Acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane has been waiting 30 years for the follow up to Barry Lopez’s National Book Award-winning Arctic Dreams, and upon reading Horizon (Lopez’s new account of a lifetime spent traveling around the world), he was not disappointed: “Horizon is magnificent,” writes Macfarlane, “a contemporary epic, at once pained and urgent, personal and oracular.”
Over at the New York Times, novelist and poet Idra Novey considers Dave Eggers’ The Parade—a disquieting parable of two unnamed contractors in a recently war-torn war country who are tasked with rebuilding a road: “Readers are shut out of any background information on either man, an authorial choice that generates a subtle tension throughout the novel.”
What We Lose author Zinzi Clemmons welcomes the publication of Zora and Langston, a new dual biography of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, which, Clemmons writes, “refocuses our attention on the positive aspects of their relationship, while doing its best to explain what really brought their friendship to an end.”
We’ve also got Ruth Franklin’s Atlantic review of Sing to It, a new collection of short stories from Amy Hempel (“One or two or three human beings navigating a situation of exquisite emotional intensity, sketched with the fewest possible words—this has become Hempel’s signature”) and Jess Bergman’s Jewish Currents essay on stalking and the “anti-orgasm” in Anna Burns’ Milkman (“As Milkman’s predations intensify, Burns’s compulsively maximalist prose careens like the speech of someone as sure of themselves as they are unsure of what’s about to come out of their mouth”).
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“Place, Eudora Welty wrote, is where an author’s quest for truth starts. A novel doesn’t ‘begin to glow,’ Welty claimed, until its setting comes to be ‘accepted as true.’ For authors inclined to rebel against this kind of dictum, withholding the particulars of a place can be a way to pursue a different kind of truth, less about conjuring place than about conjuring patterns in human failure found all over. Dave Eggers embarks on that alternative quest in his eighth novel … Readers…are shut out of any background information on either man, an authorial choice that generates a subtle tension throughout the novel. Without the usual biographical hints tucked into conversations and internal thoughts, Eggers differentiates between Four and Nine solely through their reactions to the post-civil-war devastation around them … The Portuguese novelist Gonçalo Tavares, who has written a number of fascinating parable-like novels set in unnamed cities, created a term for sentences that veer in unexpected directions or dare an unexpected shift in syntax. He calls them ‘wolf sentences’ for their ability to startle both the author and the reader and for the untamed vitality such lines can add to a scene. Readers attentive to wolf sentences may not find many in The Parade, but the final scene of the novel contains such ferocity that it offers good reason for all the tame language that precedes it.”
–Idra Novey on Dave Eggers’ The Parade (The New York Times Book Review)
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“Like many who came to Lopez first through Arctic Dreams, I sought out much of his other work, compelled by its stylistic adventure, its ethical address and the secular spirituality of land that it advanced—evident especially in its deference to traditional ecological knowledge, and to animals as tutelary presences … Anticipation often leads to overdetermination, and overdetermination to disappointment. Not so in this case. Horizon is magnificent; a contemporary epic, at once pained and urgent, personal and oracular. It is being described as Lopez’s ‘crowning achievement,’ but I prefer to see it less teleologically as a partner to Arctic Dreams, and the late enrichment of an already remarkable body of work … Lopez’s writing throughout this book is pulled taut between his need to register the extreme urgency of the environmental crisis, and his long-held belief in time, patience and the careful observation of other cultures as the basis for a fix … Horizon is a deeply wounded book. It grieves for harm done and harm ahead. ‘I want everyone here to survive what is coming,’ Lopez says. A lifetime’s training in listening to others has left him vastly empathic—blessed and burdened with a love for all … He has given us a grave, sorrowful, beautiful book, 35 years in the writing but still speaking to the present moment: ‘No one can now miss the alarm in the air.’ ”
–Robert Macfarlane on Barry Lopez’s Horizon (The Guardian)
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“One or two or three human beings navigating a situation of exquisite emotional intensity, sketched with the fewest possible words—this has become Hempel’s signature … In contrast to a writer like Deborah Eisenberg, who has produced a similarly spare number of stories but whose field of vision is more broadly geopolitical, the work of Hempel’s cohort is domestic and interior—Carver’s couples sitting around a table talking about love. Hempel’s domesticity, however, isn’t as stable as the word implies. Like her previous collections, her latest is a book of renters and house sitters; people on a temporary leave from their lives that threatens to become permanent, their ennui insufficient to spur them to action … The style leaves little room for mistakes, and several stories in Sing to It misfire or simply fail to coalesce. They’re snapshots rather than collages, vignettes rather than dreamscapes. But when the approach works, turning the pages is like swimming in a lake and suddenly finding the bottom drop out beneath you, leaving you to get your bearings amid unanticipated depths.”
–Ruth Franklin on Amy Hempel’s Sing to It (The Atlantic)
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“The dramatic fallout between Hurston and Hughes, triggered by their collaboration on the ill-fated and controversial play Mule Bone, has been fetishized in literary circles for its dramatic nature. Stories of their heated fights, rumors of a love triangle involving their typist, Louise Thompson, and the involvement of lawyers have all made the rounds. Consequently, the qualities that initially drew these artists together—their shared sense of mission and pride in ordinary black people—have long been overlooked. Zora and Langston refocuses our attention on the positive aspects of their relationship, while doing its best to explain—through historical records and firsthand research—what really brought their friendship to an end … [Charlotte Osgood] Mason’s stewardship is one of the most glaring and fascinating contradictions in Zora and Langston, simultaneously echoing those at the heart of both writers’ legacies. Although demeaning, Mason’s patronage allowed Hurston and Hughes to produce some of their most enduring works. It also sustained them through low points in their careers, as well as through the Great Depression, when many of their confreres drifted into obscurity … the greatest feat of Zora and Langston perhaps lies in Taylor’s loving yet evenhanded portraits of both figures.”
–Zinzi Clemmons on Yuval Taylor’s Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal (The New York Times Book Review)
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“As Milkman’s predations intensify, Burns’s compulsively maximalist prose careens like the speech of someone as sure of themselves as they are unsure of what’s about to come out of their mouth. In their contortions, repetitions, and evasions, her sentences come to resemble the avoidant behaviors of middle sister herself, whose coping strategies of reading-while-walking, shunning 20th century politics for the 19th century novel, and rebuffing all questions about her personal life with a stoic ‘I don’t know’ have unwittingly landed her on the list of the community’s dreaded ‘beyond-the-pales’ … In Milkman, Burns’s canniest trick might be reversing the logic that so alienates her narrator, whose private, indefinite pain is subsumed by the public violence of the Troubles. If middle sister’s habit of eschewing proper nouns for a more expedient shorthand—’us’ and ‘them,’ ‘over the border’ and ‘over the water’—positions the reader as an insider to the conflict, it also shrouds what she merely calls ‘the political problems’ in vagueness. The setting largely fails to overwhelm the immediacy, or the anxiety, of middle sister’s disintegration, her struggle to evade the Milkman. This smaller story is, in the end, the one to which we bear witness.”
–Jess Bergman on Anna Burns’ Milkman (Jewish Currents)
