Conspicuous Consumption

 It is tempting to read  Stoner,  the story of a man in an unhappy marriage, thwarted in his career, and not quite able to be the teacher or scholar he wants to be, as relentlessly bleak. And yet, in the course of the protagonist William Stoner's life, he manages to experience the aesthetic bliss that one can find in the best art, to experience love (also passionate sex), albeit outside his marriage, and also to experience paternal love in the early years of his relationship with his daughter. The view of life Williams presents us with is in no way idealized; it is a realistic account of the good accompanied by the bad, a combination with which most us will be familiar. Stoner is, for most of the book, a university professor. There is nothing in the account of his life and career that is surprising or exciting. It is, in short, mundane. Reading Williams's account of it, though, we find ourselves affected by something that lies just beneath the surface. As in, for example,...

 Having now read the first two Reacher books in quick succession I am coming to the conclusion that the series has a great strength which is also a weakness: Jack Reacher.  This entirely rootless and ruthlessly competent man is an incarnation of a fantasy that appeals to many of us. The sections of this novel that feature him are a treat. The problem is, there are sections where the POV character shifts, and they are uniformly less interesting than the Reacher sections. One scurries through them to get back to the main attraction. The main attraction will certainly draw me back, but maybe not right away. In Die Trying Reacher is dealing with a right wing group based on the sort of wackos that used to infest the less populated parts of Michigan and the American West. Reading the novel, published in 1998, takes one back to a simpler time when we could view these militia types as fringe wierdos and usually not much more. Alas, that was long before they and their sympathizers inf...

      After telling her that he thought The Waves was a masterpiece, Virginia Woolf's husband and first reader, Leonard, added that he "thinks the first 100 pages extremely difficult, & is doubtful how far any common reader will follow." I'm not sure if I qualify as a "common reader," but I maybe I am, because Leonard was spot on: It took me about 100 pages to learn how to read The Waves . The rest was pure pleasure. As I move through Woolf's novels, I am delighted to find that she never seems to have let herself get into a rut. In each novel she tries something new. In The Waves it is the presentation of six characters (and a seventh whose voice we never hear) through internal monologues—the stories they tell about themselves at different stages of their lives. Woolf shows us, by the end that, though they are individuals, they also form a sort of grid: they are all part of each other. Waves, we remember, are each separate from the other, but are b...

  Becky Cooper has worked at The New Yorker  and has written a good many articles for them (mostly about food and restaurants) including the four-parter that she would expand (and expand and expand) into this book. One of the great things about The New Yorker is their willingness to go long, whether that means devoting a significant chunk of one issue to an in depth exploration, or spreading that exploration over a few issues. Their commitment to long-form journalism is what keeps many of us reading it. There's such a thing, though, as giving a story that needs space too much space, and that is the problem with Becky Cooper's We Keep the Dead Close . In sharing with us seemingly every detail of her amateur quest to figure out who murdered a Harvard graduate student named Jane Britton, and throwing in the plight of women in academia over the last half-century, #MeToo, our propensity to tell stories and make myths about inexplicable events, and even her own relationship with a ...

  With the possible exception of László Krasznahorkai , there is no writer of recent times who is as ambitious, as original, as brilliant as W.G Sebald. I knew this when I read the first of his books to be translated into English, The Emigrants , and moving through the rest of his oeuvre only convinces me further that this is the case. The Rings of Saturn  is a travel book: Sebald/not Sebald takes a long walk through Sussex. Unlike lesser examples of the genre, though, there are no "hilarious" encounters with locals or with other travelers. Instead we get reflections on history, on literature, and on landscape, rendered in such a way that they are at once somber, dreamlike, allusive, horrifying (and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny). The walker, in the course of his English stroll, calls up Thomas Browne ("Hydriotaphia, urn burial; with an account of some urns found at Brampton in Norfolk") and Edward FitzGerald (translator of Omar Khayyam), and visits his friend M...

 This is the first published of Lee Child's Jack Reacher series. I read it a long time ago, but had mostly forgotten it. What I hadn't forgotten is the character, Jack Reacher. In giving us a man who moves through the world free of all the burdens that our societies and cultures place upon us, and also unbothered by having to forego the wonderful things that our societies and cultures make available to us, Lee Child gives us an attractive fantasy. Imagine being entirely unburdened and free. But of course things can't be that simple. Reacher inevitably gets involved in something. In this case his brother, with whom, like everyone else who has passed through his life, he has been out of touch, is murdered, and his murder turns out to be one small piece of a large pile of crime and corruption. Reacher ends up having to put things right.   With admirable competence and cool—this, too, is part of the fantasy—Reacher does put things right. Having done so, he leaves town, realiz...

     Like most Americans of my generation, I read a couple of novels by John Steinbeck in the course of my education. In my case—maybe in everybody's case—one of them was Of Mice and Men , but I also read  The Pearl . I remember enjoying them, but somehow, as I matured as a reader, I never wanted to continue through Steinbeck's oeuvre. I'm glad that some friends invited me to join in a group read of East of Eden , because, though I probably wouldn't have picked it up on my own, I enjoyed it tremendously.      I tend to dislike books overburdened with "philosophy" and "messages." East of Eden is rich in both, but somehow they don't capsize the ship. Using the story of Cain and Abel as his source, Steinbeck is able to reflect on family, on what he would have called "blood" but  we now prefer to think of as DNA, and most effectively on good and evil.  To say that everyone has some bad, some evil, some of the devil in them is banal. Wh...