too respectable to give credence to allegations against the successful; thus the slave Sally Hemings identified by gossip as Jefferson’s mistress is an invention to Adams and a fact to Vidal.

Gibbon pointed—but only pointed—him toward Julian the Apostate; and Julian has the particular charm of making us imagine that we have come not upon one of Gibbon’s pupils but upon one of his sources.

Again, Mr. Fowles sometimes converts his determination not to let us forget the 20th century auspices of his 19th century tale into an impertinent (in the strongest sense) donnishness….

Indeed, many of Vonnegut’s stories seem made up merely of bright notions and metaphors surrounded by wastelands of writing so flat and graceless that, should it ever be judged as having anything to do with ordinary life on this planet, it would be considered grimly sentimental.

The tone of judgment surrounds all the events of the book, jostling the reader again and again into an atmosphere of self-pity, into moments thick with unearned, lyrical agonies.

Graham Greene has something like a neo-romantic’s appetite for the disasters and the betrayals of the contemporary world. People and places are sardonically tested for damnation; his ingenious talent has dramatized the old Calvinist thrill.

His latest novel is a resourceful, compassionate, intensely critical and imaginative statement of a colonial crack-up, but not a bald and impersonal one. It is put together ingeniously as a mosaic of recurring themes.

Still Guthrie’s was the kind of life Bob Dylan dreamed of: leaving home for hard traveling, on the road with migrant workers and hobos, singing for nickels and dimes in boom towns, hunting odd jobs in towns that had gone dry, and always putting his songs to work, in railroad jungles, in Hoovervilles, on picket lines.

It is cheering to deduce from the modest success of The Baron in the Trees that there is still interest in something quite other than the Great American Novel (and smaller British one), the Apocalyptic-Excremental or Sexual Variations without a Theme, that there is still interest in an art which is more concerned with life and growth than with decay and death.

The Magus is like a colossal bouillabaisse, combining black magic, occultism, psychological brainwashing techniques, Mediterranean travelogues, forgery, flagellation, Nazi atrocities (described in loving detail), voyeurism, hypnotism, battle scenes, fin de siècle naughtiness, and venereal disease…

Whatever its “genre,” In Cold Blood is admirable: as harrowing as it is, ultimately, though implicitly, reflective in temper. Capote’s possessiveness towards his subject is understandable in terms of the industry, intelligence, and passion he has brought to the book’s making.

In all her writing Mrs. Lessing has returned time and again to the study of lost and alienated beings in some of the major proletariats of the modern world, notably the African natives and poor whites of Rhodesia, where she grew up or the emancipated woman of twentieth-century urban society, educated, articulate, and yet as much a prey to sexual exploitation as her unliberated counterparts in less enlightened times.

It is the index of Vidal’s achievement that he makes us understand how Christianity could appear to a learned, sophisticated, Plotinus-inspired religious pagan as a barbarous regression into the illiberal and the absurd, a return to death-worship.

If A Single Man seems tired, it is also true in feeling. It is a sad book, with a biological melancholy running through it, a sense of relentless reduction, daily diminishment.

Her eye sees with a knife’s edge, but her hand, overwary of drama and surprise, blunts the stroke. The book like a person in depression is dull in its basic condition—it comes to life only by a stirring, a moment of inspiration, then it lapses into dullness again.

The formula of The Ginger Man was more or less irresistible: a New York Irishman goes to dreary post-war Dublin and gleefully re-Joyces the joint.