August 2009
15 posts
green, continued
And also:
“I said they might. I was wrong. As a prophet, I suck, ma’am. How can things get better? We’ve got every kind of ray cutting us up. There’s twenty thousand TV rays right now telling your brain every kind of lie in the world. And Y-rays and Z-rays and who knows what else and we can’t see any of them but they’re cutting our divinity to confetti. Right...
george dawes green, the caveman's valentine
A detective-story thriller, done well-enough, with a paranoid schizophrenic who lives in a cave in Inwood Park serving as the detective. While Green relies a little more on coincidence, and takes a little more advantage of his caveman’s insanity to gloss over plot holes than perhaps he should, his central character — Romulus Ledbetter, the Caveman of the title — is the best thing...
Hogan, continued.
Still, the title doesn’t...
chuck hogan, the killing moon
It’s easy to forget about, but difficult to overrate, the importance of competence in genre writing. Hogan is not just competent — there are a couple of twists of varying degrees of sickness and believability here. But he is most importantly good at building a plot and maintaining tension, and he doesn’t undermine that with shoddy dialogue or incompetent sentences. Which is...
derek mccormack, the show that smells
‘Skelly,’ Schiaparelli says. ‘He used to be a banker.’
Skelly’s dressed in a diaper.
‘He contracted tuberculosis,’ she says. ‘It started out in his lungs. It spread.’ Skelly’s skin and bones. Thin as a woman’s watch.
‘Doctors treated him the best way they knew how,’ she says. ‘Removed a rib. Collapsed a lung....
mcdonnell, continued
“As she drank her second latte, Jane wondered when Teak would come back to the United States. It was inconceivable to her that he would not return one day. It was simple, really. Why wouldn’t you want to live among your family, where everything worked, where the lattes were better?”
McDonnell is handicapped in part by cardboard characters — the men are singleminded...
nick mcdonnell, an expensive education
‘We are all just so fucking important,’ thought Jane.
Which is a good part of the problem with McDonnell’s book — although Jane, as the most-shakily-drawn main character, gets the worst of it. It’s clear that McDonnell wants to show the way that Harvard students make contact with, and maybe end up becoming themselves, players in the Great World, or maybe the Great...
doug dorst, alive in necropolis
“As the night goes on, conversations buzz, peter out, recirculate. The crowd is divided roughly in half: those who’ve become their parents, and those who are living the same lives they did in college, only now without the college. From the former, Mercer hears about mortgages and birth coaches, about ecotourism and oil prices, about hedge funds and dog-walkers, about 401(k)’s and...
mati unt, brecht at night
(continued)
“When writing down such sentences it is good to have Yuri Lotman’s article alongside ‘Doing Justice to Biography.’ Here you can find interesting ideas about this whole problem complex when you use a concrete person as a literary ‘hero.’ This is not as easy as it seems. What it boils down to is that I would not wish anyone else to write a novel...
“This is dialectical,” he agrees immediately. “They dance and stab...”
– Here, Brecht explains to a Finn the Finnish affinity for the tango. Immediately after learning that the Finns like the tango.
Mati Unt, Brecht at Night Dalkey Archive 07.09
Forget About Brendan Haywood
backintheday:
Forgive the long block quotes (and the foray into recent news), but I found this great page from David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays and arguments, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”. This excerpt is from the essay entitled, “tennis player Michael Joyce’s professional artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice, freedom, limitation, joy, grotesquerie, and...
michael idov, ground up
(continued)
“… the books came in the mail later that week, debuts both. They were a novel by a literary-magazine editor, about hijinks at a literary magazine, and a novel by a Vietnamese girl from Michigan, about growing up Vietnamese in Michigan.”
This bad conscience comes out most strongly when Idov feels he must anticipate criticism. His character, like the author, works...
michael idov, ground up
“Stuck as we were in the epicenter of a boom, the money was largely theoretical. Home prices rose equally and everywhere, from Yonkers to Sheepshead Bay. Our winnings came in casino tokens; they would only pay out on the outside — and leaving New York, naturally, was not an option. The catch of living in the city is that moving out, no matter your circumstances, always carries a whiff...
“Most swimmers start to swim because they have some kind of a problem. At least...”
– Nicola Keegan, Swimming Knopf 07.09
jim lynch, border songs
“So much about the job burned his stomach, but he’d always wanted to see the world without actually having to travel. And now, seemingly, amazingly, the world was coming to him.”
Which is a nice way of thinking about the border, and the kind of thinking that characterizes Lynch’s Brandon Vanderkool. Vanderkool is an unlikely border patrol agent — enormously tall,...
