Posts From Author: Month: November 2016
Review: The Sellout, by Paul Beatty
The Sellout Paul Beatty Farrar, Straus and Giroux (hardcover) / Picador (paperback), 2015; 304pp Entering the world like the bastard love-child of a Chris Rock routine and a Thomas Pynchon novel, The Sellout is a sensational satire on race relations in the United States. Its outrageous plot, which reintroduces segregation to a forgotten ghetto in Los Angeles County, motors along in the background of a series of brilliant set-pieces fueled by taboo-busting invective. Paul Beatty’s Man Booker Prize triumph last month (he’s the first American author thus honored) is a richly deserved boost to the book, which will hopefully find a wide readership in the years to come as a consequence of the win. And reaching readers feels urgent: the protagonist’s contrarian position on political correctness and establishment thinking about “black America’s problems”, which leads him down a legal rabbit-hole that ends at the Supreme Court, lays the ground for a spookily timely jolt to liberal thought. Ends and means may not always line up; what seem like blasphemous methods may advance a just cause much further. How should we proceed when so little has been achieved going about things the so-called right way? Offering an answer, or at least provocatively worrying away at the question, is the submerged serious intent of Beatty’s […]
Read MoreSeriously Questioning… Richard Cohen
In How To Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers (Random House, 2016), Richard Cohen shares with readers the magpied loot of a lifetime of reading. Packed with examples from the best of world literature and interspersed with anecdotes from his one-time day job as an editor (he’s worked with Fay Weldon, Kingsley Amis, Simon Winchester, Madeleine Albright, Rudy Giuliani, John le Carré…), it’s a hugely entertaining book and one that’ll send you straight to your local library to fill in the gaps in your own reading. The first rule of Write Club seems to be that there are no rules. Every writer’s approach is different. Take the creation of characters: some let their characters guide the plot, some let them serve it; one writer may interview their characters, another will barely define them. While Dostoyevsky may have worried brilliantly over the naming of Raskolnikov, Alistair MacLean was so untaken with the importance of names that he allowed Cohen to change those of minor characters sight unseen. Cohen shares his insights into beginnings and endings, not to mention his foray into the Literary Review‘s “Bad Sex in Fiction” archives. (Who writes sex well? you might ask. “Recently I’ve been reading Elena Ferrante,” Cohen remarked in a chat […]
Read MoreAgnus Dei
Sweet Lamb of Heaven Lydia Millet W.W. Norton & Company, 2016; 256pp Here’s our set-up. After the birth of Anna and Ned’s child, a “ragged, uninvited disruption” enters Anna’s life: she starts to hear voices. Ned is distant — he’d not wanted to go through with the pregnancy anyway — and Anna is left alone to ponder this phenomenon. She watches a lot of horror movies, she spends her nights on Wikipedia. All the time, she’s beset by a “torrent of sound and image”, a “stream of convolved murmurings”. During this period, Ned becomes increasingly remote — he’s unfaithful, and his interest in entering Alaskan politics grows. Then one day, the voices stop. Anna takes Lena, their daughter, and abandons Ned. They travel the country, evading Ned’s attempts to reach them, and eventually wind up living in a motel atop a cliff in Maine, some two hours’ drive from Portland. There, Anna and Lena (now six) get to know Don, the motel’s proprietor, and his other guests, each of whom has also heard voices. “If I had been guided to the motel by some sense beyond the usual five,” she writes, “some navigational instinct having to do with magnetism or light, I wanted to know […]
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