Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:


• Liesl Schillinger on When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen: “It’s with an odd sensation of unexpected, wakening connection that you
  understand, as you read ‘When I Forgot,’ a first novel by the Finnish
  journalist and filmmaker Elina Hirvonen, that 9/11 ‘happened’ in
  Finland too…. In ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ …  Woolf embarked on a great experiment, showing how a
  lifetime may be contained and revealed in small, seemingly
  inconsequential details. Hirvonen repeats this experiment, differently
  yet deftly, and Douglas Robinson’s translation is so smooth that, but
  for the foreign names, one could forget the book was not originally
  written in English. The novel’s quiet clockwork encompasses a long,
  reflective ‘moment in April,’ a single day in Helsinki unlike yet akin
  to Woolf’s ‘life; London; this moment of June.’”



• Maslin on Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard: “Ordinarily the writer who turns to his own pages for inspiration risks
  looking lazy. But Mr. Leonard’s crime stories are packed with players
  who deserve curtain calls. And there’s nothing remotely wheezy about
  his way of throwing together Foley, Cundo and Dawn (as they’re known in ‘Road Dogs’). Foley has the brains, Cundo the machismo and Dawn the
  shamelessness to make this one of Mr. Leonard’s most enjoyably sneaky
  stories.”



• Kakutani on American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime by Teri Thompson, Nathaniel Vinton, Michael O’Keeffe, and Christian Red: “By focusing on Clemens and the people around him, the authors have
  turned the sprawling story of steroid-use into a sleek narrative that
  reads like an investigative thriller, peopled by a Dickensian cast of
  characters, from big-name ball players and their high-powered lawyers
  to small time bodybuilders and gym owners, from federal investigators
  and members of Congress to denizens of ‘the violent criminal underworld
  of muscle-building drug distribution.’”



• David Means on Nobody Move by Denis Johnson: “To give much more of the plot away would be to betray this hugely
  enjoyable, fast-moving novel…. One senses that
  Johnson took great pleasure in writing on a deadline, keeping the story
  tight to the bone, honing his sentences down to the same kind of
  utilitarian purity he demonstrated in ‘Tree of Smoke.’ … If ‘Tree of Smoke’ — intricately plotted, embracing the entire Vietnam
  era and bringing it up alongside the war in Iraq — was a huge piece of
  work, a ‘Guernica’ of sorts, then ‘Nobody Move’ is a Warhol soup can, a
  flinty, bright piece of pop art meant to be instantly understood and
  enjoyed.”





Washington Post:


• Charles on The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Rief Larsen: “I fell in love with ‘The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet’ on the first
  page, and so did the New York publishers who pushed the bids for this
  enchantingly illustrated novel toward $1 million…. Beware the bookstore display: If you pick this novel up and
  page through it, you’ll be taking it home…. There’s a problem, though, when you actually sit down to read it
  through: ‘The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet’ loses its way about
  halfway to Washington…. I can’t remember the last
  time my initial affection for a novel was so betrayed by its
  conclusion. It’s maddening that somebody didn’t help this young author
  polish ‘The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet’ into the genre-breaking
  classic it could have been.”



• Benjamin Carter Hett on The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans: “Evans is clearly up on all the latest research on Nazi Germany, no
  mean achievement in a field in which tens of thousands of books have
  been published. But his goal is to appeal to the general reader rather
  than the professional historian, and he succeeds brilliantly, producing
  a book that is beautifully written and, despite its length and grim
  subject matter, easily digestible, even gripping….This is history in the grand style, the kind of large-scale
  narrative that few historians dare to write these days. It is difficult
  to imagine how it could be improved upon, let alone surpassed.”





Los Angeles Times:


• Sarah Weinman on The Way Home by George Pelecanos: “Now, in his early 50s, it is only right that Pelecanos is thick in his
  middle period. The prose isn’t as loose but the edges aren’t as sharp.
  The musical soundtrack plays, but it blends better into the scene.
  Urban D.C. remains the setting, but with history dispensed with, social
  concerns are contemporary and do not resort to a younger man’s
  righteous bombast…. ‘The Way Home’ remains true to its titular purpose; as a result, the
  structure is perhaps less weighted toward a classic narrative arc and
  more toward the journey itself. As with his last two novels, Pelecanos
  demonstrates that redemption, if it comes at all, is hard-won.”



• Susan Carpenter on A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi: “The clean, orderly style is the work of a fully realized artist who’s
  spent 60 years honing his craft, and ‘A Drifting Life’ represents the ‘dramatic pictures’ (gekiga) for which Tatsumi is best known –
  emotional and realistic renderings of a hard-knock life told from an
  underdog perspective. Rather than jokes and action, the emphasis is on
  character and narrative…. ‘A Drifting Life’ is a beautiful portrait of a dark time during which
  Tatsumi’s artistic experimentation was clearly a guiding light for a
  fledgling movement. Even at 800-plus pages, it seems to end too soon,
  stopping in 1960. One can only hope that Tatsumi pens the rest of his
  illustrious life story.”



• Jon Fasman on Wanting by Richard Flanagan: “Richard Flanagan has written an exquisite, profoundly moving,
  intricately structured meditation about the desire for human connection
  in its many forms — that commingling of compassion, curiosity, care,
  lust, attraction, intrigue, selfishness and selflessness that is
  clumsily grouped under that most perilous of all abstract nouns: love.”





Globe and Mail:


• Claudia Casper on Mothers and Others by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: “Mothers and Others is overflowing with fascinating information
  and thinking. It’s a book you read, pausing regularly to consider the
  full import of what you just read. You might call out to friends and
  family nearby, maybe even to wounded skateboarders and hungry,
  video-gaming 13-year-olds, ‘Can you believe this?’ and read out a
  mind-blowing passage. And then you might say, ‘If that’s true, then
  that means,’ suddenly seeing some part of your day-to-day life in a
  completely new way.”



• Annabel Lyon on Brooklyn by Colm Toibin: “There’s fodder for melodrama in each of these plots, but Tóibín is
  himself a master — like his countryman William Trevor — of a kind of
  deep gentleness, even as the darkness falls on his characters. ‘Understatement,’ implying little more than a refined, dry wit, isn’t
  quite the word. ‘Subtle’ is a given. ‘Unblinking’ is perhaps the best
  adjective: Here is a writer who quietly watches and reports, shocked at
  nothing, missing nothing.”





The Guardian:


• Alex Clark on The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt: “This is a very dark novel, driven by an unsparing view of human nature
  and a clear-eyed analysis of the idea of human perfectibility. Despite
  some of its structural similarities to Byatt’s earlier novel
  Possession, and its thematic links to the tetralogy that featured
  Frederica Potter, it reminded me most of Byatt’s Little Black Book of
  Stories. In that collection and in this novel, Byatt reminds us in
  chilling fashion of the perils of artistic creation, and the duties of
  its exponents to find out the difference between what is real and what
  is not.”



• Nicholas Lezard on The Collected Stories by Lorrie Moore (available in UK only): “Reading a lot of Moore stories in one go can give you a thorough
  immersion in the shocks that flesh and heart are heir to. There is a
  good chance that any one of her stories will contain divorce, cancer, a
  grindingly dull life in the Midwest, a dead child somewhere in the
  past, or combinations thereof. These are all common enough fears,
  though no less disabling for all that; you feel that Moore is working
  at only one end of the radio spectrum, yet somehow she manages to pick
  out an enormous number of stations with the tiniest twist of the dial.”





The New Yorker:


• Arthur Krystal’s piece on William Hazlitt is subscribers-only, but it begins, appealingly, like this: “Prepare yourself: you cannot be both a Coleridgean and a Hazlittean. I’m sorry, but it needed to be said. This doesn’t mean you can’t like both ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Indian Juggler,’ but somewhere along the line you have to choose. It’s an ontological thing. Coleridge had an idealizing nature, Hazlitt a skeptical one. Coleridge gravitated toward the Absolute; Hazlitt fled from it. Coleridge believed that poetry was generated by ’severe laws of the intellect’; Hazlitt believed that it was forged in the crucible of the sympathetic imagination. Coleridge argued that opposites exist in order to be reconciled; Hazlitt couldn’t reconcile himself to that–or to much else, for that matter.”





–Tom