RaveThe Denver PostLike all of Judt’s writing, The Memory Chalet insists upon the old-fashioned virtue of intellectual clarity. If politically Judt was a lifelong member of the left, culturally he was a conservative. In an American university setting he passed for a reactionary, with his open disdain for identity politics, theorizing and political correctness ... Judt’s book differs from most memoirs in a crucial way. Even the best of contemporary confessional writing...have little to offer in the way of wisdom beyond the usual one- day-at-a-time homilies of the recovery movement and the thin truths of the self ... By habit, Judt is driven to find in his own story something more significant than a story of private wounds, traumas and grievances. This may seem in our solipsistic age like a novel approach, but it is in fact an older one.
Colson Whitehead
PositiveElectric Literature...now Colson Whitehead, the author of rarefied novels like The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, tries his hand at the genre with the novel Zone One ...an indeterminate catastrophe called Last Night has created a race of zombies and changed the world from a recognizable contemporary terrain to a post-apocalyptic one in which only shards of civilized society remain ... Yet Whitehead, who has an ear for absurdist jargon second only to Don DeLillo’s, is true to his tongue-in-cheek vision ...is one of the writers who reserve their tenderness chiefly for inanimate objects, and who has imagined destruction so he can gaze lovingly at the ruins ... As the faceless Mark Spitz sifts through his generic, buzzword-laden, pre-apocalypse memories and marches passively towards his fate, the suspicion grows that, in Whitehead’s world, the human and the undead might just be two different classes of zombies.
Ian McEwan
PanThe Denver PostPredictably — what is more predictable in a spy story than the agent falls for her target? — Serena takes a fancy to the brilliant and single-minded Tom. If this were all McEwan wanted to accomplish, Sweet Tooth, with its off-the-rack plot and its idiosyncratic but lifeless characters, would be nothing more than a mediocre spy novel. Instead, it is a mediocre spy novel with a cumbersome thematic apparatus … McEwan is also fascinated with the parallels between spying and writing fiction. Serena spies on Tom, but Tom also spies on Serena by making her the subject of his fiction.
Julian Barnes
RaveThe Denver PostThe history in question is not a national but an individual history. Tony Webster, the 60-ish protagonist of the novel, is a retired divorcee living in suburban England. Tony has been haunted by a chain of incidents that occurred when he was a teenager in the early 1960s … Though Tony claims that he has managed to put Veronica’s rejection of him and the suicide of the gifted Adrian out of mind, he appears haunted by these twin mysteries and he is energized by the opportunity to resolve them. Needless to say, Tony learns more than he bargained for … Barnes has finally found the perfect balance between the drama of ideas and the profundity of plot. It is his best novel.
