en-US Thu, 10 Apr 2025 18:32:51 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7479120403 Thu, 10 Apr 2025 18:32:51 -0700 /review/show/7479120403 David gave 5 stars to Portnoy’s Complaint (Paperback) by Philip Roth
Although I’ve read a number of other novels by the late Philip Roth, I hadn’t taken up his controversial PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT until nearly half a century after it was originally published, and I came to it hard on the heels of reading Jane Ausrten’s EMMA.

I was struck, for sure, by the markedly different senses of artistic license under which these writers produced their work. In Austen, it’s as if sex and even the consideration of it simply did not exist. In Roth, anything goes � and goes and goes.

Let me admit right off that I don’t recall the last time I laughed out loud so frequently over a book. On the other hand, I also have to say that I think Roth too often abuses his artistic freedom. Perhaps I wouldn’t have felt this way if I had read the book in 1969, but since then we’ve become accustomed to unrestrained language on the street and in grocery stores (“Hurry up or we’ll miss the effing bus� “Can you believe the effing price of these effing eggs?�) and we’ve been deluged by novelists who vie with stand-up comics when it comes to vulgarity. The shock value is considerably diminished.

That said, PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT is an immensely enjoyable book that contends to be a classic. It surely stands as some of the most energetic and forthright writing of our time. It remains in print and has always been widely read, although certain readers and critics have been alienated because of Roth’s unsparing portrayal of ethnic arrogance and insularity. .

Of the books by Roth I’ve read, AMERICAN PASTORAL remains my favorite and the one I most recommend.


It’s difficult to quote much from PORTNOY�5S COMPLAINT and post it online without provoking censorship, but let me quote a statement that comes just after one unquotable passage: � ‘Wow,� I said, and meant it.�

Just like that, Roth refreshes a tired expression,. That’s the sort of impulse in him that I most admire. ]]> Review7467636793 Sun, 06 Apr 2025 12:49:31 -0700 /review/show/7467636793 David gave 5 stars to Emma: 200th-Anniversary Annotated Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Jane Austen(2016-01-13) by unknown author
I somehow managed to reach the age of 83 without ever having read Jane Austen’s late novel EMMA, and I’m here to tell you I’m glad I decided to give it a go. At a time when spareness and flatness in language are encouraged and celebrated, when selecting the appropriate emoji passes for being expressive and communicative, it’s a a deep and welcome pleasure to go back to Austen and experience the grandness and complexity of her style.

After 453 pages, it’s astonishing finally to realize how thinly plotted this novel essentially is. What kept you reading? Was it indecision about Emma � the constant jump from fascination and amusement to revulsion as this privileged and manipulative young woman makes her judgments and indulges her penchant for matchmaking? For this reader, it was also the play and shine of Austen’s language. however dated and arch, and the speech of her characters, such as Miss Bates, an older woman and classic chatterbox. At a party and dance, we get ““the incessant flow of Miss Bates, who came in talking and had not finished her speech under many minutes after her being admitted into the circle of the fire.�

Characters casually drop observations such as: “What an air of probability sometimes runs through a dream! And at others, what a heap of absurdities it is!� �
Here’s Emma trying to make up her mind about a young man’s worthiness: “Emma’s very good opinion of Frank Churchill was a little shaken the following day, by hearing that he was gone off to London, merely to have his hair cut. A sudden freak seemed to have seized him at breakfast, and he had sent for a chaise and set off, intending to return to dinner, yet with no more important view that appeared than having his hair cut. There was certainly no harm in his traveling sixteen miles twice over on such an errand; but there was an air of foppery and nonsense in it which she could not approve. It did not accord with the rationality of plan, the moderation of expense, or even the unselfish warmth of heart which she had believed herself to discern in him yesterday.� She goes on.

And here Emma is in a passage in which Austen shows her to be, as ever, both fascinating and repellent: “Emma did not repent her condescension in going to the Coles. The visit afforded her many pleasant recollections the next day; and all that she might be supposed to have lost on the side of dignified seclusion, must be amply repaid in the splendour of popularity. She must have delighted the Coles —worthy people, who deserved to be made happy! � and left a name behind her that would not soon die away.�

It’s necessary to understand and accept that Austen is writing at a time when women’s options were limited and most pf them tended to focus on marrying well. It’s also necessary to understand and accept that she is writing from a highly class-conscious society and that Emma is not alone in her obsession with evaluating and ranking everyone. An older woman evaluates a young man as being “so truly a gentleman, April 6, 2025 � page 2

without the least conceit or puppyism.� She then elaborates on the distastefulness of puppyism.

One can imagine Austen forever hoping to come up with a pronouncement as resounding as the one that opened her PRIDE AD PREJUDICE. Here she is in the opening sentence of volume two, chapter four of EMMA: “Human nature is so well disposed toward those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.� Not as memorable, Jane, but good.
�
At one point in the novel, writing of Emma’s efforts in music and drawing, Austen observes that � ‘steadiness has been wanting.� There was never a lack of steadiness in Austen. When EMMA was published, she was 40 and near the end of her life, and she had already achieved an impressive body of work that was destined to stand the test of time. There are those who regard EMMA as her finest novel. It is certainly worth, and repays, any serious reader’s attention. ]]> Review7401492098 Thu, 13 Mar 2025 19:41:14 -0700 /review/show/7401492098 David gave 2 stars to Mothers and Sons (Hardcover) by Adam Haslett
Adam Haslett’s latest novel, MOTHERS AND SONS, meets the first requirement of successful narrative in that it kept me reading, but in didn’t finally take shape for me. I recommend Haslett’s previous work highly, including his IMAGINE ME GONE, but this one is disappointing.�

The materials are there � a son who’s an immigration attorney and a mother who’s a former minister who abandons her church and her family and founds an alternative community, plus assorted secondary characters � but, for this reader, Haslett didn’t� succeed in building their stories into something convincing and compelling. He tries hard to bring it together in the final section, but it’s too little too late.

It doesn’t help that early on he gets bogged down in courtroom proceedings in which lengthy statements appear in Spanish followed by English translation. Why?

Bottom line: do not take a pass on Adam Haslett, but do take a pass on this particular effort.

My continuing regard for this earnest writer’s earlier work still makes me eager to see where he’ll go next time around and hope that he finds his power again. ]]> Review7401424088 Thu, 13 Mar 2025 19:13:03 -0700 /review/show/7401424088 David gave 3 stars to Union Atlantic (Hardcover) by Adam Haslett
]]> Review7230699245 Sat, 18 Jan 2025 16:56:14 -0800 /review/show/7230699245 David gave 2 stars to The Most (Paperback) by Jessica Anthony
I'm hard put to understand why Jessica Anthony's THE MOST was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in Fiction.

In consistently flat prose, Anthony gives us a pair of shallow people stuck in a dysfunctional marriage. Au fond, the only thing I was able to appreciate about this book is its brevity. ]]> Review7224342206 Thu, 16 Jan 2025 21:52:56 -0800 /review/show/7224342206 David gave 2 stars to Wide Sargasso Sea (Norton Critical Editions) by Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys’s novel WIDE SARGASSO SEA, originally published in 1966, is based on the mad, sequestered wife Mrs. Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s JANE EYRE. It remains in print and has more or less been accorded the status of a sort of minor classic, so feel free to take my opinion of it with a grain of salt.

It simply didn’t engage me. It’s just 170 pages, and if it had been much longer, I probably wouldn’t have finished it. I had trouble keeping track of characters or understanding their motivations, and I tired of Rhys’s reaching for literary effect.

I read the book in the Norton paperback edition with an introduction by Francis Wyndham. ]]> Review7204705965 Sat, 11 Jan 2025 20:37:45 -0800 /review/show/7204705965 David gave 5 stars to Blood Test: A Comedy (Hardcover) by Charles Baxter
One of life’s most perplexing mysteries is how a writer of established worth, or even indisputable excellence, can suddenly up and lay on us unreadably bad new work.
�

It’s a widely promulgated principle among writers that you should get something down on paper every day. I do not subscribe to this principle, and I would suggest to those who do follow it, or at least to their publishers, that they should not necessarily commit to print everything that turns up. Now that America’s MFA writing programs have for some time been churning out legions of new writers every year, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that there’s a whole lot of not always worthwhile writing going on.

I am a long-term admirer of the deft and complex fiction of Charles Baxter, but in the short term I have to advise readers to steer clear of his latest novel, Blood Test. It has any number of lethal flaws, the worst of which is an “Aren’t I cute?� attitude that would be annoying in a writer half Baxter’s age and is inexcusable in an established writer of Baxter’s stature. He even occasionally repeats an attempt at humor that fell flat or turned the stomach the first time around.

Perhaps the problem is that he starts out with a contrived and shaky premise: his narrator takes the blood test of the title, which reveals that he has a predisposition to a life of crime. A writer somehow has to get started, right?

Well, faithful reader, an even greater mystery is how you can be having a terrible time with a book and then have the same book unmistakably spread its wings and fly. I wrote the four paragraphs above after the first 70 pages or so of BLOOD TEST, but as I read on it turned me around so completely that my rating goes from one star to five and I now want to recommend the book to everyone. If you start it and have trouble, as I did, by all means stick with it as it opens up to be the moving story of a soul seeking something to hold onto in an an unmoored society.

As this happens, the startling, resonant, bull’s eye bursts of language that are a Baxter trademark abound. When he describes silence broken by “the hee-haw of an ambulance,� it’s one of those moments in reading when you just want to shout “Perfect!�

Rest assured, Baxter remains a writer I admire, enjoy, and trust. ]]> Review7192917163 Wed, 08 Jan 2025 19:42:57 -0800 /review/show/7192917163 David gave 1 star to The Best American Short Stories 2024 (Paperback) by Lauren Groff
My misgivings about the 2024 edition of THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES began even before I had cracked the book. Promotional material for the volume quoted guest editor Lauren Groff: “There have never been as many exquisitely built stories in existence than there are now.� That is a wretchedly built sentence. Surely“as many� should be replaced by “more� or “than� should instead be “as.� And what meaning does “in existence� add? And you’re the editor? (This unfortunate sentence is repeated without correction on the back cover and in Groff’s introduction.)

That the language in most of the stories Groff and series editor Heidi Pitlor have selected is troublesome is only the beginning of the problems with this book. More disturbing is an almost consistent bleakness of tone and focus as we meet one discontented or disaffected character after another. Perhaps the effect is supposed to be devastating, but it is more likely to put readers to sleep.

Should we have a trophy for the writer in the volume who achieves the greatest bleakness? That dubious distinction might go to Madeline Ffitch for her “Seeing Through Maps,� in which at one point a severely antisocial woman finds herself stuck in the anthill awfulness of a hospital emergency room. She’s there with her husband, actually her ex-husband, who has accidentally severed his thumb while cutting wood. (Oh, by the way, they have an estranged son. What else would a son in this collection be?) Here’s your Bleakness Trophy paragraph:

“A nurse called my neighbor� s name. He tried to get to his feet but sat back down hard. I hauled him up and went with him into the back and the nurse put us behind a curtain, through which we could hear all the clamor and beeping, the frequencies and trouble and off-color jokes, the tapping and sighing and coughing that filled up that building, which is why we tried to avoid buildings, and each other. But here we were.�

And there we are in this slogging anthology.

To be fair, there are a few redeeming entries, such as Jhumpa Lahiri’s “P’s Parties,� but you’re left wondering if you might be responding to them in a kind of desperation, largely because they provide relief from all the darkness. They deserve a better home.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m by no means a Pollyanna. But I can’t help feeling the lexicon of current literary criticism could use a term that indicates the exact opposite of sentimentality � a similarly forced, unearned negativity that’s every bit as unacceptable as sentimentality. Falseness is falseness, whether it’s sunshine or shadow. ]]> Review7118722733 Wed, 25 Dec 2024 16:56:08 -0800 /review/show/7118722733 David gave 4 stars to The Message (Hardcover) by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The longest and for this treader most engaging section of Ta-Nehisi Coates� THE MESSAGE is the final section, in which the author visits Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory and finds disturbing similarities to Jim Crow America.

Coats is particularly engaging when he exhumes buried history, as he does with Israel’s affinity with and arms support for apartheid South Africa under Meir and Begin.

He is also eloquent in insisting that the ultimate story of Palestine must be told by Palestinians themselves and lamenting a story of Palestine � told solely by the colonizer, an effort that extends to the proscribing of boycotts by America n states, the revocation of articles by journals, the expulsion of students from universities, the dismissal of news anchors by skittish networks, the shooting of journalists by army snipers, and the car bombing of novelists by spy agencies. No other story, save one that enables theft, can be tolerated.� ]]>