About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Noah Hawley
Pan The Washington Independent Review of Books Saturated with purpose, its attempt to Say Something Serious — \'to create coherence from incoherence,\' as the author puts it — often devolves into didacticism. The result is a novel that feels like having the front-page headlines of the newspaper explained to you ... To keep the didactic element entertaining, Hawley augments the stakes ... The author’s attempts to articulate the severity of the catastrophe are cartoonish. Emotions become generalizations ... The novel gamely captures the exterior energy of the moment without sharing its interior reverberations ... depth is not Hawley’s game. He’s prone to reduction and explains Louise’s brazenness in one sentence ... One senses that the elements in Anthem are subordinate to generating excitement; they’re set pieces for an action scene ... It seems we’re meant to find in Anthem some sort of deep resonance. Yet Hawley is merely reflecting a world — and reflections are flat. Each character represents an archetype or condition ... Awash in political and cultural abstractions, Anthem becomes a sort of shadow. There is no visceral commentary at work here, only the light of real life projected onto caricatured cutouts, their dull shapes moving ceaselessly about the page.
Bryan Washington
Positive Washington Independent Review of Books The situational spark that begins the novel is contrived...yet the artifice soon becomes illuminating. Washington finds eloquence in colloquialism; he creates, through a variety of voices, the poetics of conversation. Little turns of phrase...create a storytelling centered within characters’ consciousness. One doesn’t feel that this is writerly paint applied to the text but is instead the very germ of how the characters experience the world ... by alternating between the present and intrusions of memory, the author creates states of mind in Mike and Benson that become the novel’s central force ... Washington’s clever use of subordinate clauses blends the past and present, pressing them against one another as if creating a photo album for the reader. The reader’s sense of the characters is deepened not from an articulation of one photograph but by Washington adding more images to the collection ... Yet there are moments when the author’s hand weighs too heavily on a character’s diction and confuses, rather than clarifies, that character’s world ... And Mike and Benson often narrate with indifference ... But more often, Washington’s details contain a pathos that weeps below the lacerating irony ... it is there that life rests: in the slow gathering of moments, some seemingly arbitrary, all clamoring for attention.
Ayad Akhtar
Rave The Washington Independent Review of Books ... fiercely eloquent ... This question of how to establish an identity — and all the influences that sustain it — pulses through the narrative ... the narrative unfolds between nations, with Akhtar drawing stark but beautifully written parallels between places such as the military-heavy city of Abbottabad and Scranton ... Philip Roth once wrote of his characters containing a \'multitudinous intensity of polarities,\' a description fitting for Akhtar’s writing. Akhtar, like any writer worth his salt, becomes the sum of his contradictions, and his characters the expressive result.
Andrew Martin
Rave The Washington Independent Review of Books The author understands the intimacy a narrator’s self-disclosure can create with a reader and, sprawling and unencumbered, how great a distance a paragraph or even a single sentence can cover. His characters are at once affable and distraught, a polarity that grants each story an enticing tension ... Martin’s most astonishing power is his ability to sublimate a character’s internal frustrations into an external representation of reality — a cathartic, frequently amusing projection of the self onto the world’s brutal canvas.
Paul Kingsnorth
Positive The Washington Independent Review of Books These musings read like journal entries from a practiced scholar, as Kingsnorth references everything from the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Dante Alighieri to the works of cultural ecologist David Abram ... isn’t just for literary types. The book is self-consciously shaped by, and susceptible to, the questions we convince ourselves we already know the answers to — including those surrounding nature, our sense of belonging, deities, and the biggie: the meaning of life.