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Recent Reviews
Ian McEwan
Mixed New York Magazine \"The desired effect [of the opening passage] is vividness, proximity; the result is the opposite, with the adjectives muffling the screaming, so that it is no longer screaming but only screaming-that-is-being-written-about. Few contemporary writers are as fixated as McEwan on physical violence; yet no one’s prose is less violent than his ... Where sounds, through his window panes, elude him, and dialogue is always forced and automatic-sounding, McEwan sees with remarkable clarity ... Saturday is not a suspenseful novel; after the march forces Perowne into a minor car accident, the book heads with great deliberation toward its crisis. When it finally comes, the crisis is awful and McEwanly lurid ... Having pressed further into the reaches of consciousness and pain in Atonement, [McEwan] has pulled back. Henry Perowne, ultracompetent, scientific, reasonable, in the end supports the invasion of Iraq. The daytime glass through which he sees the world becomes, at night, a mirror. He flinches, seeing his reflection—but not for very long.\
William Taubman
Positive The Nation In his thorough and highly readable new biography of Gorbachev, William Taubman does not dwell on the 1996 campaign. It strays perhaps too far from his central tale, which is of Gorbachev’s courageous and historic ending of the Cold War ... Reading Taubman, one gets the sense that Gorbachev was not an accident. True, he was only able to become general secretary because he had powerful patrons; but it was also the case that, once in power, he was able to find within the Communist Party a significant group of like-minded reformers ... From Taubman, one learns that Gorbachev, once at the top, was uncertain about what to do ... Taubman unfortunately devotes almost no attention to the economic challenges that Gorbachev faced, apparently assuming they are self-evident.
Philip Roth
Positive New York A number of novels in recent years have fictionalized or fabulized the Holocaust. Roth is up to something different; he is wondering what his own life might have been like if history, which is so fragile, had moved in a different direction. The novel is framed as a memoir of his boyhood in Newark … The book is a tribute to Roth’s parents—it imagines that under conditions of extreme duress, they would have acted with courage and dignity … Everything else in the novel eventually returns to normal—so that the Lindbergh years in this universe become just a terrible detour. The only thing that’s different in the alternate future is Roth. He is frightened and overly cautious and needlessly loquacious. The narrator of this book is not the tirading monologuist of Portnoy’s Complaint or Operation Shylock or even The Human Stain. Had it happened here, we might have got this sentimental, essayistic champion of Jewish Newarkers.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Pan The New York Review of Books The novel is dominated by the voice of Oskar. Unlike the sardonic, funny, wised-up narrator of Grass’s The Tin Drum, this Oskar is a genuinely annoying nine-year-old … The ways in which a nine-year-old might threaten the adult world with his unrestrained ego are all hemmed in, controlled, and all the people are nice, and all a little sad and lonely. The skepticism and satire that marked the best parts of Everything Is Illuminated are nowhere in evidence here … The effect of the book as a whole is in fact precisely to pull the September 11 attacks out of history—at the very moment when history has been here for a while now.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Mixed The Nation As it moves through three generations of the Stephanides family, the novel turns out, as if in deference to all those pious post-9/11 editorials, to be almost shockingly unironic, with certain sentences born in a spirit of irony or ambiguity clearly doctored into earnestness … The first half of Middlesex moves at a geological pace, as layer after layer of detail is deposited in our minds … The final eighty pages are exceedingly fine, as Eugenides at last allows his prose to reach for the higher notes … With its heart so clearly in the right place, its taste and intelligence so handsome, Middlesex is a book that’s almost impossible to dislike even as you’re bored by it.