About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Clare Chambers
Positive The Telegraph (UK) You get the sense, as the plot unfolds, that even Chambers’s skilful, modest realism can’t quite digest the strange, lumpy and dark story it has somehow managed to swallow.
Lydia Davis
Mixed The Telegraph (UK) \"Our Strangers’s quirky presentation sometimes hides the fact that the stories themselves are fairly uneven (there are over 150 in the book). Some of them read too much like jokes that aren’t meant to be funny ... The overall effect can become a kind of cumulative slightness. Yet that slightness does allow Davis to record details and emotions without any of the falsification that can be forced on you by the traditional narrative devices of context and plot. Part of her point is to show what ordinary life is actually like without the big claims that literature wants to make for it.\
Ann Patchett
Positive The Telegraph (UK) \"As all this should make clear, we’re in nostalgic summer romance territory, and Tom Lake delivers the expected emotional pay-off ... Tom Lake shares many of the qualities of Wilder’s play. Patchett writes beautifully measured prose, even if it sometimes makes her narrator come across as over-controlled, maybe even a little controlling ... Occasionally the action feels thematically convenient rather than real...The same is true of some of the characterization...But that’s also part of Patchett’s point: that there’s something ultra-vivid about the talents of actors, and it makes them not quite real.\
Javier Marías, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa
Rave The New York Times Book Review Exhaustive and self-contradictory while suggesting some core of consistent purpose ... He’s...interested in the tropes of the genre, like a writer of westerns using the frontier as the setting for a morality tale ... A tension you can feel throughout Marías’s work: between the need to fictionalize the world so you can bear it, and the need to realize what’s going on so you can act.
Jeff Benedict
Mixed Times Literary Supplement (UK) James did not speak to him either, but Benedict is good at reproducing his thoughts and even some of the scenes of his life from a composite of James’s published interviews and extensive interviews with the other people involved. The result is a skilfully confected and readable book that does very well with James’s childhood and loses its way the closer we get to his present-day self ... Veers uncomfortably into hagiography the closer we get to the present day ... Benedict himself seems to lose interest in the basketball as the book goes on. He dispenses with James’s last championship season in LA in a few short paragraphs and spends much more prose on his evolution as a social activist.
Jonathan Coe
Positive New York Times Book Review Begins on familiar terrain ... All suggest another satire of arty, upper-middle-class English life. But the novel that follows turns out to be sweeter and less embarrassed by sentiment. It also ventures much further afield ... Coe positions Calista cleverly to contrast her with the two Hollywood big shots at the heart of her \'memoir\' ... But in spite of the finely calibrated plausibility of her contact with fame, Coe isn’t really aiming at modest realism here. Some of the dialogue feels straightforwardly informational ... All of these games allow for a certain amount of meta-reflection on the nature of art — writing and filmmaking — and the way that even great artists have to come to terms with their diminishing relevance ... In its own quiet way, the novel is as odd as the movie it describes: part Hollywood biopic, part Holocaust memoir, part middle-class domestic drama. What holds it together is the hard kernel of historical fact at its core.
Elizabeth Strout
Positive The Times Literary Supplement (UK) ... an impressive performance ... Strout, at her best, never strains towards plot creation. Everything that happens here (until, maybe, the final scenes) seems natural and normal, with the right amount of unusual baked in ... Barton’s dominant mode as a narrator is a kind of carefully protected naivety. She uses naivety as Roth used irony, to say what the author wants to say and undercut it at the same time. One of the things she uses it for is to make you feel more strongly what everybody already knows...Sometimes this register seems less suited to the complexity of events ... What you make of this novel depends to a large extent on your sympathies for its narrator. There are many wonderful passages, descriptions of the changing New England landscape, moments of real insight, powerful depictions of families in flux. But Lucy by the Sea sometimes feels a little like a children’s story. Characters tend to be either one-note (good or bad), or two-note (alternately good and bad, with not much room in between). Lucy herself, like a child, measures her reactions simply ... Strout presents a view of the world that equates suffering with authority and runs the risk of both sentimentalizing and simplifying it, and of defining people entirely by isolated events. This also explains why the author was so quick to leap on the narrative potential of the pandemic – a period in history when the tragic and domestic were forced into contact with each other on a scale never seen before.
Mohsin Hamid
Mixed The Times Literary Supplement (UK) The opening is brilliantly direct ... The humourlessness seems to be part of a more general strategy. The world these characters inhabit is not quite our world...it’s a deliberately generic, slightly flavourless version of reality ... Without many specifics to draw on, it isn’t quite clear how to advance the story from the original premiss, and this is where Hamid’s second big narrative decision comes in. Anders isn’t alone in his metamorphosis – it soon starts happening to other people ... In other words this is less a story about individual alienation and more one about social transformation. It’s also a kind of pandemic narrative ... This is an allegory that has as much to say about multiculturalism as it does about race ... Hamid is careful to show real sympathy to the more reactionary figures, like Oona’s mother, who end up being less attached to their prejudices than Anders, for one, might have feared. Yet, as in most parables, the writing is marred by its own good intentions.
Christopher Beha
Positive The New York Times Book Review Beha is excellent at establishing his characters as representatives of particular intellectual worldviews; he doesn’t have to pin them down because they keep trying to do it to one another ... an impressive performance. Beha writes like an insider about a wide range of human experiences ... Sometimes the architecture of the plot seems grander and more elaborate than the story housed in it requires — about a family forced to re-evaluate itself as vitality shifts from one generation to the next. There are coincidences, chance encounters, faith healers, high crimes, medical emergencies and other disasters. The argument against analytics is really that there’s something human and elusive the numbers can’t account for, but the improbable here ends up scoring a lot of points ... There are also moving passages of carefully rendered points of view ... the kind of long novel that begins to occupy its own time zone in your life: Like a trader who has to wait for some foreign market to open, you keep returning to this world, waiting for fresh news.
Richard Ford
Positive The Times Literary Supplement (UK) The title of his new collection, Sorry for Your Trouble, is typical Ford. He takes a platitude seriously, because it’s probably true, and says it with enough meaning or depth of feeling that sincerity itself serves as a kind of irony. (Self-delusion in Ford grades almost imperceptibly into self-insight, and it’s not always clear that the difference counts for much.) ... If the characters in I’m Sorry for Your Trouble are richer than the inhabitants of Rock Springs, they’re older, too—and their lives have turned out, if not well, then acceptably. The long-feared thing has not yet happened, and may never; or, if it has, and the aftermath is heading their way, it will probably pass whether they deal with it or not. As for the reader: I can’t think of many other writers, living or dead, who have given me so many reasons over the years to slow down on the page and pay attention.
Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. Susan Bernofsky
Mixed The London Review of Books Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, Visitation, can be read as a response or a companion to Sebald’s The Emigrants ... Like Sebald, Erpenbeck attempts to take the long view of modern German history, though her perspective is geological rather than historical ... The landscape, of course, doesn’t care who occupies it, and if the view you take is long enough then the terrible events of the 20th century that shaped these people’s lives begin to look rather small ... Erpenbeck’s aim seems to be to show an old-fashioned society on the brink of modern madness ... Erpenbeck seems to have learned a lot from Sebald. She writes in long run-on sentences and doesn’t always concern herself with paragraphs. Important plot elements and insights are buried democratically alongside commonplace descriptions and facts ... Erpenbeck has a sharp eye for unpretentious natural detail and pays close attention to the little repetitions necessary to hold a life together ... I’m probably not avant-garde enough (or German enough) to appreciate Erpenbeck’s work. The price she pays for cutting up her narrative seems to me very high: the reader has to work hard just to find out what’s going on.
Andre Dubus III
Positive The New York Times Book Review These are hard things to write about and Dubus asks difficult questions. What do you do with a man who has done what Daniel Ahearn has done? How do you sympathize with him? Dubus does a good job of making Daniel’s self-justifications seem simultaneously plausible and crazy ... Dubus writes well about class—not so much the clash between different ends of the social ladder as the internal conflict that determines whether someone will rise or fall. His characters usually have a foot on two rungs. They’re going up or down. What drives Dubus’s storytelling is the urge to find out which way they’ll turn.
Lawrence Wright
Positive The Guardian Wright serves up a campfire stew of memoir, reportage and historical digression. He is a typically Texas storyteller, an anecdotalist who wanders around and stops occasionally to point out the view, but somehow you end up getting where you’re going anyway ... Wright is a liberal, but his sympathies range across the aisle ... Even on issues such as gun control, Wright tries to offer a balanced view ... On the whole, Wright is semi-optimistic. Part of the point of the book is to talk about the way the kinds of stories he tells shape people’s sense of where they live. The myths matter, too.
Richard Powers
Positive The Guardian (UK) It’s an extraordinary novel, which doesn’t mean that I always liked it ... It’s an astonishing performance. Without the steadily cumulative effect of a linear story, Powers has to conjure narrative momentum out of thin air, again and again. And mostly he succeeds. Partly because he’s incredibly good at describing trees, at turning the science into poetry ... But there is a cost to all this plurality and intellectual energy ... All the big things happen suddenly. Characters die, from gas poisoning or suicide or strokes; marriages collapse; people get arrested. In a book about the wisdom of trees, the stories that shape human life tend, by way of contrast perhaps, to be overdramatic ... There is something exhilarating, too ... I found, while reading, that some of what was happening to his characters passed into my conscience, like alcohol into the bloodstream, and left a feeling behind of grief or guilt, even after I put it down. Which is one test of the quality of a novel.
Joyce Carol Oates
Positive The New York Times In general, Oates is dealing here with the academic world — professors and their kids, editors, writers, adjuncts — people who live in the provinces, on the outskirts of real success ... This is Oates’s real trick, that her formal games and realism tend to reinforce each other — they make the same case.
James Kelman
Rave The New York Times Book Review The happenstance nature of all this is carefully orchestrated. Sometimes Kelman’s carefulness shows through, a visible seam holding the plot together, but he compensates for this with the wonderfully observed slow accumulation of detail that makes up Murdo’s world — both inner and outer ... It takes discipline for a writer to stick to the commonplace so religiously, but over time that discipline pays off. The ordinary becomes the real, and as Murdo sets off to find that gig in Lafayette the casual descriptions of his journey become almost breathlessly anxiety-producing. There’s an element of wish fulfillment here that’s unusual in Kelman’s work, but he’s paid for it, as it were, in advance. And the novel’s ending is more than justified by Kelman’s means of getting us there. A kid is trying to overcome his grief without forgetting about it: a contradiction that serves more generally for what’s involved in being an immigrant, or in growing up. And Dirt Road is about all of those things.
Jerome Charyn
Rave The New York Times Book Review Kosinski is a slippery figure to write about, since the facts have gotten mixed up in his fictions. Accusations of plagiarism and dishonesty — and his and others’ defenses against both — have further muddied the waters. But all this confusion is really grist to Charyn’s mill. He’s not trying to tell the story straight ... Jerzy is a novel with a light touch that’s still capable of lifting heavy subjects. Charyn knows what he wants to do and knows how to do it. His prose has some of the rapid-fire but carefully controlled energy of Thomas Pynchon’s early novella The Crying of Lot 49.