Until recently, many people—even the Nobel Peace Prize Committee—trusted Barack Obama. And even if they didn’t trust the person in the Oval Office, the American civic tradition tells them to find solace in the genius of the U.S. system of government, with its carefully calibrated array of checks and balances designed to prevent presidents from doing anything too terrible.
“Jonathan Franzen’s first novel was terrible,” writes Parul Seghal at Slate, but it is also a reminder that “great art seems to be born from what is narrow, obsessional, and repetitive in us.”
The subtitle of Rachel Cohen’s luminous biography of legendary art critic and historian Bernard Berenson is “A Life in the Picture Trade.” This is an apt characterization given Berenson’s role in building some of the greatest private Renaissance art collections of America’s Gilded Age (most notably Isabel Stewart Gardner’s). But it’s also one that Berenson would have looked upon with more than a little horror, since admitting he engaged in any kind of “trade” would conflict with his carefully constructed self-image, worked out over a lifetime of secrecy and reinvention.
Is Norman Rockwell the epitome of American normalcy that many say he is? A new biography argues that Rockwell didn’t “mirror” American life in any true way; his work was, if anything, a kind of funhouse mirror in reverse, turning a world that was really full of strange bumps and twists into something eerily becalmed and normal-looking.
Though the term genius is used rather promiscuously, few comics merit the label as much as Richard Pryor did. He was masterful—a truth teller, an incisive social critic, a man who opened up a great deal of the black experience to a general audience. He also plumbed his own personal experience with a flair for self-deprecation that could be as discomfiting as it was funny. Onstage, he hid little of himself: While performing at a gay-rights benefit in San Francisco, Pryor startled the crowd by declaring, “I’ve sucked dick … and it was beautiful.” Then, after inviting them to “kiss
“The ensuing is the report of one Detective Helen Tame. I am Helen Tame, the ensuing is my report, and it is not true that this second sentence adds nothing to the first.” So begins Personae, the second novel by Sergio De La Pava. Whereas the famous sleuths of golden-age television and airport mystery novels were preeminently concerned with justice, Detective Tame’s obsession with “Truth in its multifarious instantiations,” and her infatuation with this capital-T subject goes well beyond the letter of the law. Tame’s report, concerning the apparent murder of a 111-year-old Colombian writer named Antonio Arce, “ensues” for
When the British state decreed that the Guardian destroy all computers that had handled information from Edward Snowden, the paper complied, purchasing power tools to drill and grind laptops and hard drives to bits. But as Guardian publisher Alan Rusbridger writes, and as officials are “painfully aware,” technology has made it impossible to destroying this information—or to prevent its circulation.
The playwright and the novelist may try to share the same skin, but historically, they haven’t made a good fit. The signature case would be Henry James, all but bankrupted by his work in theater. Going the other way, David Mamet has published two novels that generated nowhere near the excitement of his plays. So just picking up Mira Corpora, the debut novel by the New York dramatist Jeff Jackson, you fret for this still-young talent. He’s with the Collapsible Giraffe company, a group that combines imaginative experiment and philosophic inwardness. The Times listed their Botanica among the “galvanizing theater
Janet Maslin was not thrilled about having to review Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. The book is “long and demanding,” and it “isn’t invested in its characters.” Catton may have won this years Man Booker Prize, but the New York Times critic is not impressed.
It would be a considerable exaggeration—and possibly misleading in other ways as well—to say that James Wolcott and I were ever friends. But we did get thrown into each other’s company a lot for a while there in the late ’70s. I was struggling to make a splash in the Village Voice’s pool of juvenile freelance rock critics, and he was the paper’s foremost young Turk—one soon to be Christianized, you might say, by Harper’s and then Vanity Fair. Even though he’d graduated from riffing it up in Bob Christgau’s music section to a slot as the Voice’s attention-catching TV
I live in farm country in the Midwest. Last summer, the prairie was dry and haunted. Scorched cornfields stretched as far as the eye could see, the stalks standing tall and brown, bearing no fruit. On the local news every night, reporters talked about the blessing of crop insurance, and reported how nearly 90 percent of the state was suffering from the drought. Conditions were similar across the plains. This year was different: We were inundated by rainfall. Hundreds of acres flooded into small lakes big enough to have currents. “We’re the Seattle of the prairie,” was the joke, only
My favorite character on Boardwalk Empire, Eddie, Nucky Thompson’s obsequious Prussian bagman, killed himself because FBI agents used personal information to coerce him into collaborating against his beloved Nucky. After a Pilsner-fueled night of fraternizing with other German ex-pats (and Al Capone’s brother), sweet old Eddie was picked up by US agents. They held Eddie at an offsite location for 12 hours, offered no lawyer, and harshly interrogated (tortured) him, but still—Eddie did not crack!
Some years ago, I heard a fantastic story about Andy Warhol attending a banquet for wealthy Manhattan art patrons sometime in the 1960s. The tables were laden with all manner of delicacies—caviar, pâtés, the works. As Warhol stood near one of them and surveyed the spread, the hostess approached him and gaily suggested he help himself. There was a pause before he turned to her—not a hair of his silver wig out of place—and said, in a droll monotone, “I only eat candy.” Then he drifted off into the crowd, leaving her in stunned silence. Forget about his prints of
When, in 1910, a dozen Romanian Jews set out to cultivate a plot of land next to a marooned Arab village in Palestine, their mission seemed suicidal. But that bewildering act laid the foundation for the socialist utopia of the kibbutz, or collective farming community, examples of which would soon sprout all across Israel. Within a century, the country boasted over two hundred and fifty kibbutzim. Though their members only ever accounted for about five percent of the Israeli population, the kibbutzim’s cultural influence was outsized—they were hailed as the “army of Zionist fulfillment,” their trademark sandals and khakis were
Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review is called “Let’s Read About Sex,” and apparently it’s caused a small stir. This is ironic because we’re at a stage in literary debate where the most original thing we could do with sex just might be to shut up about it.
The authors insist that the sexual revolution must have been error[,] for so many women are still imperfectly happy; witness how they suffer from ‘conflicts,’ from ‘problems.’
In Nelly Reifler’s new novel, we’re introduced to a diminutive protagonist with a good heart and a robust furry belly. A widower, and, yes, a mouse, H. Mouse loves his two daughters, Susie and Margo, with a profound and sometimes melancholy adoration. His campaign for State Judge, based on his generous philosophy that “we are, each of us, born in a state of grace and innocence,” has strong public support. In darker moments, though, when his past slips out from the shadows, it is hard for H to include himself in his belief “that no matter what someone may do,
In 1942, the literary quarterly Accent accepted James Farl Powers’s short story “He Don’t Plant Cotton,” his first published fiction. Powers was working then for a wholesale book company in Chicago, having dropped out of Northwestern because he couldn’t afford tuition. He wrote his editor that he hoped to quit his job, to “get away and, yes, you guessed it, Write.”
The Virgins, Pamela Erens’s subtle, accomplished second novel, is set at Auburn Academy, a New Hampshire boarding school. The book begins in the fall of 1979 and covers a single academic year in the lives of Aviva Rossner and Seung (“pronounced like the past tense of sing”) Jung, doomed lovers, reckless exhibitionists, exotic standouts in their starchy WASP surroundings. Aviva, with her gold jewelry, cowboy boots, and pretty face full of provocative makeup, and Seung, a champion swimmer and inveterate pot smoker, quickly become objects of school fascination: “even the teachers talked about them.” Only a few years before, neither
Between 1952 and 1957, Naguib Mahfouz did not write any novels or stories. This was not a case of writer’s block. Mahfouz, who had completed his masterwork, The Cairo Trilogy, in the early 1950s, later explained that he had hoped Egypt’s revolutionary regime would fulfil the aims of his realist novels, and focus public attention on social, economic and political ills. Disenchantment would drive him back to fiction, of a more symbolic and allegorical kind.
