MixedBookforumKing’s prose is murderously fizzy, like movie-theater soda pop that dances a little bit in your nostrils right after you’ve taken a sip. At her best, she’s kind of like the Eve Babitz of the Y2K-era shopping mall ... King is so fun on the page that you almost don’t realize how sharp and emotionally observant she can be, too. But such charismatic writing can also charm you into overlooking the book’s critical nearsightedness ... this tactic of inquiry becomes a bit too self-indulgent. As Tacky progresses, what was promised to be an exploration of mass culture becomes, increasingly, a highly specific and occasionally depressing travelogue through King’s sex life ... But if it falls short as a work of criticism, Tacky often excels as deeply felt, vividly conjured memoir. The book’s best and most wrenching essay is sort of about the bacchanalian MTV reality show Jersey Shore, but it’s really about King and her late father watching it together. It is a testament to the kineticism of King’s writing that by the end of the essay, you feel like you knew the guy.
Sasha Geffen
PositiveBookforum... incisive ... It is seldom now, fifty years after the Beatles’ breakup, that one encounters new ideas about the most written-up band of all time—but, I have to say, I’d never quite heard that one before. Such is the subversive thrill of Geffen’s wide-ranging book, which takes a brisk tour of the last century or so of pop music to ask a number of provocative questions ... Their lucid prose is frequently enlivened by small, passing insights into music I’ve encountered a million times but will now forever hear refracted through their imagery and words ... also converses with the more academic strains of queer theory (without getting overwhelmed by them) ... Geffen’s perspective is refreshing, and sometimes able to draw welcome attention to other critics’ blind spots ... In both its approach to criticism and in the sounds of the forward-looking young artists described in its later chapters, Glitter Up the Dark subtly captures a generational shift ... What I found most valuable about Glitter Up the Dark was the lens through which it looks back and invites us to notice how such seeming \'subversions\' have always been present beneath the surface of even the most popular music ... Reading this book often gave me the sensation that I was looking at a familiar scene through a kaleidoscope, suddenly seeing smeared borders and tiny, winking rainbows everywhere.
Sarah Smarsh
MixedBookforumThe most vivid character in She Come By It Natural, though, is Smarsh’s Grandma Betty ... Observing contemporary feminism’s class-blindness, Smarsh is trying to write women like her own grandmother back into a cultural narrative that she believes has unduly ignored them ... Parton herself is such a slyly masterful curator of her own story and selfhood that it can sometimes feel like all there is to know about her—or at least all she’s going to let us know about her—is already out there. And so, as a Parton fan myself, I can’t say I learned much new information from Smarsh’s book. She Come By It Natural is at its best when it’s in memoir mode, rather than treading the well-worn road of Parton’s biography or, worse, using Parton as an all-encompassing filter through which to view and make sweeping conclusions about very recent cultural history ... Smarsh is correct to criticize feminism’s past and present waves for not talking enough about class. But her analysis often cuts a little too close to the academic-theory-indebted identity politics she elsewhere so vehemently critiques...Her read cannot quite explain the vast spectrum of Parton’s fan base, which includes conservative grandfathers, young queer folks, and just about anybody in between.
Emily Gould
MixedBookforumPerfect Tunes—perhaps not coincidentally the first book Gould has published since becoming a mother—does not skimp on the shit, vomit, or other biological sundries that accompany raising a child ... Gould remains expertly attuned to the tiny details that reveal a bohemian-seeming New Yorker’s actual tax bracket ... As Marie gets older, time flies, sometimes to the detriment of the novel’s rhythm. She ages in a short series of overbrief chapters, and before we know it, she’s fourteen and battling the same depressive and addictive tendencies as her late father and his mother. These connections and causalities can feel too neatly diagrammed: Pregnant characters puke with suspiciously fateful timing; intergenerational ailments are a bit too directly handed down ... Gould, in the end, is not suggesting that oft-told myth that motherhood makes artistic life impossible; she is showing, through Laura and Marie’s relationship, how unexpressed creativity can become as painful to carry as unpumped breast milk. That’s some generous wisdom from a writer who was once cast as her generation’s preeminent navel-gazer.
E. Jean Carroll
PositiveThe RingerCarroll’s lively prose careens in constant pursuit of pleasure. A woman’s ponytail is \'fire-apple red.\' Charlie Rose is a \'giant dingleberry.\' A man is described as assuming \'the Dickwad Pose: hat on backward, tongue stuck out, six-pack declaring war on North Korea.\' Not every single joke lands, sure, but on the whole Carroll is indefatigably funny and full of life. Which makes the times when she suddenly runs out of humor all the more devastating. \'And that’s it,\' says the usually ebullient, pleasure-seeking Carroll, at the end of her story about her traumatic encounter with Trump 23 years ago, recently excerpted in New York magazine. \'I’ve never had sex with anybody ever again.\' ... Carroll refuses to strike the somber tone of the victim. This might rankle some people, might make some people take her book—even her story about Trump—less seriously. She has lived long enough not to give a shit. A lifetime of cumulative trauma may have tamped down some of her sexual desires, but her life force persists in other ways. E. Jean Carroll has kept writing; she has kept speaking her mind in her own peculiar words.
Lisa Taddeo
MixedThe RingerTaddeo might have set out in search of ordinary women’s untold tales, but from beginning to end each of these stories seems almost salaciously exceptional ... But if it’s true that Taddeo \'spoke to hundreds of people, 30 or so at length,\' Three Women made me very curious to hear what she learned from those dozens of others. Her approach places a hermetic focus upon these three women’s dreams, desires, and fears, yes, and it certainly seems valuable to hear about their inner lives. But it also makes the book seem limited in its scope, disappointingly small, and suspiciously cherry-picked ... what about the stories that don’t burn quite so hot? This book is so intimately focused on its three subjects’ internal lives that the rest of the world seems to fall away in an indeterminate blur, like the view out a fogged-up window ... I enjoyed reading this book, and I gobbled it down in two consecutive sittings, but in the end I’m not sure it taught me anything definitive about \'what longing in America looks like,\' save for the specific kinds of stories Taddeo was longing to tell.
Kristen Roupenian
MixedThe Ringer\"Although she often seems to be aiming for Bad Behavior-era Mary Gaitskill, Roupenian at her most gross-out reminded me more of the grisly provocations of Chuck Palahniuk. Cruelty and macabre can be thrilling in moderation, but Roupenian often lays them on so thick that they risk flattening her characters into one-dimensional cartoons. Roupenian, though, does has a gift for propulsion and pacing: Even in the times when this book disgusted or infuriated me, I couldn’t put it down.\
Joan Morgan
RaveThe RingerMorgan’s book honors the record’s spirit not by adding any more height to the pedestal on which it’s already been placed, but instead interrogating it, questioning its mythology, and even bringing in some dissenting black female voices to admit they never much felt like the record spoke for them ... from the likes of [dream] hampton, #MeToo activist Tarana Burke, writer Michaela Angela Davis, and Black Girls Rock founder Beverly Bond. Through this kind of multivalent approach, the lessons of Miseducation come newly alive and worthy of fresh debate ... The final section of Morgan’s book takes place in this present moment, and it does make you wonder whether we’ve strayed farther than ever from the lessons of Miseducation, if pop culture is even more prone to the sort of hyperbolic expectations that partially explain why Hill fled the public eye.
Melissa Broder
PositiveBookforumBroder is often at her most potent when she’s exploring the pressure to be a 'good' feminist in the midst of our culture’s external-turned-internal pressures to stay thin, likable, and fuckable ... Broder is, all told, a better poet than essayist. Not every piece can sustain that sharp, stinging tone of her tweets, and a few of them just fall flat, and then revel a little too much in their flatness, like Tao Lin at his most irritating. But the collection’s last two pieces are stunning in a way that actually captures that 'primal' quality Broder said she saves for her poems. The first is about her husband’s struggle with a chronic illness and the difficulties and joys of creating an untraditional marriage. The last, perhaps the most powerful, is about her sobriety and her decision to immerse herself in—and even parody—the unpleasant emotions she’d spent most of her life running away from.
