About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Olivia Laing
Positive The New York Times Book Review She gathers an abundant, unruly bouquet of floral nomenclature, either of her own making or gleaned from fellow writers who have wrung inspiration from the lives of plants ... This isn’t a historical survey of gardening, much less a practical guide, so much as an inquiry into the idea of the garden — its history and poetics, its relationship to sex, imagination and power.
Joseph O'Neill
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Sharp and slippery ... The book bristles with offhand insights and deft portraits of peripheral characters. It is populous, lively and intellectually challenging, but also coy and not a little cagey, concealing the ball with intricate footwork and sly misdirection as it risks running out the clock of readerly patience ... I wanted more — more of a reason to have cared about Lakesha and Mark, two of the more memorably vexed and vexatious fictional characters I’ve encountered in a while. This is a very smart book. I’m not sure that’s a compliment.
Colm Toibin
Mixed The New York Times A busier book than its predecessors, more exciting in some ways but in others less satisfying. There is more plot...and less Eilis ... This exquisitely drawn, idiosyncratic soul turns out to be just another character in a novel after all.
Michael Wolff
Mixed The New York Times Book Review A prologue in the form of a deadpan mock obituary — by far the most sober and judicious stretch of pages in this cornucopia of innuendo and convoluted prose — sets up a headlong tumble through 18 months of uncertainty and upheaval at Fox News and among its custodians in the Murdoch family ... It’s not that he thinks Fox (or Trump) is a joke, but rather that his professed ability to suspend political judgment allows him to be amused by the inner workings of power rather than appalled by its outer manifestations ... He doesn’t rely on clearly individuated anonymous sources either. Instead, assertions of fact and judgments of character emerge through a hazy collective consciousness ... The real subject of The Fall is the schism between the former president and the network that had served as his de facto propaganda arm ... The dirt-dishing and tea-spilling makes for queasy fun, and the clash of big personalities is diverting, but compared to the gaudy circus of Trumpworld, this show feels a little tame.
Werner Herzog, trans. by Michael Hofmann
Mixed Atlantic In making Onoda the subject of his first novel—a slender chronicle rendered in efficient, idiosyncratic English prose by the poet and translator Michael Hofmann—Herzog declines to treat him as a joke. He is clearly fascinated by the absurdity of this hero’s situation, and also determined to defend the dignity of a man who had no choice but to persevere in an impossible mission ... The Twilight World emphasizes the existential dimensions of Onoda’s strange, looping odyssey in language that often veers from the concrete data of jungle sounds and smells into dizzying abstraction ... Herzog is not interested in psychological or historical realism, or for that matter in literal facts, but in \'ecstatic truth\' ... The Twilight World strikes me as too flimsy, too elliptical to count as essential Herzog, but it did send me back to his films with a renewed appreciation of what they put at stake and why they matter ... The affinity between Herzog and Onoda is evident on every page of The Twilight World, though to identify the author with his subject too closely would be a mistake. Herzog’s sympathy for his errant heroes is always evident, but so is the detachment required to represent them honestly, to find the truth that they themselves might be too absorbed in their own circumstances to see.
Sam Lipsyte
Pan The Atlantic \"The universe of Hark looks pretty familiar, although politics, the bane and boon of most contemporary satirists, receives little more than a lazy, glancing shot ... Lipsyte often seems trapped in a voice and sensibility that he no longer entirely believes in ... Lipsyte’s writing has a habit of disappearing up its own…never mind ... I have nothing but sympathy for the [political and social] predicament out of which this book arises, and nothing but impatience with its way of addressing that predicament ... A metaphor may be a place for cows to graze, but this is bullshit.\
Richard Russo
Rave The New York Times Russo knows his characters too well to allow them the luxury of victimhood or to indulge in the grim determinism of some of his peers. His humane sympathy for weakness and self-deception – a sympathy extended even to the manipulative Mrs. Whiting and her minion, a dimwitted policeman named Jimmy Minty – does not rule out stern satiric judgment. The people of Empire Falls are not held down simply by fate or by their own bad choices but by the active collaboration of their neighbors and loved ones … Russo's command of his story is unerring, but his manner is so unassuming that his mastery is easy to miss. He satisfies every expectation without lapsing into predictability, and the last section of the book explodes with surprises that also seem, in retrospect, like inevitabilities. As the pace quickens and the disparate threads of the narrative draw tighter, you find yourself torn between the desire to rush ahead and the impulse to slow down.
Jonathan Lethem
Rave The New York Times Cross-racial male friendship is an old American story – if you believe the likes of D. H. Lawrence and Leslie Fiedler, it is the American story, and the love between Dylan and Mingus goes, as Lawrence might have put it, ‘deeper than the deeps of sex,’ even as it includes some adolescent sexual experimentation … Dylan's biography, for all its hurt and fear, is also an unbeatable hipster résumé, an honor roll of authenticity and cool … if Dylan is imprisoned in irony, narcissism and the other temperamental limitations of his – why be coy, our – generation of overeducated whiteboys, Mingus's incarceration is more literal, and the book is at its most daring and least self-conscious in making his life more tragedy than case study … The naturalistic geography of a borough Lethem knows like the back of his hand is illuminated by a daub of magic realism, when Dylan and Mingus come into possession of a ring that gives them super powers.
Marilynne Robinson
Rave The New York Times Sunday Book Review Gilead and Home stand together, in part, as twinned portraits of these godly, elderly patriarchs … Even as Robinson’s deep and unsentimental fondness for Ames and Boughton is as evident as their devotion to each other, her judgment of them and what they represent is uncompromising and severe. Home is a book full of doubleness and paradox, at once serene and volcanic, ruthless and forgiving. It is an anguished pastoral, a tableau of decency and compassion that is also an angry and devastating indictment of moral cowardice and unrepentant, unacknowledged sin … Home and Gilead are marvelous novels about family, friendship and aging. But they are great novels — or perhaps two installments in a single, as yet unfinished great novel — about race and religion in American life.
Positive The New York Times Sunday Review Díaz shows impressive high-low dexterity, flashing his geek credentials, his street wisdom and his literary learning with equal panache … Díaz’s novel also has a wild, capacious spirit, making it feel much larger than it is. Within its relatively compact span, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao contains an unruly multitude of styles and genres...Holding all this together — just barely, but in the end effectively — is a voice that is profane, lyrical, learned and tireless, a riot of accents and idioms coexisting within a single personality … This is a novel of assimilation, a fractured chronicle of the ambivalent, inexorable movement of the children of immigrants toward the American middle class, where the terrible, incredible stories of what parents and grandparents endured in the old country have become a genre in their own right.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Positive The Atlantic Perhaps without meaning to—because really, who would set out to do such a thing?—Foer has made a significant contribution to the emerging literature of the Gen X male’s midlife crisis. Here I Am belongs in the diffident, self-conscious company of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask ... despite his overly demonstrative efforts to be fair to her, Julia is finally a bit of a cipher. She’s the cold mom, the distant wife, the skeptical spectator in the circus tent of big-boy feelings ... Here I Am is a maddening, messy, marvelously contradictory novel.
Adrian Tomine
Rave The New York Times Book Review Tomine’s lines are so clean and precise, his compositions so natural-looking, that it’s easy to treat his images as transparent vessels of meaning, the cellophane wrapper enfolding the tart, bright candy of the plot. But even his smallest, plainest panels are heavy with subtext, thick with unstated emotion and full of the kind of information that can never quite be conveyed in language.