Issyvoo

Terrence Rafferty’s opinions

• The Yiddish Policemen's Union

  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.

  Read the full piece at New York Times Terrence Rafferty New York Times 2007
• The Sea

  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.

  Read the full piece at New York Times Terrence Rafferty New York Times 2005
• Billy Bathgate

  … 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.

  Read the full piece at New Yorker Terrence Rafferty New Yorker 1989