About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Aaron Robertson
Positive The New York Times Book Review Interesting and idiosyncratic ... This book is a formal hybrid that oscillates between a personal history and a more scholarly one ... Eccentric ... Beautiful ... Robertson has done impressive research, reflected in ample endnotes, but readers expecting a thorough treatment of Black utopianism as a historical topic will not find it in The Black Utopians ... A meaningful contribution.
Cormac McCarthy
Positive The New York Times Book Review The experience of reading Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, The Passenger...kept making me think about the word \'portentous\' ... \'Portentous,\' according to Webster’s, can mean foreboding, \'eliciting amazement\' and \'being a grave or serious matter.\' But it can also mean \'self-consciously solemn\' and “ponderously excessive.” It contains its own yin-yang of success and failure. Applied to prose, it can mean that a writer has attained a genuinely prophetic, doom-laden gravitas, or that the writing goes after those very qualities and doesn’t get there, winding up pretentious. McCarthy has always been willing to balance on this fence ... Still, it was a thrill to hear new McCarthy sentences ... The teetering wouldn’t be interesting if he weren’t capable of those spellbinding descriptive passages, a trademark ... Much of The Passenger happens in a room, or a couple of rooms, where the same scene, with variations, runs on a loop. I suspect that many readers will resist or resent spending as much time there as we do. I came to find the goings-on sometimes captivating, but almost feel that I am covering for my abuser in confessing that ... I’m not sure why Alicia’s therapy transcripts have been made a separate volume, in Stella Maris. That is, I’m not sure why McCarthy felt that The Passenger could absorb her hallucinations but not her treatment. Seems arbitrary, as formal choices go ... The Passenger is far from McCarthy’s finest work, but that’s because he has had the nerve to push himself into new places, at the age of all-but-90. He has tried something in these novels that he’d never done before.
Cormac McCarthy
Positive New York Times Book Review Portentous\' ... There is bravery involved, especially at heights of style where the difference can be between greatness and straight badness. [McCarthy] teeters more in these new books than in the several novels for which he is judged a great American writer ... You hear Hemingway and the curious loudness of those supposedly clipped and stripped-down sentences. Something attention-seeking in the syntax ... Much of The Passenger happens in a room, or a couple of rooms, where the same scene, with variations, runs on a loop. I suspect that many readers will resist or resent spending as much time there as we do. I came to find the goings-on sometimes captivating, but almost feel that I am covering for my abuser in confessing that ... Slightly showy? If so, only with what Wallace Stevens called the \'essential gaudiness\' of the best poetry. The action passages underwater are also splendid ... The Passenger is far from McCarthy’s finest work ... He has tried something in these novels that he’d never done before: I don’t mean writing a woman (although there’s that), but writing normal people.
David Foster Wallace
Positive GQ You'd be forgiven for suspecting that a book about random people who work for the government sounds insufferably tedious. The reason it's not has to do with the word about—it's the wrong word, the wrong preposition. Wallace doesn't write about his characters; he hadn't in a long time. He writes into them … Wallace's choice of the IRS as a setting makes sense when you consider that he's doing something theological in this novel, and the ‘service,’ as the employees call it, provides him with convenient Jesuitical overtones. He was using the IRS the way Borges used the library and Kafka used the law-courts building: as an analogy for the world.