Issyvoo

There is a curiously double level to this novel. The surface is enthralling as narrative. It is impressive as writing. But above that surface is the aura that I spoke of, intangible and powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds that you have seen in summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire. And that is the surface of the novel that has filled me with such excitement.

Reading McElroy’s fiction the reader gets an eerie sense that his narrators are simultaneously in the world and circling it like a lost satellite.

Terse truisms occasionally bog down Yoshimoto’s prose […] But much of the action unfolds through artful dialogue and a nimble fusion of romantic and existential reflection.

Mr. DeLillo’s novels published after Sept. 11 have tended to be disappointing, substituting gauzy musings about mortality and time for dead-on observation, Pinter-esque silences for razzle-dazzle dialogue and tactile prose.

The book will be another huge success, for reasons not mistaken but insufficient. Certainly as a testament of suffering nobly borne, which is what it will be generally taken for, it is exemplary. However, it is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.

As Eskimos do with snow, the English see gradations of social inadequacy invisible to the rest of the world; Mr. Hollinghurst separates them with a very sharp knife.

She has […] created a body of work distinguished by its sober, often bracing prose, its patient eye for all-telling detail and its humane but penetrating intelligence about middling people faced with middling prospects.

Filled with astonishing immediacy and presence, fleshed out with detail that seems firsthand, The Tiger’s Wife is all the more remarkable for being the product not of observation but of imagination.

Banks is slow to reveal exactly what the Kid did or why he did it. Lost Memory of Skin unfolds suspensefully, deriving an eerie moral tension from the question of just which laws the Kid actually broke.

Howard Jacobson recently described himself to The New York Times as “an English writer who happens to know about Jews and would like to write like Jane Austen, with a little bit of Yiddish,” adding that he’d rather be called “the Jewish Jane Austen” than “the English Philip Roth.” In saying this, he only affirmed the impression that his characters may be autobiographical in their self-delusions.

This being a sci-fi metafiction, the world is the novel and vice versa: Yu’s story-line geometry does sometimes lack complexity, and while P. Y. isn’t exactly a hero, he does at least get a starring role in his own stasis. The nerdy science fiction of time travel, the framework underlying the novel’s world, while likewise incomplete and not always convincing, is enjoyably batty.

Sometimes I do wish I’d taken some fiction workshops, because occasionally I’ll read an interview with a writer and they’ll be talking about something craft-y and I’ll realize I have no idea what they’re referring to. I’ll get that feeling of being a fraud, that in a basic way I don’t even know how to construct a proper story. But it’s probably too late for me now.

…one might find in Toussaint’s truncations an admirable rebellion against a world that’s submerged in too much information and too little beauty.

Lethem has been at this long enough that the style has become recognizably his own: knowing and exuberant, with beautiful drunken sentences that somehow manage to walk a straight line.

Deeti’s weakness as a character may stem from Ghosh’s desire to be an archaeologist of the powerless. That’s a noble ambition, but it turns Deeti into little more than a skeleton on which to hang a history.

After reading the auto-hagiography of the Turkmen leader Niyazov, Theroux summarizes it as “pages and pages … most of it self-reverential.” He could be writing a press release for his own book.

…the author has produced what is arguably his most powerful book yet: a novel that subjugates his penchant for postmodern pyrotechnics to the demands of the story at hand…

In the ruins of 9/11, relationships are a non sequitur. Disconnectedness is the new currency. Language is fragmented. Vision is distorted. […] While there are just enough signposts to keep Falling Man tethered to a recognizable reality, it’s an askew, alternative-reality variation on the literal, as if we, too, were taking it in through Keith’s unfocused gaze.

That people might be made whole by what they are denied—a paradox to start with, it runs wholly counter to the logic of the times. But what else describes a sacred man’s job? His renunciations can’t be ours, but they can cast our own worldliness in an importantly compromised light.

For [Chabon] plot is, like chess, no more and no less than a beautiful game, something to be played as scrupulously and passionately as you can, but warily—with an eye to the danger that the game could start playing you.

Edward wants sex, Florence is sure she doesn’t. The situation is miniature and enormous, dire and pathetic, tender and irrevocable. McEwan treats it with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan’s written…

…regardless of their setting, her books have tended to pivot around certain persistent themes: the relationship between the individual and society; the tension between domesticity and freedom, responsibility and independence; and the tug of war between human will and the imperatives of love, betrayal and ideological faith.

Auster, who once called a novel The Music of Chance and used to play the human Uncertainty Principle for spooky atonal up-to-date effects, has chosen this time to sing a simpler tune that would seem to be beneath him, intellectually.

50 or 100 years hence, will people still be amused by Thompson’s psychedelic ramblings or the early Wolfe’s strings of exclamation points? More lasting, I think, as a grand pointillist mural of our time and place as expressed in the lives of an encyclopedic range of people, will be the books of John McPhee.

Don Ainsworth, strongly opinionated collector of leather boots made from every animal from anteater to water buffalo, with whom McPhee crosses the country in the cab of a chemical tanker truck, so loves “manicuring the ship” — the mirror-like sheen of his stainless steel tank — that he pays extra to have it washed in deionized water that leaves no spots.

This is an exquisitely bleak incantation—pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes.

Messud writes with the amused candor of someone who lacks a native’s attachment. (The American-born daughter of a Canadian mother and an Algerian French father, she grew up in Australia and Canada and was educated at Yale and the University of Cambridge.)

But in this sort of book portentous rhetoric, preferably laced with classical allusions, is an absolute requirement: an air of consequence must hang heavy over even the most trivial actions, the most ordinary settings. The idea is to suspend us in a lyrical trance while we wait—and wait and wait—for the penny to drop.

To love Love Me, it probably helps to be a writer and also half Norwegian. […] Keillor’s forte, though, is hitting those wry, eyebrow-arching notes that ring true no matter who you are or where you’re from.

Spry and playful, sly and macabre…

His protagonists are likable because they’re so painfully self-aware, even when screwing up. They know their limitations.

…the book’s length feels like its author’s arms stretching farther and farther to encompass more people, more life. His narrator is a soul who inhabits a liminal realm, a creature able to bridge the divisions that plague humanity…

Sebald, though in no current sense a postmodernist, has left far behind modernism’s vision of a world in fragments. His vision, on the contrary, is of a terrible connectedness.

By turns funny and corrosive, portentous and affecting, The Corrections not only shows us two generations of an American family struggling to make sense of their lives, but also cracks open a window on a sullen country lurching its way toward the millennium.

Needless to say, Philip Pullman’s parallel purposes are hard to reconcile. The author as God must lean from his heaven and direct affairs in the way he requires them to go, and we mortal readers must erect small gantries from which to suspend our varieties of disbelief.

…while social information should be more highly prized than it is in the modern literary novel, Atwood sometimes operates with the indiscriminate retrieval of an Internet search engine set to “display all.”

Mr. Auster’s prose shifts its essence in the same ways that the accumulation of significant events shifts the reader’s focus. At times the prose is transparent, at others it humorously calls attention to the mystery novel genre with light parody.

The power of “The Sacred and Profane Love Machine” lies not so much in the story itself — it has a plot which, in other hands, might easily amount to no more than a novelette — but in the author’s intent, compassionate and analytic eye upon the story.

Whether personal or political, all attitudes, stands, positions in the Kunderian vision come up short. He will kill off three of his quartet and allow the fourth to disappear from the book, presumably from a lightness of being; but his true story, the one to which he gives honest service, is the operation of his own mind as it formulates and finds images for the disastrous history of his country in his lifetime.

As it is, while Singh (or Naipaul) ponders on meanings, we wait in vain for the novel to happen. These recollected events fail to shatter the even tenor of the memoirist’s voice and the over-controlled surface, to burst into fiction, to validate Singh’s withdrawal. Failing that, his solemnity is diminished to attitudinizing, by hollow literary posturing. He himself speaks of himself as a “dandy,” and he is right; but that is not what he meant.

London in the early 70’s was more Patrick McCabe-ian than he could have made up. It was a sinister, garish city in the heady throes of glam rock and skyrocketing inflation, and the bombing campaign waged by the IRA insured that in 1974 cars and pubs exploded almost daily, it seemed, while department stores were routinely evacuated.

In her elusive relationship to the values of her era lies Powell’s greatness—yet this is also, paradoxically, her most damning liability. She could be neither marketed as breathlessly of-the-moment nor lionized as timelessly classical.

For Myra Breckinridge is a genuinely, brutally witty book, a parody on Hollywood, pop intellectualism, pornography and just about anything else you could name.

In short, this is a full novel—rich, slow enough to impress itself upon us like a love affair or a sickness—not the two-hour penny dreadful which is again in vogue nor one of the airless cat’s cradles custom-woven for the delight and job-assistance of graduate students of all ages.

Brideshead Revisited in his prime, in the full powers of an eager, good mind and a skilled hand, retaining the best of what he has already learned.

Admirers of Miss Spark’s last and brilliant little tale, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, may find The Girls of Slender Means more oblique and ambiguous… furthermore, the book’s end may appear arbitrarily drastic to those who do not have a religious view of fate.

What sustains us through this dread-filled dance between the calamitous past and the bleak present is the exuberant, almost acrobatic nature of the writing itself.

The Grass is Singing (a phrase from “The Waste Land”) is neither entertaining nor easy to read. It is a painful picture of a woman’s failure, in which the drama and conflict are mostly internal.

But the mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable, and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated, to see that Mr. Roth didn’t entirely abandon Henry James after all.

East of Eden is arguably his most problematic work, an attempt to weave together the history of Steinbeck’s family and an invented story that is a modern parallel to that of Cain and Abel.

While there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences.

Memory, language, the struggle to comprehend and name a self, to separate the true history from the false one: these tasks fall to Paula Spencer as they fell to Proust’s Marcel or Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence…

In The Green Knight, Ms. Murdoch offers a keen satire on the way we create fantasies and diversions to protect ourselves from moral complexities and spiritual vacuity. But she undermines her effort by the limitations she imposes on her characters' capacity for self-knowledge.

Tanizaki has written that the Japanese language is completely different from English or other Western languages, that it is special and in some ways superior to Western languages…Tanizaki is a very brilliant novelist and a great man, but I don’t agree with him, because there is no superiority of one language to other languages. It’s just not true.

My contemporaries and I are trying to create a new kind of Japanese language. If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

Reading The English Patient, you hold on to the gunnel and your hat at the start. But by the end you find yourself resting on the bottom of the boat, with your hat over your face to keep off Mr. Ondaatje’s too brilliant prose.

But in many ways it is Anne Tyler’s most sophisticated work, a realistic chronicle that celebrates family life without erasing the pain and boredom that families almost necessarily inflict upon their members.

Mr. Banville’s agenda is not simply to offer a portrait of the intellectual as psychopath. He’s a demolition artist, dynamiting received ideas and basic assumptions at every turn.

…Carver completely dispensed with the romantic egoism that made the Hemingway idiom such an awkward model for other writers in the late 20th century. The cafes and pensions and battlefields of Europe were replaced by trailer parks and apartment complexes, the glamorous occupations by dead-end jobs.

In those opening lines to one of her most famous works, ‘The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers articulates the theme that would preoccupy her throughout her career: the apprehension of separateness experienced by introspective individuals and their yearning for some sort of connection with the world of others.

His most ambitious and one of his longest books, this is neither a sendup nor an exercise in some established genre. It sets forth, with full realistic detail, a large cast of characters at least six of whom are rendered in depth as well a on the surface.

White Noise seems all the more timely and frightening—precisely because of its totally American concerns, its rendering of a particularly American numbness.

Mr. Calvino may divide and categorize in triplicate the visual, the cultural and the speculative aspects of Mr. Palomar’s world, he may prompt and tag and analyze and juxtapose to his (and our) heart’s content, but Mr. Palomar himself remains wonderfully spontaneous and receptive to the pell-mell of the senses.

I still say Mr. Updike is kidding. After all, the metaphor alluded to here is pretty vague. After all, one could argue that just as much as he is needling the feminists, Mr. Updike is exploiting a contemporary perspective to understand earlier history.

He deliberately centers his story in Faulkner country—Oxford, Miss., and environs—but nothing about The Summoning is Faulknerian, least of all its style.

But there is a flatness in the book that these likable characters cannot redeem. Partly this is the result of the heavy-handedness that is felt everywhere. “That storm blew up like a sawed-off simile,” Fenwick says. Mock solemnity keeps turning into the real thing…

I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories. I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it’s good for the circulation.

Banquets, perorations and sanctimonious chat cannot entirely displace one’s craving for so much of what Mr. Vidal, speaking through Spitama, has ignored: a sense of place and the uneven texture of common humanity.

Montaigne is a fitting companion for Mr. McPhee, who has the same sort of miscellaneous temperament, the same fascination with odd bits of knowledge.

Geology is virtually a literary exercise, a form of close-reading, […] and every cliffside, stream bed or mountain range became a text of sorts: not a Wordsworth sonnet, perhaps, with clear lines that leap off the page, but one by Mallarme that has to be pondered on and coaxed before it will yield, along with a headache, a rich guess at its meaning.

This story is not allegory. But my book is a polyphony in which various stories mutually explain, illumine, complement each other. The basic event of the book is the story of totalitarianism, which deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children.

But García Márquez is as exorbitant as Melville and Dostoyevsky. He believes not only that excess is good for you, but that it is essential, that a book must have an immensity about it in the same way life is enormous—and dense and mysterious and as repetitiously predictable as the General’s vengeance for an affront. How else, his novel implicitly asks, could the story of interminable dictatorship be told?

To understand America, read Mark Twain. If I believed in sortilege, Twain’s would have to be my holy books. No matter what new craziness pops up in America, I find it described beforehand by him.

This is our best political novel, more sprawling but more vital than Democracy, as ambitious as U.S.A. but more focused. It is melodramatic—partly mocking the form, party using it, partly transcending it. The book grows on each rereading.

[Vonnegut] makes pornography seem like any old plumbing, violence like lovemaking, innocence like evil, and guilt like child’s play.

Here and there The Black Prince is weakened by familiar Murdoch blemishes: too great a strain on adjectives and plausibility; in some places, a bit too much pointing; elsewhere, an irritating vagueness…

It is not easy to describe the techniques and themes of the book without making it sound absurdly complicated, labored and almost impossible to read. In fact, it is none of these things. Though concocted of quirks, ancient mysteries, family secrets and peculiar contradictions, it makes sense and gives pleasure in dozens of immediate ways.

It seems to me that most contemporary novelists, especially the Americans and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; they’re enraptured by their navels, and confined by a view that ends with their own toes. If I were naming names, I’d name myself among others. At any rate, I did at one time feel an artistic need to escape my self-created world.

…The Group—a predominantly Greenwich-Villagey sisterhood assigned to the Vassar Class of 1933—resurrects the jaunty, furtive, feral wars of the Trotskyites and the Stalinists, the rear-guardists and the avantists, the happily married and the brightly forlorn wanderers, with amazingly unflagging jubilance.

In a public statement Mr. Robert Penn Warren recently observed that he liked to write in a foreign country, “where the language is not your own, and you are forced into yourself in a special way.” When I began to write The Adventures of Augie March I was living in Paris, where circumstances made me constantly aware that I was not a Frenchman.

…Mr. Bellow goes back to the earliest and most generic form of the novel. It is a form which has always been congenial to observant humorists who relish human variety, who are fertile in creating characters and who are not afraid to seem more interested in life than in art.

You may lament the lack of anything verging on integrity or nobility in Miss Powell’s cast of characters, for she takes delight in shooting the props out from under every sort of illusion; but you can’t help but be delighted with the skillful way in which she does it. A Time to Be Born should be prescribed as an antidote for overindulgence in inspirational or romantic books.

This is no book for those who would turn delicate noses away from the gutters and sewers of life; but there is nothing that could give the faintest gratification to snickerers.

If Dos Passos has omitted the class struggle […] it is only the external class struggle he has left out; within his characters the class struggle is going on constantly.

But if Dos Passos is a social historian, as he is so frequently said to be, he is that in order to be a more complete moralist. It is of the greatest significance that for him the barometer of social breakdown is not suffering through economic deprivation but always moral degeneration through moral choice.

It lacks any touch of eccentricity; it is startlingly normal; at the risk of seeming paradoxical one might say that it is exciting because of its quality of cliché: here are comprised the judgments about modern American life that many of us have been living on for years.

Ernest gave a good speech if that’s what you like and his sum total was that war was pretty nice and a lot better than sitting around a hot hall and writers ought to all go to war and get killed and if they didn’t they were a big sissy. Then he went to the Stork Club, followed by a pack of foxes.

Graham Greene sees implications which he realizes will immensely strengthen the story but seems on the whole not to be able to work them out convincingly.

The Caporetto retreat, which forms the background for an entire portion of the book, and furnishes the action, is a masterly piece of descriptive narration. Not static description (which Hemingway abhors), and not merely action, but a subtle weaving of description and narration, this has all the movement of the retreat, its confusion, its horrors, and also makes the reader see the retreat.