culture August 26, 2013

Alexander Maksik's "A Marker to Measure Drift"

Can the literary novel ever really get its arms around the problem of human evil? It keeps trying — a difficult assignment for the poor beast. In any case, an undaunted Alexander Maksik has brought his skills to this very problem. His second novel, A Marker to Measure Drift, recounts a season of homeless exile in the life of a 24-year-old Liberian woman fleeing an episode of gruesome violence incidental to the overthrow of the tyrant Charles Ghankay Taylor, in 2003. Maksik has produced a bold book, and an instructive one.

culture October 07, 2009

Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy

James Ellroy's astonishing Underworld USA Trilogy … is biblical in scale, catholic in its borrowing from conspiracy theories, absorbing to read, often awe-inspiring in the liberties taken with standard fictional presentation, and, in its imperfections and lapses, disconcerting.

print June/July/Aug 2008

Reflections

Madison Smartt Bell

Flannery O’Connor warned us some fifty years ago that any work of fiction burdened with instructional intent was doomed to become a tract. Or as Sam Goldwyn is reported to have said, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

Most American novelists seem to act on these principles (whether or not they’ve actually heard them announced). And there is something quite sound in the idea that flaming political passions make for bad art. The fact that it is extremely difficult to define the boundaries of any event while it’s happening has led American novelists to

Norman Rush