My Shelf Runneth Over

Reflections:One Thousand White Women

2012-01-17T10:24:00.001-05:00

To write an epic tale of the plains Indians in which the white men are the evil aggressors and the Indians the valiant victims would be so easy. Jim Fergus does not take that path when he tackles the topic in One Thousand White Women. Fergus's rendering of the dispute between settlers and natives shines because of his nuanced sense of the difference between immorality and amorality--and his

Reflections: A Suitable Boy

2011-06-28T18:22:00.000-04:00

Call me Ishmael—or better, Ahab, for I have sought battle with a great, white whale. Some time ago I learned that of the 100 books that an Anglophone reader was most likely to have read, there were four I hadn’t. To be completely average, I would have to read A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. I blithely ordered this commonwealth novel (along with the other three titles), and

Reflections: Slammerkin

2011-03-23T13:19:00.000-04:00

A young girl, seduced by a ribbon and the viciousness of a ribbon seller, transforms from a working class, charity-school girl to a hardened street walker in eighteenth-century England in Emma Donaghue's Slammerkin. The young girl, impregnated by the ribbon peddlar and consequently banished the home of her mother, develops a contradictory personality. She leeches onto women she meets and seeks

Reflections: The Madonnas of Leningrad

2011-01-24T20:28:00.002-05:00

It's rare I take the time to savor a stumbled upon book. With a list of To Be Read that rivals the Eiffel tower in height, I have to be choosy. I was seduced by the vivid cover and compactness of Debra Dean's The Madonnas of Leningrad, and I'm glad for it. It is not, it must be pointed out, an amazing piece of literature by any common standard. It does, however, offer the quiet pleasure of the

Reflections: Ragtime

2010-12-12T21:26:00.002-05:00

Thirty-five years after its publication, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime still speaks to readers. It is on the list of "1001 Books You Must Read Before you Die" and was voted one of Time Magazine's best 100 books of the 20th century. Its tale about the American era between the turn of the century and the nation's entry into WWI weaves together concerns and beliefs very much in the fore of American

Reflections: The Help

2010-06-15T08:05:00.001-04:00

There is something about Kathryn Stockett's The Help. This novel about the entanglement of racism and the expectations for cultured white women in the American South circa the mid twentieth-century has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for 62 weeks and counting. One cannot avoid an at least osmotic awareness of the title as it pops up so frequently in conversation and in the hands of

Reflections: The Learners

2010-05-23T12:19:00.003-04:00

I was recently reminded just how many ways there are to enjoy fiction. I am a person who holds strong beliefs about what makes a novel a pleasant and worthwhile read. Judged by my code, Chip Kidd's The Learners would not have been at the top of the class. And yet. I have rarely laughed so hard and so loud in my adult life--and in public too. No social inhibitions could forestall the audible

Reflections: Everything Matters!

2010-04-29T15:58:00.001-04:00

Novels that reach into experimental territory require an author with a certain talent for persuasion. Readers become accustomed to the norms of fiction and can resent being pushed from their old ways, no matter how good the cause. When I began Everything Matters (2009), by Ron Currie Jr., I felt the narrative Luddite in me raise its head. Why are these paragraphs numbered? How effective is this

Reflections: The Bee Season

2010-04-18T22:05:00.002-04:00

At the core of Myla Goldberg's Bee Season is the principle that true enlightenment means making your own choices despite the will of others. Young Eliza Naumann is an example of a new generation of Jewish Americans, the product of a father who broke with his secular and wholly assimilated family to become a Torah scholar and cantor. Eliza has no such deep connection to her roots, and this is the

Reflections: In the Country of Last Things

2010-03-26T11:40:00.002-04:00

Paul Auster's 1987 novella, In the Country of Last Things, shows the power that language can have to create whole new worlds for the reader to experience. Auster truly deserves the encomia heaped upon him, for he has mastered the art of prose fiction. Our narrator, Anna Blume, has slipped across the border into an urban space that used to be like our own, but has experienced some inexplicable

Reflections: Chaos: A Novella and Stories

2010-03-20T11:12:00.001-04:00

Reading Edmund White's Chaos: A Novella and Stories means experiencing delicious doubt: is this fiction or fictionalized? That one cannot tell is a tribute to just how talented White is as an observer of character; the short narratives craft such full and believable characters that one cannot imagine how White could have created them out of whole cloth. Each of the four pieces reports the ornate

Reflections: The Children's Book

2010-03-10T19:02:00.001-05:00

A narrative, a history lesson, a treatise on the material culture of Europe before WWI, a reflection on the various burdens of the woman's condition: A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book defies a basic generic descriptor. For whatever else it may be, it is a surprisingly long novel in the contemporary market, and quite an ambitious one at that. The novel takes place in England, and spans the years

Reflections: The Echo Maker

2010-02-28T21:13:00.000-05:00

Richard Powers brings his audience another idea novel in The Echo Maker (2006). This "neuro-novel" plumbs the depths of a small handful of characters, seemingly to prove the point that all sense of self derives from the human brain's tendency to create a continuous and logical narrative about who we are and what we are doing in the world. In other words, Powers frets, biochemical impulses are all

Reflections: Gentlemen of the Road

2010-02-21T18:46:00.003-05:00

Michael Chabon knows narrative. He knows male/male friendship bonds. He knows modern American Jewish culture. In Gentlemen of the Road he brings them all together...again. As in The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon has mixed together his essential ingredients to come up with a new and exciting recipe for the reader's delectation. Gentlemen keeps its eyes upon two highwaymen of the

Reflections: White Noise

2010-02-16T08:57:00.001-05:00

Don Delillo's White Noise (1985) is, for all of its post-modern pretensions, a domestic novel. It begins with a father, satisfied in his career, watching benignly as other families--more kempt and wealthy than his own, yet familiar and appealing to him--descend onto his territory, the campus on the Hill. The story, such as it is, expresses the turmoils of its adult main characters, Jack and

Reflections: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

2010-02-12T22:05:00.000-05:00

Dai Sijie's novella Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress holds out the promise latent in all acclaimed and slender works of fiction. There is an excitement specific to contemporary medium length fiction, which causes hopes of spare, elegant, and often experimental prose to dance in one's head. Form aside, here is a romantic story of love and friendship in the midst of an important historical

Reflections: Come Together, Fall Apart

2010-02-08T21:45:00.001-05:00

Cristina Henriquez has been hailed as a writer to watch. Her 2006 collection of short fiction Come Together, Fall Apart brings to life both the Panama that existed on the eve of Noriega's capture and that which exists today. What follows refers only to the novella "Come Together, Fall Apart" within the collection of the same name. The reader of "Come Together, Fall Apart" experiences the

Reflections: Death Comes for the Archbishop

2010-02-07T21:02:00.003-05:00

Few novels manage to maintain the meditative rhythm throughout that Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop does. Bishop Jean Latour and his longtime companion and spiritual helpmeet Father Joseph Vaillant traverse the New Mexican territory in the wake of the Mexican war (1848) and, eventually, the Gadsden Purchase (1853). Latour and Vaillant commit their lives to serving a long neglected

Reflections: The Grandissimes

2010-02-06T19:24:00.001-05:00

In the years 1803 and 1804, Louisiana confronted a crisis of identity when its western portion, including New Orleans, became part of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase. In the months and years following the purchase, the region's citizens and slaves confronted a challenge to their social arrangements, rights, beliefs and traditions. A single question was on everyone's mind: could

Reflections: The Body Artist

2010-01-30T14:17:00.004-05:00

The Body Artist (2001), by Don DeLillo, falls into the peculiar genre of the "short novel" alongside works like The Stranger and Of Mice and Men. Short novels beg to be considered on different terms than longer pieces; they are often engaged in a hyper-focused description of one particular event or experience. In a longer novel, this would be precious or over-bearing, but in short fiction it is a

Reflections: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

2010-01-29T19:53:00.001-05:00

Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is one for the ages. It's a rare novel that inhabits an impressive concept, brings painfully full characters to life, contributes well-crafted observations to the cultural vault, and entertains you with a gripping story throughout. This Chabon has effected with a style and grace that make the true lover of literary fiction ache

Reflections: The Man Without Qualities

2010-01-23T19:09:00.002-05:00

Considering Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (1952, 1978) brings to mind the old schoolyard joke about how being forearmed/four armed is being half an octopus. The reader must allow me at least four arms, and their accompanying hands, to describe this epic novel. It is not a book whose theme one can state simply in a sentence or two. It is, on one hand, a book about the conflict between

Reflections: Shroud

2010-01-09T19:37:00.001-05:00

Samuel Johnson once crafted a simultaneously admiring and damning summation of the work of novelist Samuel Richardson with this statement: "[i]f you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." Replace "Richardson" with

Reflections: Cloud Atlas

2010-01-06T20:45:00.000-05:00

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas must be acknowledged as a complex example of contemporary literary fiction. At moments the reader is bowled over by the impressive technical skill with which Mitchell creates multiple distinct worlds and languages with a sprezzatura that Castiglione would have envied and admired. At others, however, the bottom of the reading experience falls out, and the reader

A Paen to the Book Blogging Community

2010-01-05T19:40:00.006-05:00

Lovely Kim over at Chapter Chit Chat just tagged my blog in her "One Lovely Blog" list. This is another initiative on the part of creative book bloggers who value community; the award requires the awarded to then pass the honor along to other noteworthy blogs/bloggers. A win/win system, I must say. Here are the rules: 1) Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the

Reflections: The Comfort of Strangers

2009-12-20T15:26:00.003-05:00

Ian McEwan's short novel The Comfort of Strangers reads like an exercise in suspense-creation. The book opens with a liberally minded couple on holiday drowning in the lazy pleasures of taking one another for granted while disengaging from all social interactions except for with one another. They stay in bed napping and making love until driven from the sheets by hunger. Then, they walk

Reflections: The Woman and the Ape

2009-12-17T22:08:00.002-05:00

Peter Hoeg's The Woman and the Ape flirts with many complex social issues, and yet at every turn dodges the responsibility of turning social critic. Hoeg is, first and last, a storyteller. In this tale, Hoeg introduces us to Madelene, a woman who escaped her family through marriage, and her marriage through drink. Only when her husband, a behavioral scientist, starts experimenting on a

With Thanks

2009-12-13T22:56:00.002-05:00

The book blogging world is peopled with lovely inhabitants. Members of the community united to create a 400 person secret Santa gift exchange. My secret Santa sent me a book I've long been looking forward to reading: Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country. I raise a glass to my Santa, and wish her and all readers a wonderful holiday season.

Reflections: A Short History of Women

2009-12-13T16:53:00.003-05:00

Writing honestly about Kate Walbert's recent novel, A Short History of Women, presents a challenge. Because the novel deals with such a politically charged issue, comments about the novel may be interpreted as comment on theme rather than on the story. The novel, whether intentionally or no, confronts the reader with a defensive posture which suggests that if you do not like it, you are

Reflections: Galatea 2.2

2009-12-05T20:20:00.005-05:00

A thirty-something man on the rebound falls in love with, in quick succession: the shadow of a colleague, a machine, a young graduate student, and the machine again. His vampiric id uses the privacy of his mind to drain the objects of desire of their individual qualities and assign to them qualities he loves, wants to love, or has loved about himself. Richard Power's Galatea 2.2 is a modern

Reflections: The Discomfort Zone

2009-11-30T20:15:00.006-05:00

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am not a connoisseur of memoirs. As a person who holds privacy dear, I contemplate with a kind of fascinated horror those who think their subjectivity is sufficiently important to put on display for all mankind and posterity. Of the billions of people on the planet, I wonder what makes one believe in his or her own absolute uniqueness.

Reflections: Middlesex

2009-11-22T22:34:00.006-05:00

It has been six years since Jeffrey Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize for Middlesex. If it were in my power, I would give it to him again tomorrow. This is a magical novel, weaving together the story of a young hermaphrodite and a middle-aged country in crisis with as much success as Salman Rushdie united a generation of infants and their new-born country in Midnight's Children (a claim I do not

Reflections: The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

2009-11-15T22:08:00.005-05:00

The Reader is a novel that has generated some controversy because of the way it characterizes Hanna Schmitz, an illiterate German who worked as a prison guard at Auschwitz. The trial of Hanna forms the central point of the novel, and her lover tells its story. People have therefore been concerned that Bernard Schlink seeks some kind of sympathy or absolution for the more ignorant perpetrators of

Finis: The Wanderer: Volume V

2009-11-14T11:43:00.002-05:00

Burney's behemoth has been, finally, perhaps even belatedly, put to rest on the bookshelves of your humble servant. Although filled with some regret when looking back at the bleak reading landscape of the past three weeks, I will acknowledge that there are some lessons that one can take away from Francis Burney's The Wanderer. What I have learned from The Wanderer:1. Dilettantes and aesthetic

The Wanderer: Volume III

2009-11-09T11:52:00.004-05:00

Despite my desire to find something to appreciate in this volume, I must admit that my patience wears thin. This is not a volume in the classic genre of "bad to worse," which at least provides a harrowing rhythm of progress. Rather, it is a volume that follows Ellis (now finally revealed to the reader, though not to her neighbors, to rightfully own the name Juliet) from bad to bad. How many times

The Wanderer: Volume II

2009-11-05T20:34:00.005-05:00

Where the first volume of The Wanderer found Ellis in the unenviable position of a toad-eater (an eighteenth-century name for an indigent person who lives at the mercy of a protector whose payment was the pleasure of publicly tormenting one less fortunate), this volume finds her in the somewhat more comfortable position of seeking her own humble living. Making use of her musical talents, Ellis

Intermission: A Reflection on Shaftesbury

2009-11-04T20:21:00.004-05:00

I'll admit that if I were Alice in Wonderland, eighteenth-century texts would be my little white rabbit, the chasing of which always leads to a precipitate and absurdly long fall into a magical world. Reflecting on Burney's Mrs. Ellis has led me to the Earl of Shaftesbury and his part in the debate about where, exactly, morality comes from. In his "Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit" he makes

The Wanderer: Volume I

2009-11-02T14:44:00.010-05:00

There are many things that Frances Burney's The Wanderer (1814) is not: short; Burney's best work of fiction; cheerful. There are even more things, however, that it is: a cogent argument for political moderates; a consideration of how History (wars, generals, and nations) affects history (the daily life of unknown individuals living in a given historical period); a reflection on the rock and a

Reflections: The Drowned Life

2009-11-01T09:56:00.008-05:00

Jeff Ford's The Drowned Life doesn't work. Although at times fantastically innovative and, at others, truly insightful, the whole does not provide a satisfying reading experience. In many respects, Ford's strengths here create The Drowned Life's weakness; this is a man who comfortably writes in a range of styles from literary memoir to fantasy. While the variety of stories that Ford can bring to

The midwivery of fiction writers

2009-10-31T11:43:00.010-04:00

Entering a new world created for us by narrative requires an excellent midwife; this is the first of the many roles the good author plays. Transitions--from inside to outside, from home to work, from our world to the author's--pose a challenge. The consummate raconteurs know this, and so consider how best to birth us into the place and time we will inhabit for the coming hours or days. There are

Mode d'emploi: Short Story Collections

2009-10-26T15:35:00.005-04:00

Short stories should be savored, drop by drop. They should not be read too quickly in succession. The genre holds the potential for the literary equivalent of an intaglio: the perfect literary artifact in miniature. These are the accepted wisdoms on short fiction, pearls which have given birth to a relationship to collections of short stories that I find alien and alienating. If you are supposed

Reflections: The Time of Our Singing

2009-10-25T18:09:00.007-04:00

Richard Powers's novel, The Time of Our Singing, immerses the reader in a world of music and abstract physics in order to hold out a glittering promise of an America "beyond race." Don't jump to conclusions about the unrealistic or unjustifiable optimism of the author; when every moment is a single "now," that promise might be fulfilled only after hundreds, even thousands, of years' worth of nows