Another week, another glut of damn fine literary criticism. In her New Yorker review of Porchista Khakpour’s Sick— the Iranian-American author’s memoir of her struggle with Lyme disease—Lidija Haas writes: “Khakpour’s decision to avoid explicit claims to scientific or literary authority is a bold move, one that draws attention to the ways in which women are expected to tell stories of sickness.” Over at the Washington Post, Ron Charles was significantly less impressed with hot new power couple Bill Clinton & James Patterson’s political thriller The President is Missing, calling the book “about as exciting as watching your parents trying to remember their Facebook password.” In his Guardian review, multi Eisner Award-winning cartoonist Chris Ware calls Nick Drnaso’s dystopian graphic novel, Sabrina, “an extraordinary—and extraordinarily upsetting—novel.” We’ve also got incisive takes on two highly-anticipated short story collections: Katy Waldman on Lauren Groff’s “gorgeously weird and limber” Florida, and Jonathan Dee on Helen DeWitt’s “compulsive, overstuffed, highfalutin” Some Trick.
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“Despite its intermittently chatty tone, Sick is a strange book, one that resists the clean narrative lines of many illness memoirs—in which order gives way to chaos, which is then resolved, with lessons learned and pain transcended along the way … By focussing on place, Khakpour implicitly situates herself in the long line of women who have been, as the writer-director Todd Haynes has put it, speaking of his 1995 film Safe, ‘pathologized by their own dis-ease in the world’ … Though she’s worn down by her mistreatment at the hands of some of her doctors, Khakpour seems unsurprised; as a woman of color, born in Iran, she begins from the assumption that many Americans will find her suspect. Her lack of defensiveness is perhaps the book’s most remarkable quality … Khakpour’s decision to avoid explicit claims to scientific or literary authority is a bold move, one that draws attention to the ways in which women are expected to tell stories of sickness—and the ways in which their storytelling can affect their chances of accurate diagnosis and effective treatment … Rather than wrestle her subject into more comfortable territory, Khakpour forces her reader to deal with unrelieved uncertainty … She dramatizes a paradox: solidarity with other sufferers is a source of both comfort and information, and yet it can also lead you to be written off as one more member of the herd of suspected malingerers.”
–Lidija Haas on Porochista Khakpour’s Sick (The New Yorker)
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“The President Is Missing reveals as many secrets about the U.S. government as The Pink Panther reveals about the French government. And yet it provides plenty of insight on the former president’s ego … As a fabulous revision of Clinton’s own life and impeachment scandal, this is dazzling. The transfiguration of William Jefferson Clinton into Jonathan Lincoln Duncan should be studied in psych departments for years … for much of The President Is Missing, Patterson seems to have deferred to the First Writer. That’s a problem. When we pick up a thriller this silly, we want underwear models shooting Hellfire missiles from hang gliders; Clinton gives us Cabinet members questioning each other over Skype … The larger problem, though, is how cramped the novel’s scope remains. There’s no thrum of national panic, no sense of the wide world outside this very literal narrative. And so much of the plot is stuck in a room with nerds trying to crack a computer code. That struggle feels about as exciting as watching your parents trying to remember their Facebook password.”
–Ron Charles on Bill Clinton & James Patterson’s The President is Missing (The Washington Post)
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“Nick Drnaso has produced an extraordinary—and extraordinarily upsetting—novel … Drnaso allows himself to think the unthinkable; one’s worst fears about the disappearance of a loved one are directly addressed and, in most cases, grimly and grittily realised. He at no point lapses into cliche or sensationalism … rhymes and echoes of action are spaced throughout the story like landmines. No line of dialogue is wasted—Drnaso’s story doesn’t feel ‘plotted,’ but as though it is happening just as one feels life does, even those moments of great emotion, such as a character’s unimaginable anguish and helplessness in the face of uncertainty, or the clinical interest one can take in the prurient details of a reported crime as a distraction from the painful realities of one’s own existence.”
–Chris Ware on Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (The Guardian)
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“The voice of these stories—compulsive, overstuffed, highfalutin and colloquial in equal measure, unafraid of exclamation points that would make Tom Wolfe blush—is like a record of the speed at which such a brain works, and the concomitant difficulty of slowing it down in order to deal with what we regular people would call ‘regular people.’ That voice’s resting pulse, so to speak, is a kind of deadpan logical progression … It shouldn’t work, really, none of it. It should seem too self-pitying, too inside baseball. Even armed with the knowledge of all that the author’s struggles have cost her, reading tales about geniuses suffering the indignity of exposure to nongeniuses might well cause a reader’s eyes to roll: I mean, tell it to James Joyce, you know? … What saves Some Trick in the end is not only that DeWitt is so very funny but that she has harnessed her coder’s brain to negative capability. Which is to say, while she is firmly on the side of the intellectual unicorns, she is also capable of doing full and hilarious justice to their bizarre, frustrating, alien, occasionally tiresome aspect. And she does treat the plight of these artists as a comedy rather than a tragedy, even if, as in any serious comedy, there are casualties.”
–Jonathan Dee on Helen DeWitt’s Some Trick (Harper’s)
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“Despite its departures from Groff’s earlier work, the collection still conjures that feeling of when the floor falls out from under you; as in Fates and Furies, familiar, everyday life dangles by a thin string … Taken together, the stories have the feel of autobiography, although, as in a Salvador Dali painting, their emotional disclosures are encrypted in phantasmagoria. Fates and Furies spelunked into characters’ psyches, while Groff’s short fiction projects psychology outward, externalizing dread, pleasure, and innocence in feral cats, jasmine, and cygnets … Groff has always been a sentence-level writer, and the sentences indigenous to Florida are gorgeously weird and limber … The author practices a kind of alchemical noticing that destabilizes reality and brings the outside world into alignment with characters’ inner lives.”
–Katy Waldman on Lauren Groff’s Florida (The New Yorker)
