A Widow’s Story – Joyce Carol Oates
One emotion interrupts another in a series of convoluted, dash-ridden sentences that create a tangle of Dickensonian brambles, occasionally dotted with the softly familiar sight of a numbered poem amidst Oates’s prose. Unlike a reader of Dickenson, however, Oates’ reader must push her way up a mountain of words, slippery with confused thoughts and sharp with grief.
More so than the memory that death incites, Suicide is an exploration of forgetfulness and “memory’s caprices.” It’s a cruel irony, one that underscores the entire novel; that a defiant act meant to sharply etch a life into the minds eyes of the living ultimately does the opposite. No character gets a name, no character gets a face; only traces remain.
Whether Connors realizes it or not, his isolation isn’t so pure, nor his city living so alienating that he has to view himself as split between the two. That’s part of being American, containing those multitudes. That’s part of being human. And that’s what makes this book so incredibly enjoyable.
This is exactly what we need: more books that don’t force us to choose between enthusiasm and rigor, the ridiculous and the sublime, stories and arguments, the personal and the literary. If the theories we use to read novels don’t also help us read our lives, then we’ve missed the point entirely.
All the Time in the World – E.L. Doctorow
The stories are novelistic in scope, as each one ends with the bang of an action, event or revelation, but they are also quiet, compact, and unassuming – at least at first.
NOX is mystifying and exquisite, and, to reverse Carson’s metaphor, it opens doors that won’t close—even once you fold the book back into its box, you remain inside it.
Barnes approaches big questions about human relationships and finds no simple answers, but in setting his parameters narrow, he is able to dig deep, forgoing the pyrotechnics of ardor and the convictions of youth for measured uncertainty and emotional ambivalence.
Cloud of Ink, one of the two winners of the 2010 Iowa Poetry Prize, is a solid volume of eccentric, dense, whimsical, occasionally inscrutable and occasionally gorgeous poetry. Though the collection is somewhat eclectic and adopts a number of different approaches, Klatt’s talent for imagining bizarre, dreamlike scenarios is certainly one of his greatest strengths.
Unfamiliar Fishes – Sarah Vowell
Vowell often comes off like a guest who crashed the party and then forgot why she wanted to come in the first place.
Wolitzer’s greatly misunderstood what it’s like to be on and experience the internet, while simultaneously reacting to the medium as it was in about 2003. The depiction of technology and its effect on our relationships is so awkwardly misplaced, it’s hard to move past it.