Andrew Martin

• 

  culture August 29, 2012

  New Ways to Kill Your Mother by Colm Tóibín

  Colm Tóibín is a member of a small club of nearly household-name book reviewers. Of these, each is recognized for a distinctive approach. Daniel Mendelsohn is praised for his loping, rueful analyses of contemporary culture. James Wood and Martin Amis are famous for their close readings, with Amis being more insistent on the importance of the cleverly constructed sentence. Jenny Diski is renowned for taking down intellectual imposters, and Zadie Smith makes her arguments about aesthetics seem urgent and personal.

  Tóibín is unique for his studied remove and biographical focus. His reviews are

• 

  culture February 09, 2012

  Something Urgent I Have to Say to You by Herbert Leibowitz

  Early in his biography of the defiantly unorthodox poet William Carlos Williams, Herbert Leibowitz makes it clear that he intends to be just as unconventional as his subject. In the book’s first chapter, Leibowitz, the longtime editor of the literary magazine Parnassus, mounts a sustained assault on “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” a love poem widely considered one of Williams’s great achievements, and the source of Leibowitz’s title. Leibowitz calls the poem “a false lyric that strays far from the vigorous speech melodies [Williams] pioneered” and sneers that its “hackneyed verse matches the

• 

  culture September 14, 2011

  We the Animals by Justin Torres

  Take out the dinosaurs, the formation of the universe, and Sean Penn, and The Tree of Life, Terence Malick’s summer anti-blockbuster, is a film about the charged, unspoken bonds of a young family. Through mumblings and mundane interactions, Malick depicts the relationship between the film’s three brothers in a nearly sacred light, and succeeds at making viewers understand that eventually these boys will grow up and tragedy will be befall them. Still, Tree of Life lingers on the fleeting moments they do have together.

  Justin Torres’s first novel, We the Animals, is chasing something similar,

• 

  culture February 17, 2010

  The Gin Closet by Leslie Jamison

  The Gin Closet, the first novel by 26-year old Leslie Jamison, begins strikingly: “On Christmas I found Grandma Lucy lying on linoleum. She’d fallen. The refrigerator hummed behind her naked body like a death rattle.” This is a promising opening: dramatic but short of bombastic, lyrical without showing off. But Jamison’s novel, over time, becomes considerably less sure of itself than it first appears. While the author displays keen powers of observation, a clumsy structure and a lack of focus keep her book from achieving cohesiveness.

  The novel is narrated in alternating long sections by

• 

  culture December 01, 2009

  A Good Fall by Ha Jin

  For all their meticulous attention to the immigrant experience, Ha Jin’s books leave little to the imagination. The narrators and characters in A Good Fall, his new story collection featuring a cast of Chinese immigrants, express their feelings and the reasons for them bluntly. “I’d had two girlfriends before, but each had left me,” states the young man narrating the story “Choice,” and then adds: “The memories of those breakups stung me whenever I attempted to get close to another woman.” In “Children as Enemies,” an ill-treated grandfather laments: “If only I’d had second thoughts about