As a sucker for novels set in the milieu of rock music, I was blown away by Bill Flanagan’s Evening’s Empire, partly because it is completely different to all the others I’ve read. Rather than embedding the reader in a character who is a singer or guitarist in a band, the hero of Evening’s Empire, [...]
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It’s funny how literary fiction often throws up doppelgangers, two concurrent novels whose storylines appear to be twinned. A week after reading Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (see my review), I found that Jess Walter’s fifth novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets, offers a very similar tale, that of a modern young man heading for [...]
Sam Lipsyte is one of those authors you discover late and immediately commence locating his entire catalogue. On the basis of his fourth novel, The Ask, he is a virtuoso stylist, capable of funny and sad and serious, often on the same page. His language is worth savouring for itself. Milo Burke, the hero of [...]
I’ve always found the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a reliable marker of top quality, indeed I can’t recall the last winner that disappointed me. So it pains me to report that this year’s winner, Tinkers by Paul Harding, is ambitious and brimming with literary brio, but ultimately a rather ordinary read. Anchored by the last [...]
Still Alice by debut American novelist Lisa Genova peers into the downward spiral of Alice, a Harvard psychology professor at the top of her profession, in the grip of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Few diseases frighten us more, for it has no cure and the inevitable creeping decline treats victim and loved ones with equal cruelty. Sticking to [...]
New Yorker Tim, a wealthy law firm partner, walks. Rather, his legs walk uncontrollably, sending Tim away from his work and his wife and daughter, walking nonstop until he collapses into narcoleptic sleep. Intelligent, proud, tough, he joins battle with his unheard-of affliction. The Unnamed, by sophomore novelist Joshua Ferris, is Tim’s weird, undulating tale. [...]
Out of the last financial boom, in the wake of the GFC, come the novelists’ judgements. Often novelists can penetrate deeper than the analysts and historians. Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic is a coruscating dig into the ascendancy of a fictional American bank of that name, told through the eyes of four intersecting characters: an emotionally [...]
Anna Quindlen’s best novels, such as Black and Blue, burrow into violence and death. A writer who immerses her readers, she weaves a tapestry of characters into richly imagined lives and then . . . crunch, the horror of it all. So it is with Every Last One. Deftly Quindlen shoves the reader into the [...]
There are two kinds of atheists. One branch obsesses over religions and their foibles, the other shuns any religiosity. I’m in the latter category and have avoided biblically slanted literature since Sunday school, so I only tackled Philip Pullman’s controversial The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ for a book club. Oddly enough, I [...]
Point Omega, the fifteenth novel by Don DeLillo, one our most profound living novelists, is longer than a novella, 117 pages in a slim volume, but not longer by much. Yet the reading experience rivals that of the 900-pages plus of 2666, Roberto Bolano’s masterpiece. Every word, sentence, paragraph and page of Point Omega hums [...]