PositiveBook PostOne of the chief aims of Miranda Seymour’s new biography, it seems, is to counter...demeaning and oddly vituperative characterizations. Without bowdlerizing the chaos and murk of Rhys’s life, or attempting to concoct for her a more exemplary character, Seymour makes a convincing case for Rhys’s intelligence and agency as an artist ... \'I never wanted to write, [Rhys] once wrote to a friend ... But, as Seymour successfully demonstrates, this oft-quoted remark was something of a feint. It does little justice, at any rate, to the scrupulous care that Rhys applied to her prose or the perfectionism that made her so unwilling ever to declare her books complete.
Ian McEwan
PositiveThe New York Times\"In Saturday, McEwan\'s new novel, these characteristic virtues of structural elegance and coherence are on prominent display ... In giving us a protagonist so steadfastly hostile to the charms of his own art, McEwan signals a return to some of the questions about the purpose and value of literature that he posed in Atonement. Here, though, the contemporary setting lends the questions a new moral urgency ... In Saturday, as in all McEwan\'s work, there is much to admire in the efficiency and clarity with which he marshals his themes. Here, though, his control over his material is too pronounced. The final chapters, with their literal enactment of the notion that the truest poetry is the most feigning, only reiterate what has already been amply, if implicitly, communicated in the course of the novel. And in doing so, they threaten to undermine the very literary immediacy that they champion. Overstatement is still overstatement, even when effected with a knowing wink to the reader ... In other novels, McEwan has proved more than able at capturing the breathing warmth of life in fiction\'s cold frame. Here, though, his symmetries seem to have gotten the better of him and his art comes perilously close to stifling life altogether.\
Esther Perel
MixedThe New YorkerPerel is more sanguine than others about the capacity of a marriage to withstand adulterous lapses, but her belief in coupledom—her commitment to the idea of commitment—is never in doubt. Insofar as she stresses the importance of flexibility, patience, and even stoicism in long-term relationships, her book bears a distinctly traditional message … The scrupulous evenhandedness of Perel’s approach is eminently reasonable in theory. She wants to redress a traditional bias against cheating spouses, to acknowledge ‘the point of view of both parties—what it did to one and what it meant to the other’ … In the long list of difficult demands that Perel makes on the human spirit—not seeking revenge, understanding your spouse’s desire to feel ‘alive’ with someone else, and so on—the labor of fending off sexual boredom and keeping domestic life ‘hot’ may strike some as the most punishing and arduous of all.
Sally Bendell Smith
MixedThe New YorkerSmith’s stance is very close to what one imagines a senior palace aide’s might be: Charles is far from ideal, but he is what we’ve got, and there can be no talk of mucking about with the law of succession and replacing him with his son ... Early on, however, it becomes apparent that Smith’s public-relations instincts are at war with a fundamental dislike of her subject. The grade-inflating summaries she offers at the beginning and the end of the book are overpowered by the damning portrait that emerges in between...Although the book would like to be a nuanced adjudication of the Prince’s 'paradoxes,' it ends up becoming a chronicle of peevishness and petulance.
Cynthia Ozick
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewOne’s faith in Ozick’s 'large project' depends mainly on how willing one is to join her in grandly ignoring the exigencies of the marketplace. The literary novel may be an independent art, but long-form, highbrow criticism is surely rather less so: The amount of such writing that is being published at any given time relates less to necessity and will than to the number of readers prepared to pay for it. And much as we might wish it were otherwise, it’s safe to say that the current supply of superior criticism is more or less commensurate with public demand. More troubling than Ozick’s indifference to these bothersome facts is the aggressive snootiness of her tone...there is something unseemly and excessive about the energy she expends on delineating what she finds vulgar and unsatisfactory in the current literary scene ... She is a subtle reader and persuasive champion of the aristocrats of her cultural hierarchy. The essays in this collection that discuss the work of Bellow, Kafka, Trilling, Malamud, are all shrewd and engrossing and eminently capable of seducing the reader’s agreement. But her zealous efforts to put lesser talents and lower forms in their place are rarely so edifying.
Peggy Orenstein
MixedThe New York Review of Books...[Doesn't] entirely avoid the exaggerations, the simplifications, the whiff of manufactured crisis that we have come to associate with this genre ... To use sun-dappled recollections of life before the iPhone as a way of pointing up the misery of girls’ present conditions is a little misleading ... Orenstein offers a rather more nuanced and measured account of the way girls live now, but she too has a tendency to underestimate the heterogeneity of teenage culture and the multiplicity of ways in which girls engage with it ... Orenstein is most convincing when she addresses the passivity, the 'concern with pleasing, as opposed to pleasure,' that characterize her interview subjects’ approach to sex.
Nancy Jo Sales
PanThe New York Review of Books...[Doesn't] entirely avoid the exaggerations, the simplifications, the whiff of manufactured crisis that we have come to associate with this genre ... To use sun-dappled recollections of life before the iPhone as a way of pointing up the misery of girls’ present conditions is a little misleading ... Sales portrays social media as an irresistible and ubiquitous force in the lives of young women...Is this an accurate representation of social media’s utter dominion, one wonders, or a reflection of Sales’s rather narrow line of questioning?
