Issyvoo

The writing is Mr. Barthelme at his most facile—flicking scenes onto the page with scarcely a breath. (“The road. The caravan. People taking pictures of the caravan with little pronghorn cameras. Flashes of light.”) The work can be grasped by any reader—even the least suspecting—as an appropriately slapstick homage to the spirit of anarchy.

The deeper you plunge into him, the more you realise that no one was spared the knife. His novels rejoice in the fact that the sinned against are as open to satire as the sinning.

When I write I try to make landscapes rise from the page, to appear in the camera lens of the reader’s mind.

Her published novels began sharp, terse, angular, and blithely enigmatic, on the French model of Queneau, and she ended as one of the most expansive and leisurely expositors since the Victorians.

Still, in his own fashion, Collins did manage to get to the top of the mountain. The fact that his work could be imitated says something about his fidelity to a strain of human experience, and about his method of describing that experience, which is plainspoken and radically inclusive.

You don’t have to admire Undine Spragg to admire an author with the courage and the love of form to go for broke like this. Wharton embraces her new-fashioned divorce plot as zestfully as Nabokov embraces pedophilia in Lolita.

Money, in novels, is such a potent reality principle that the need for it can override even our wish for a character to live happily ever after, and Wharton, throughout the book, applies the principle with characteristic relentlessness…

A love of Henry James […] can be especially perilous for a twenty-first-century novelist. Because James’s own refinements run so close to self-parody, the contemporary Jamesian runs the risk of pastiching a parodist.

The Moonstone shows most compellingly of all his [Collins'] novels how a work can simultaneously define a genre and transcend it.

There is a moral magnitude and a weary, melancholy wisdom in Sebald’s writing that transcends the literary and attains something like an oracular register. Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream.

In Hollinghurst’s new novel […] the Jamesian cadences come in peristaltic waves.

There is a key moment of American literature in Henry Adams’s Education, when Adams waits to hear the names of those in Grant’s first cabinet; they turn out to be nothing but mediocrities and hacks, and Adams looks away in disgust, toward Europe and the past. Twain’s eye, disgusted by the Gilded Age, sought gold in old Missouri.

Yet the moral intelligence of Huck Finn can hardly be overpraised. The character of Jim, in particular, the runaway slave, who is Huck’s only companion, is beautifully subtle.

There is a secondhand quality to Jacobson’s portraiture: the outlines are garish rather than vivid.

…we cannot help but be impressed by Stoker’s representation of the amoral contrivances of love, or of desire.

McEwan is a connoisseur of dread, performing the literary equivalent of turning on the tub faucet and leaving the room; the flood is foreseeable, but it still shocks when the water rushes over the edge.

…Archer’s predicament echoes passages in Wharton’s autobiography, in which she notes the divergence between the social life she was obliged by her upbringing to conduct, and her secret creative life.

There is always a little tug, in all the mess, a melody we recognize. He could catch you unexpectedly.

Again and again, [Naipaul’s] sense of aggrieved encirclement expands to encompass others, and he manages, with neither vanity nor condescension, to blend his woundedness with theirs: the empire of one is colonized by his characters.

At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.

It is a tribute to Hardy’s powers that catastrophes on such a scale do not plunge his novels into melodrama or absurdity. Rather, we accept them, as we do in the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare, as the symbolic casualties inflicted on humanity by a cosmos that is fundamentally cruel.

[Sinclair] builds his effects through precise reporting and the remorseless piling up of detail; he was a master of the routines of physical labor and the gear-by-gear minutiae of industrial processes. In the meatpacking scenes, he holds his rhythm steady and lets the hideous facts do their work…

…the rich killer Harry Thaw stripping naked and banging his penis between the bars of his cell at the Tombs while Houdini watches, radical Emma Goldman relieving scandalous Evelyn Nesbit of her corset and giving her a loving oil massage. It smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets, and turned the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic game.

McCarthy’s novels are deeply engaged with founding American myths, in particular those of regeneration through violence, Southern pastoral, the figure of the sacred hunter, and the frontiersman’s conquest of the endless Western spaces.

Strictly speaking, the three novels […] are children’s books, but their ideal reader is a precocious fifteen-year-old who long ago came to find the Harry Potter books intellectually thin. It’s possible that as many adults now read the trilogy as do children… The Amber Spyglass won the 2001 Whitbread Prize for best children’s book, then went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year award, too—the first children’s book to do so.

Herr Issyvoo. The name sounds like a kiss followed by a sigh.

The novel shares with Ragtime a texture of terse episodes and dialogue shorn, in avant-garde fashion, of quotation marks, but has little of the older book’s distancing jazz, its impudent, mocking shuffle of facts; it celebrates its epic war with the stirring music of a brass marching band heard from afar, then loud and up close, and finally receding over the horizon. […] Doctorow here appears not so much a reconstructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past occasions for poetry.

Doctorow is a stranger writer than he at first seems; his fiction, though generous with the conventional pleasures of dramatic plot, colorful characters, and information-rich prose, yet challenges the reader with a puckish truculence

The connecting thread here is the spectacular untrustworthiness of the village’s inhabitants, who are as wily as Odysseus…

The novel’s bloody illustrations of the horrors of war compel assent and pity, and yet, such is the novel reader’s romantic nature, it is the lovers that keep us turning the page; theirs is the consummation we devoutly wish. Our wish is granted, but with a duplicitous art.

Paul Bowles was the son of a Long Island Dentist, and he spent his life in flight from dentistry, Long Island and being anyone’s son.

An nagging sense of gimmickry, amid all these spinning wheels of plot, accompanies our awed and often delighted awareness of Atwood’s mastery of period detail […] as this dwindling family floats down the twentieth century’s dark river.

…the novel’s achievement lies in its depiction of the everyday enterprise of loss.

The well, of course, is a common literary image. It is a retreat into the self; it is also a retreat into the world of memory, of the past, and of death.

In Tóibín’s disturbing body of work, the inarticulate, mulish past always recaptures us. History teaches, inspires, embitters and harms us. Tóibín’s genius is that he makes it impossible for us to walk away.

In Tanizaki, the bizarre reaches out to possess reality; perverse sexual obsession is just his most usual instrument for demonstrating how precariously society’s facades and structures contain the underlying honne.

… It reads like a translation. It’s as if [Doctorow] wanted both to engage some ugly truth about the country his grandparents came to and to avoid being implicated in it. He clings—self-defeatingly—to the notion that the only true culture is that of the Old World.

The old, robust masculine tradition of British comedy from Fielding and Smollett continues in our own vernacular.

Comedians will covet Mr. Barthelme’s control, which has nothing to do with caution. There is [the protagonist’s] mother’s recipe for brisket, for instance, which begins “What fool bought brisket?” and ends “Do what your mother tells you.”

Witty observation and artful phrasing are the rule in Calvino’s subtly arranged sets and subsets of vignettes.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant deepens into the tragedy of closeness, of familial limitations that work upon us like Greek fates and condemn us to surrender and secret fury.

The cakewalking manner and the sentimental soul of Ragtime nourish each other, but in Loon Lake style and substance are out of kilter. Doctorow, possibly realizing how little heft the bony, disagreeable story of Loon Lake has, weighs the book down with style.

His universe is claustrophobically human, and his ambition and reputation alike remain in thrall to the weary concept of the “comic novel”.

Mr. McEwan is a stirring writer, and his mastery of his pathetic household (and of us) is complete, but his strength is matched a weakness—a willingness to settle for a tour de force.

…I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.

He’s a supreme study of the writer as public figure and the hazards thereof.

She moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstance and personality, and reveling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates their own.

What García Márquez is after is a language that can contain individual consciousnesses but is not confined by any one, a language that can encompass a whole human condition, that can accommodate the contradictory illusions of which it is made up.

Like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino dreams perfect dreams for us…

An extraordinarily deft, lyrical, rich novel that catches the spirit of this country in an era between the turn of the century and the First World War in a fluid, musical way that is as original as it is satisfying.

Mr Farrell’s interesting and entertaining novel is merely the rather early effort of a writer who has not yet hit his stride…

These ordinary human beings follow their prescribed obstacle course:getting absurdly drunk, hitting each other with the poker, fumbling at adultery, muddling suicide.

It is probably impossible to be American and not be fascinated and impressed by Vidal’s suave telescoping of so much of our early history.

The novel’s Olympian ease and its catholic acceptance of horror and splendor as they arise in this our “paradise of misery” could not have been achieved in the United States, and no European novel would contain its joyous emptiness…

…one of the many distinguished Adamses, this one an all-round intellectual—historian and philosopher—as well as a political meddler and perennial grouch. […] He felt extremely sorry for himself, and was ever more certain that the world was going to pot.

The hero of The Ginger Man behaved rudely enough, but in all his (often tedious) brawling, drinking, and philandering, he had, somehow, the air of a false primitive, and as a commentator on his own behavior he was flamboyant and amusing.

His mind was never at rest, and his pencil was connected to his mind by the best conductive tissue I have ever seen in action.

As Hemingway sought the words for things in motion, Salinger seeks the words for things transmuted into human subjectivity. His fiction, in its rather grim bravado, its humor, its morbidity, its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present American life.

For all his easy invocation of life, death, love, fear, wisdom, and truth, Henderson never betrays the slightest symptom of knowing what he is talking about.

Lucky Jim is extremely funny. Everyone was much amused, and since it is also a kind of male Cinderella or Ugly Duckling story, it left its readers good-humoured and glowing.

In parading his own remorse, Bloch declared himself “actuated by no sense of gloomy pleasure.” To prove it, he took the opposite course from that of the old men of Vichy. He turned precept to example and died like a character in those chansons de geste in which he used to search for details of feudal society.