MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewForeverland,...is dedicated simply \'To Bill,\' the husband of Heather Havrilesky, its author, who pays him this brief honor as a prelude to writing endlessly about his flaws ... This seemingly one-sided bargain is worth noting because it is typical of the relationship at the very center of the story, a marriage between a neurotic perfectionist and a formidably patient man with much to criticize about him ... That the author has made her particular disgusts...the basis for a general treatise on matrimony is the abiding problem of Foreverland. How well can an institution be explained by a single instance of it, and especially by one beset with problems that aren’t necessarily widely shared? Quite well, Havrilesky seems to feel, or else she wouldn’t start so many sentences with sweeping prefaces such as \'Marriage is\' or \'Having a baby means\' or \'The suburbs are\' followed by blanket statements of what they are ... She is...amusingly sarcastic ... I know only my own marriage, like her, and I prefer to hide its nuttier moments. Marriage is — for myself and others — a secret ... \'The suburbs are a place where people go to embrace the dominant paradigm, because the dominant paradigm makes them feel safe and comfortable.\' A dominant paradigm? In today’s America? As often happens in the book, Havrilesky’s big wedding being an example, the paradigm here is in the author’s head and those of her specific cohort and feels decidedly anachronistic, like a cultish tribute to traditions that allegedly dominated once ... I suppose that’s the point — the suburbs are clichéd — but so is complaining about them in this fashion. Havrilesky, to her credit, says as much, but then she barrels forward anyway ... This attraction to the categorical, this yearning for the definitive broad statement, is unfortunate in a writer whose signal gift is for mordant, close-up descriptive prose ... One of the book’s best episodes involves a chaotic last-minute cross-country road trip of too many miles and too few bathrooms ... It’s a bravado feat of family portraiture: savage, tender, claustrophobic ... But what is marriage? A paradox. This seems to be Havrilesky’s final answer, but she gives it up front and repeats it along the way ... That she feels it’s especially exemplary in an age of careening domestic improvisation is somewhat mysterious and cause for argument.
Lionel Shriver
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewWe are reading a novel of issues, a thesis novel concerning euthanasia and medical rationing. It’s not ripped from the headlines, perhaps, but neatly clipped from them, its manner quippy, satirical and arch, its characters capable of op-ed-style rants on the questions at hand, and on many others too ... If a writer is going to hang a story on the question of a suicide pact’s fulfillment, it is probably best if the characters involved are ones whom we fondly desire to see survive. After fully meeting the Wilkinsons, it is hard not to wish them exactly the sort of fate that they’ve devised for themselves ... fanciful science-fiction-style chapters are diverting and welcome in such a morbid narrative, though their morals are glum: We may triumph over mortality, but we can’t escape ourselves ... Yet the novel isn’t really about death, one learns while negotiating its branching paths. It’s about marriage. The persistence of relationships. For whatever direction the Wilkinsons’ lives take, or history takes, they always end up together, chattering, spatting and laughing, drinks in hand. It’s a charming notion, circuitously stated: When two become one, they need never part again.
Reeves Wiedeman
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... indefatigable, scrupulous ... like the most engrossing nonfiction stories, has a plot indeed, one that only reality could contrive. To fully appreciate its twists and turns, the reader should understand, or be willing to study on the fly, the customs, manners and vocabulary of contemporary investment banking. The sure reward for this effort is utter horror, unless the reader is herself a banker, in which case profound embarrassment might be more appropriate ... So what is the moral of this cautionary tale? What was Neumann’s mistake? His tragic flaw? Different readers will settle on different charges, but it might not matter. A 10-figure payout proves all of them wrong.
David Foster Wallace
MixedThe New York TimesBecause Wallace\'s writing often conveys the sense of someone trying to bail out a sinking language by working at higher and higher speeds, with bigger and bigger verbal buckets, it\'s no surprise that many of his stories take as their subject the limits of words themselves ... When Wallace\'s superbrain walks into a room, it notices everything ... When he\'s off on one of these hyperfocused sprees, there\'s no such thing as an unimportant detail; his intensity spreads out in all directions, throwing every feature of the scene into equally high relief. By the end of the story there\'s no such thing as an important detail, either ... Wallace\'s own work is far from flushable -- for one thing it\'s just too big and broad -- and much of it probably partakes of genius, at least in the chess-grandmaster, Bronx High School of Science sense. He has the vocabulary. He has the energy. He has the big ideas. He has the attitude. Yet too often he sounds like a hyperarticulate Tin Man.
Anthony McCann
RaveThe New York Times...a strikingly empathetic nonfiction narrative by the poet Anthony McCann. The book is that rare beast these days — a chronicle of and a meditation on an intensely politicized affair that delves beneath merely partisan concerns to touch its subject’s absurd and tragic heart. As such, it’s a work of almost foolish courage, given the overwhelming rancor of our current social moment — not because it refuses to takes sides, but because the book sides with the people as a whole, with us, the puny, errant, bedeviled playthings of the all-American colossus ... McCann is unsparing in his critique, in his mockery even, of Bundy’s rhetoric, but he also regards him as a figure of considerable charisma — a sort of leathery Bill Clinton or militant Will Rogers ... McCann is too literate and too farseeing to lay the blame...on any one party or ideology, but toward the end of his agonized narrative, after blood has been spilled in a temporary catharsis, he offers a bitter elegy for Ammon and Cliven’s desert uprising, as ridiculous, shameful and selfish as it was. Their nemesis, in McCann’s final analysis, was not the federal government at all, but the financial forces that have leveled small-scale American agriculture in general.
E.L. Doctorow
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewCall it peristaltic storytelling: that process by which a writer captures his audience not by creating loose ends that must be followed, but by swallowing the reader whole and then conveying him—firmly, steadily, irresistibly— toward a fated outcome. E. L. Doctorow\'s heart-squeezing fictional account of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman\'s fiery, rapacious last campaign through the cities and countryside of the Confederate South moves along in the manner I\'ve described—a narrative style that couldn\'t be more fitting because it reflects, we come to see, the way that Sherman\'s conquering army moved ... Yes, war is hell, and The March affirms this truth, but it also says something that most war novels leave out: hell is not the end of the world. Indeed, it\'s by learning to live in hell, and through it, that people renew the world.
Mario Vargas Llosa, Trans. by Edith Grossman
PositiveThe New York TimesAssisting Trujillo is a cast of zombies that the author must have given himself nightmares raising from the crypt. By alternating fatherly affection with calculated silences, the dictator fosters a chronic, low-level panic among his spiritually gelded lackeys … The novel promises fireworks from the outset as the dictator's enemies load and point their guns, but the author is in no hurry to pull the trigger. He fills the pregnant pause with protocol — the phone calls, meetings, meals and little ceremonies that, taken together, give power its shape and form … In this crackling translation by Edith Grossman, Vargas Llosa's Trujillo is a riveting creation — a corked volcano of vulgar, self-pitying rage who demeans his aids with mocking nicknames … In a dictatorship, Vargas Llosa suggests, remaining self-possessed is the great challenge.
Thomas Pynchon
MixedThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewIf Doc sounds like a literary joke — the Private Eye with drooping lids who can’t trust the evidence of his own senses — then he must be a joke with a lesson to impart, since Pynchon isn’t the type to make us laugh unless he’s really out to make us think … Once the plot gets rolling (spurred by the search for a missing land developer whom his trampy ex-girlfriend has a thing for), the story takes on the shape of his derangement, squirting along from digression to digression and periodically pausing for dope-head gabfests of preposterous intensity … Doc’s manhunt for the AWOL billionaire eventually spirals off into absurdity, becoming a collage of trippy interludes peopled by all manner of goofs and lowlifes. These scenes only fitfully advance the narrative and sometimes cause us to forget there is one.
Stephen King
MixedThe New York Times Book Review...Stephen King’s nostalgic new summer novel about the adventures of a lovelorn college boy in a haunted Southern amusement park. The book delivers chills, not shocks, and is silly-scary in the manner of a yarn that a sophomore might tell a freshman while toasting marshmallows around a fire ... Between the lines is an implied critique of the sanitized, corporate, Disney-style amusements that have supplanted the grass-roots titillations of an earlier, cruder era ... There’s not a lot more to Joyland than that, good fun ... The novel is like a plump wad of cotton candy; it fills the mouth with fluffy sweetness that quickly dissolves when the reader starts to chew.
Ian McEwan
PanThe New York Times Sunday Book Review...a book so good — so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off — that it’s actually quite bad … This may be Beard’s story, but it’s McEwan’s vehicle, constructed to let him pull all the showy turns of the major contemporary novelist and ambitious public intellectual: personalizing the political, politicizing the personal and poeticizing everything else. The tip-off is Beard, who’s endowed by his creator with precisely the vices — apathy, slothfulness, gluttony and hypocrisy — that afflict the society the book condemns, threatening to cook the human race in the heat-trapping gases released by its own arrogance. Because a fictional character can exhibit only so much awareness of his own thematic utility, Beard doesn’t notice any of this, merely regarding himself as a colorful eccentric. But readers will see him for what he is: a figure so stuffed with philosophical straw that he can barely simulate lifelike movement.
Jonathan Safran Foer
MixedThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewOskar Schell is the 9-year-old New Yorker whose motormouth drives Foer's story. He's a cross between J. D. Salinger's precocious, morbid, psychiatry-proof child philosophers and all those daunting city kids from children's books … A conscious homage to the Gotham wise-child genre, the book features several beloved stock characters, down to the nice doorman and other service folk who help their upper-middle-class young wards get around the urban jungle safely … Once they've cracked open this overstuffed fortune cookie and pondered the symmetries, allusions and truths on the tightly coiled strip of paper, it will dawn on some readers that today's neo-experimental novels are not necessarily any better suited to get inside, or around, today's realities than your average Hardy Boys mystery.
Cormac McCarthy
MixedThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewA darting movie-ready narrative rips along like hell on wheels because it has no desire to break new ground, only to burn rubber on hard-packed old ground, thereby packing it down harder … At times, the whole novel borders on caricature, so unremittingly hard-boiled that it threatens to turn to steam … McCarthy's dialogue is like this: every question sets up a one-two punch, and most of the sparring partners sound alike … Such sinister high hokum might be ridiculous if McCarthy didn't keep it moving faster than the reader can pause to think about it. He's a whiz with the joystick, a master-level gamer who changes screens and situations every few pages.
