The Critical Sphere

Numerous online book reviews and journals have just posted new issues, which collectively illustrate how substantive such online publications have become and how quickly they are beginning to offset the loss of book review pages in newspapers and print magazines. In most cases, the reviews appearing in these online sources are easily as good as those published in print, and in many cases quite obviously superior.

The Quarterly Conversation would have to be exhibit one in a defense of this claim, and its new issue is, as usual, abundant with thoughtful reviews and critical essays. Among them:

The editors on the recent spate of posthumous publications:

As long as editorial will reigns and readers wonder what if?, it’s clear that the dead will never have the last word—the bigger question is, should they?

Scott Esposito on the oeuvre of Cormac McCarthy:

. . .Without getting bogged down in questions surrounding McCarthy’s spirituality, McCarthy’s invocation of God points to the important fact that Child of God, like most of his other novels, embodies a sense of wholeness, a breaking down of both the bifurcations between the natural and the human and the divisions within human society. Though he sees these borders as significant, McCarthy always recognizes that they are mere human contrivance. By breaking them down McCarthy better represents his characters’ existential confusion as they comprehend the fact that borders are merely human constructs: when our attempts to categorize the world are undermined, we are forced to confront the grotesque; that is, the fact that the world is fundamentally unknowable. . . .

Travis Godsoe on literary caricature:

Caricature can be recognized for its strength as a tool for shaping a character or thing into a form that rescues its essence from the mundane pit of factual limits, and lifts it up to reverberate into the infinite space of the imagination.

Karen Vanuska on Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit:

The Foundation Pit is a singular literary manifestation of a people in the midst of a struggle to create new identities for themselves and their nation. American readers in search of the elusive “Great American Novel” will appreciate all that Platonov achieves in this sort of work. Additionally, The Foundation Pit is, at heart, Platonov’s very personal statement about disillusionment with one’s country and what that disillusionment means for one’s daily life. Contemporary readers of all nationalities will probably find such disillusionment achingly familiar.

-----

The June issue of Open Letters is a special fiction issue, including both reviews of fiction and a separate "portfolio" of stories and novel excerpts. Among the reviews:

Sam Sacks on Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor:

It’s not that Sag Harbor is bad (although on the occasions when Whitehead tries to conceal the pointlessness of his observations with flowery window-dressing language, the going gets tough); it’s that it’s just there, cheerfully amenable to readers who can match their own memories to it (as I can to some degree, having summered on the eastern seaboard throughout the 1980s) and offering a shrugging “Guess you had to be there” to everyone else. . . .

John Fox on Denis Johnson's Nobody Move:

The jacket copy promotes the book as an homage to and a variation from the genre. That’s half right. It’s certainly an homage to noir. The variations are scarce, though. Mostly, the book rises to the level of the best practitioners of the genre, such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, with razor-sharp dialogue, compressed scenes, and gripping characters. But structurally and philosophically, Nobody Move is not subverting the genre in any significant way. . . .

Also, John G. Rodwan on Joseph Conrad:

Joseph Conrad, laureate of futility and ambassador of the unspeakable, fills his fiction with indistinct forms, unknowable characters, inscrutable events and irresolvable mysteries. Repeatedly drawing attention to the insurmountable challenges to clear and precise expression, he devises stories about the impossibility of telling accurate stories. He often uses multiple, backward-looking narrators recounting partially remembered events pieced together from various sources. Conrad frequently depicts characters struggling to cope with uncertainty and overcome – or desperately sustain – the illusions they predictably develop in a confounding and ultimately meaningless universe. For a solidly productive author, Conrad’s body of work evinces remarkable doubts about the utility of language and a deep skepticism about the value of writing. . . .

-----

At Bookslut:

Jacob Silverman on Francis Wyndham's collected fiction:

It is [in Wyndham's depiction of homosexuality in early to mid-twentieth century England] that his sense of subtlety comes through best, for these stories aren't simply gay stories. In fact, the stories that feature gay characters are often about broad themes of obsession, longing, the decay of troubled families, even boredom. And so it's refreshing to see these gay characters presented with no underlying thesis -- only a desire to tell us their stories.

Beth Harrington on Dennis Cooper's Ugly Man:

The novice reading this collection will wonder if there really are that many sexually ambiguous young men possessed by the most brutal and distortedly violent impulses walking around everyday society. And yet in the context of Cooper’s unfazed delivery, the answer seems realistically yes. In fact, Cooper’s intentions as an author seem less about cheap shock value but rather about throwing the value of shock into complacent readers’ faces. Stories of junkies and Satanists teaming up and killing one another and/or themselves seem to mockingly underscore everything that society indoctrinates its members to be afraid of, yet leave one skeptical that these forces are actually the cause of such atrocities.

-----

At Gently Read Literature:

Deborah Bogen on the poetry of Lynn Emanuel:

There’s no doubt that Emanuel is interested in what she calls the “bookness” of a book, the features and limitations of narrative and in postmodern practices that create in the reader self-consciousness and a sense of separateness from the author and the text. This essay will argue that the central project of Emanuel’s three books is an examination of what art can and cannot do. There is a critical moment in each volume where the unavoidable appearance of real elegy, elegy that is profoundly personal, filled with human sorrow and a loss is not amenable to the kind of linguistic manipulation that creates distance and coolness in much of the rest of the text.

Darren DeFrain on J.C. Hallman’s The Hospital for Bad Poets:

In the first story from J.C. Hallman’s terrific collection, The Hospital for Bad Poets, he drags the eponymous character from the Flemish morality play Everyman into the twenty-first century as “the average man.” “The average man is not what he used to be,” begins the story and the collection in typically understated tone. And Hallman examines the daily malaise that afflicts “the average man” (so average he doesn’t merit capitalization of his generic appellation). The average man just doesn’t feel right. His malady is “not quite disease, not quite exhaustion, something more spectral and unaccountable.” It is this general spectrality that pervades Hallman’s collection. His stories exist always with some less-than-sinister unease at the periphery. His characters, in the tradition of Beckett and Barthelme, struggle against the germination of paranoia and despair as they face familiar themes of philosophical alienation and moral surreality.

-----

At N1BR:

Christian Lorentzen on Walter Kirn's Lost in the Meritocracy:

This book gave me a headache in my lower-middle brow. As most of its pages are devoted to Kirn's Princeton years, Lost is designed to appeal to a certain readership's love-hate relationship with the Ivy League and the nation's other elite institutions of higher education. Those readers who didn't go—perhaps they didn't get in, maybe they didn't apply—will learn that Princeton was hell on earth. Glad I didn't go there! Those with elite degrees and mixed feelings will be assuaged of any lingering guilt. The system is unjust, but don't blame me for benefiting from it—I was young and did as I was told!

Michael Lindgren on John Cheever:

It's an enlightening experience to read Blake Bailey's biography, though not in the way I would have expected. Bailey is a fine writer and an obviously indefatigable researcher, but in terms of a general sense of Cheever's life, there is not much in his book that you can't get from Scott Donaldson's John Cheever (1988). Spending seven-hundred pages in close proximity to this haunted, irascible, petulant, and deeply humane man's life has only confirmed my ultimate ignorance of exactly how literary attraction works and what motivates our affinity for a person's words, the majority of which, in this case, were committed to paper quite some time before I was even born.

-----

At The Short Review:

Steven Wingate on Matt Bell's How the Broken Lead the Blind:

So many short shorts veer toward willful absurdity for its own sake, but Matt Bell’s How the Broken Lead the Blind manages to get beyond that stereotype in ways that will reward the reader. Bell does not veer toward pyrotechnics, as so many practitioners of this burgeoning subgenre do, but maintains the authorial discipline to give us thick, complex insights into human wants and confusions. . . .

Elaine Chiew on Nam Le's The Boat:

I had a good chuckle when the main character, also named Nam, in Nam Le’s first story in this debut, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," took note of the prevalence of ethnic lit. "It’s hot," says a literary agent. "I’m sick of ethnic lit. It’s full of descriptions of exotic food," says one of his friends. "You can’t tell if the language is spare because the author intended it that way, or because he didn’t have the vocab."

Nam Le then sets out in the next six stories in this collection to disprove the fact that he’s just another ethnic minority writer. . . .

-----

Finally:

A journal of whose existence I have only recently become aware, The Rumpus. Its book section is here.

I have also just become aware of The Point, "a Chicago-based print journal devoted to rigorous intellectual essays on contemporary life." I am linking to it here because, for now at least, it is making the majority of its contents available online, including this very good essay on David Foster Wallace by editor Jon Baskin.

Comments

[J.C. Hallman]

Hi,

Thanks for this kind reprinting of Darren DeFrain's take on my book of stories. I think your website is perfect, in spirit, for an anthology I've edited, a collection of "creative criticism" that will be published by Tin House Books in October. I'd love to put you a list to receive an advance copy. Can you email me at JCHallman@gmail.com?

Here's a link to my website's description of said anthology, THE STORY ABOUT THE STORY:

http://jchallman.com/pages/books/the_story_about_the_story/the_story_about_the_story.asp

Thanks again,
J.C. Hallman

[Adam R]

You might also like The Chapbook Review: http://www.thechapbookreview.com

[JMW]

Thanks for this great roundup, and please excuse this plug for my own recently launched online review, The Second Pass:

http://thesecondpass.com/

[King Wenclas]

Do any of these critics ever look outside the acceptable parameters to examine the machine of literature itself? (The fact, say, that Cormac McCarthy recently received a grant-- like he needs it-- from public charity PEN?)