Review: Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion by William Blake
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Okay, I am not about to “review” William Blake. Reading his work is an experience, and you’re in the mood to “get it” or not. You don’t, in the 21st century, evaluate it.

Still it is fair, I think, to try to evaluate this edition of his work.

When I was reading Alan Moore’s remarkable novel Jerusalem a few weeks ago, I wanted to get a sense of Blake’s Jerusalem. I pulled my trusty Penguin Collected Blake off the shelf and started reading, but then I realized I was missing a big part of the experience. Moore may have written a novel entirely in text, but it’s one that turns on the visual fine art he describes. And, of course, Moore has spent most of his career in graphic novels. So, I wanted to see the illustrations Blake prepared for his own work.

That turned out to be tougher than I expected. I assumed there’d be an easily accessible on-line edition, but I couldn’t find one – nor could the college reference librarian I consulted. (There are some great digitized editions on-line at the New York Public Library, but not for Jerusalem.)

Instead, we found this edition from Princeton University Press and, expensive as it is, we ordered it for the library.

It’s a beautiful book, and it’s possible to see all 100 plates of the poem back-to-back. Still…

I believe the originals are a good bit larger than the reproduction. And, at least in my imagination, they’re brighter than the pastels of this. Plus, as a result of the sizing, it’s hard to read the words of the text. Sure they’re typed out at the end of this, but I had that in my Penguin.

So, while this may be the best edition available, it still leaves a lot to be desired. Somehow, it seems, this masterwork of English literature remains inaccessible.

All that said, there are better places to start reading Blake. This one is late-stage stuff. It’s hard to make sense of it since its mythology is already developed. I mean who exactly are Los and Albion, and what do they have to with the dismemberment of Jerusalem – who is himself simultaneously a character, a symbol, and a city as well as a representation of 18th Century London?

And the language and tone is right out of the Book of Revelations with bizarre pronouncements and everything functioning at a mythological, symbolic level more than a literal one.

There are some great lines, of course. This is Blake after all. A couple I love are, “[The sons of Albion are] by Abstraction opposed to the Visions of Imagination,” and “As God is love: every kindness to another is a little Death.”

I don’t pretend to understand it, and I missed being able to see the large and bright illustrations I imagine Blake must have wanted to accompany them, but there is nevertheless occasional magic in the glimpse we get.


View all my reviews

Review: The Cider House Rules

The Cider House Rules by John Irving
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thirty years ago, when I was first becoming aware of the world of contemporary literature, John Irving was a name to reckon with. He seemed a kind of caboose to the John Updike/Philip Roth generation, and he had the further advantage of a noted lightness to his work. What’s more, he projected an appealing masculinity, reminding people he’d been a serious wrestler (I was an unserious, or at least unsuccessful one) and standing as someone who was shaping literature we should all be reading.

I pushed myself to read A Prayer for Owen Meany when it came out, and, while I remember admiring the prose and much of the structure, I was ultimately annoyed by its contrived quality. If little Owen could see the future in which he killed our protagonist’s mother, then why the hell couldn’t he alter it? It would have meant forgoing one swing of a baseball bat. To the extent I felt I was permitted, I decided I didn’t like it all that much.

I may have read The World According to Garp – I certainly watched the movie – but that was the effective end of my Irving expedition until now. I found an audio version of this on sale and figured it was time for another look. What was it, I wondered, that made Irving such a success back then?

The basic answer, I think, is that this guy really can write characters and stories. There’s something idyllic in the Maine setting of this, and there’s something appealing in the multi-generational span of the novel. We get a glimpse of Wilbur Larch that takes us back to the late 19th century, and then we follow Homer Wells to the start of a career that will take him – in his older age beyond the end of the novel – into just about the present tense.

There’s clearly something at stake in all this, too. It’s a century of men wrestling with the challenge of ensuring that women have access to safe abortions, but it isn’t a narrow claim of such right. We get to see various characters reflecting on the morality of the process, and we see some of the ethical challenges they experience. (It’s worth noting, of course, that these are mostly men who have to decide such questions. Most of the women are either in need of rescue or lovingly supporting these men.)

And, as well, this is a compelling love story. The triangle among Homer, Candy and Wally is memorable and emotional, and I enjoyed reading it. I even forgave it, at least some, for a contrivance that reminded me of Owen Meaney when, at the end, Dr. Larch proves to have anticipated his own betrayal and prepared a decade-plus scheme to allow Homer to move into his place. For the same effort, it seems, he could just as easily have extricated himself.

On the whole then, this reminded me of Dickens. It’s a coming-of-age novel, and it’s one that aspires to call our attention to some systemic injustice.

There’s still a lot to admire and enjoy in the way Irving takes us from a pastoral past into something that looks like our own yesterday, but as a bottom line I’m not sure it’s aged all that well. As I think about Irving’s reputation, I find myself comparing him to another neo-Dickensian – to Donna Tartt whose The Goldfinch struck me as a fabulous and memorable book, one without the clear shortcomings of this one. Speaking today, I’m convinced Tartt is clearly a better writer than Irving, and I intend that as a compliment in both directions. If I’m able still to be reading contemporary literature with care and comprehension thirty years from now, I wonder if things will look different in the face of new writers further pushing the boundaries of what we Americans read.


View all my reviews

Review: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Part of this book is right up my alley. It chronicles how a really clever economist applies the tools of his field to questions seemingly outside it. He tries to show, for instance, that we suburban parent types worry more about gun violence than about our swimming pools as life-threatening hazards for our children. Or he shows us that real estate agents have incentives to sell our houses for less than they might otherwise get. Or that sumo wrestlers have incentives to cheat when they find themselves in the crucial rubber matches of their events. Or even that there’s a way to determine which Chicago public school teachers were feeding their students answers on standardized tests.

Each of those anecdotes is presented cleverly, and there’s something satisfying in seeing someone make such clear sense of the world. Dubner chronicles Levitt’s breakthroughs with a pleasant enough pattern: we come to understand a problem, Levitt asks a clever question, and we see the sorts of data that give him insight no one else has ever gleaned.

This takes a notorious turn, though, when Dubner talks about Levitt’s most famous proposal. That is, in trying to figure out why crime dropped as dramatically as it did in the early 1990s, he determined that was the era when children were coming of age who would have been born if not for Roe vs. Wade. That is he proposes that crime dropped as it did because a generation of likely criminals were aborted.

To be fair, both authors acknowledge the dicey morality of that claim. Dubner takes it head on by declaring that morality is the story of the world as we would like it to be while economics is the story of the world as it is.

The two also dance around, at times thoughtfully, over the possibility that there are errors in the methodology. And maybe there are.

But the morality that seems violated here isn’t merely the Thou-shalt-not of abortion politics in either direction. Instead, it seems as if Levitt has violated a central tenet of his own work. He has, that is, oversimplified a complicated scenario.

A proclivity toward crime, like his airy assertion that IQ is hereditary (which it might be but, if so, it warrants a lot of explanation before it can be used as a stand-in for functional intelligence), is just something too full of variables for such a clearly declared premise. It may be that children whose parents didn’t want them – the potential children who were aborted – do have a higher likelihood of committing crime, but surely there’s more to it than that. More skilled economists than Levitt – like Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein – have traveled similar territory, and they’ve done it by acknowledging more ambiguity. And by making less sweeping claims.

This starts with the pleasure of watching someone who builds a fascinating case insight by insight and term by term. By the time this ends, though, it feels as if our authors have tried to slip a couple of major terms by us, as if they’ve gotten us to accept premises we never signed on for.

There’s cleverness here, but it falls short of Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project, and it leaves something of a bad taste in the mouth.

And I’m tempted to dock it another half star for reprinting the original articles Dubner wrote on Levitt. It seems an unnecessary appendix, and it’s awkward to get the same anecdotes delivered in a different tone, sometimes with ancillary information that might have had more effect earlier in the book.


View all my reviews

Review: Japanese Fairy Tales and Others

Japanese Fairy Tales and Others by Lafcadio Hearn
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I finished this book because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nature and limits of cultural appropriation.

I started it because I read, somewhere, a tantalizing description of one of the 16 stories here, “The Boy Who Drew Cats.” It’s still a great overview, I think: a young boy who always draws cats to calm himself is locked in a temple haunted by a terrifying mouse demon. He draws his pictures before falling asleep and then awakens to find the monster dead. He has no idea what happened until he looks at his drawings, unchanged from the night before with the exception that they now have blood dripping from their maws.

As evocative as that account may be, it’s told with no more narrative skill than the summary I give. Hearn makes evident throughout that he’s writing for children, so he avoids tension and depth. Everything’s flattened – and this may be the best story of the collection – so I was tempted to put it down almost as soon as I picked it up.

Still, it struck me that Hearn was up to something here, something that likely seemed innocent and even admirable in 1953 but that seems culturally tone deaf today.

The introduction reports that he lived in Japan for many years, which our introduction reports in order to give him credibility despite his “Greek and Irish parents.” You can see in that quick biography, though, that even then there was a mite of concern for what we now see as potentially appalling. This is not his culture, yet he is claiming authorship over some representation of it.

I have mixed feelings on the whole claim of cultural appropriation. I think, for instance, of Paul Simon and his working with Ladysmith Black Mambazo. That was a marriage of styles, and Simon always made sure to credit his South African collaborators as partners in the process of creation. Yeah, he got the lion’s share of the profits and the credit, but he also brought a powerful celebrity standing to the project. He heard a way to make their music accessible, and he had much to do with turning them into international figures in their own right.

I also believe it’s essential that we grant authors the right to “tell the stories of others.” Of course it’s often a positive when a woman writes from a man’s perspective. Take the brilliant example of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead for one. I think it has to be true of men as well, provided in all cases it’s not a matter of a gimmick but rather an exploration of the world in full.

Those thoughts aside, this book depends on the exotic nature of the materials it’s appropriating. Hearn isn’t attempting to Westernize what he’s heard or adapted. That is, he doesn’t try to turn these into stories that follow the convention of a character who learns anything about apprehending the world. Instead, each depends upon a measure of foreignness. They seem supposed to “work” by reminding us of the inaccessibility of the Japanese imagination.

At least two of these turn on characters who are confused because they have never seen a mirror before. The characters in each believe they are seeing a deceased older relative as they look upon their own faces and remember the ones gone. It speaks to a condescension that infects many of the other stories.

I don’t doubt that Hearn, if he were still alive, would defend himself by claiming a great friendship with many Japanese, and I am certain there’s something to his having lived so long in the country, especially after the devastation of World War II.

With that in mind, I don’t pretend to critique this as I would have done if I’d read it in 1953. I’m reading it 66 years later in a changed understanding of culture. In that light, this is a troubling collection that invites us to take comfort in our superior understanding of the world. We’re asked to at some of the marvels these flattened characters come across, but we’re not supposed to see them as people we might somehow fully commune with. I’d love to try my hand at telling the story of the boy who drew cats, but I’m not sure at the moment that I’d know how. For now, this one goes back to the library shelf and likely stays there.


View all my reviews

Review: The Concept of the Political

The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Setting aside, for the moment at least, that this is the work of a Nazi and anti-Semite, I’m struck by the notion that Schmitt is part of what we might call the last wave of the major structuralists. That is, there’s a species of Modernism that begins with Marx and Freud (who posited clear structures to revolution and the psyche) through to Saussure (linguistics) and Levi-Strauss (anthropology) that deals with the dissolution of traditional notions of order by proposing specific and limited structures within which we live.

Schmitt follows in those footsteps, which makes one kind of sense of the 1932 first publication of this book, by insisting on a structure to the “political.” He distinguishes that from “politics,” and focuses on the condition of living in a culture where we are all subject to the ultimate power of the state. Only the state he insists, has the power to compel an individual to kill or be killed. As such, it carries a unique capacity for ordering Modern existence. He acknowledges other forms of what we have sometimes referred to as “tribalism,” other dimensions within and across states that we understand affiliations, but he insists the kill-or-be-killed power of the state gives it a status distinct from all others.

Beyond that, he sees a fundamental logic to the state. As a “political entity,” a state can either fail or survive. If it survives, it does so because it recognizes that all separate states are either “friends” or “enemies.” There is, for Schmitt, effectively no middle ground.

To his credit, that’s as clear as a structural argument can get. It reduces the world to a binary which is perfectly in keeping with the Fascist imagination. (Oops, I got that in a little before I intended.)

To his further credit, he explores that proposition in wide and subtle ways. He sees all “political” interactions – here, again, with “political” referring to the particular power of the state to compel its citizens to participate in war – as determined with an awareness of their fundamental existential stakes. Whatever else our political representatives may think they’re disputing with their potential friends and potential enemies, the defining limit is the willingness to go to war. Each potential trade deal, negotiation over boundaries, exchange of prisoners or treaty is ultimately backed by the implicit pledge that we will kill or be killed over it.

Such an analysis makes a different kind of sense of the 1932 publication date in that he was writing in the midst of the decline of the Weimar Republic with the specter of Hitler on the horizon. His Germany was suffering under the weight and humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, so it’s understandable that he’d see negotiated politics as such a black-and-white distinction. When the governments that defeated your father’s army continue to exact onerous penalties from you, even peace must feel something like war. Everyone not actively supporting you, that is, must needs appear as an enemy.

As I read this, I found myself pushing against both the fundamental structural premise – is it really so simple that everyone is either a friend or an enemy? (such thinking surely colored the U.S.’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam the rest of Southeast Asia) – and against the specific conclusion: can’t there be an understanding of the political that accommodates a different, transactional outcome beyond an implicit we-win/you-win dynamic?

To Schmitt’s further credit, he anticipates such a counter-argument. As he puts it in chapter 8, liberalism presents just such a claim, proposing that the danger of the state is over-reach. That is, according to liberalism, ultimate political authority resides in the individual and his or her rights. We should fear governments for “oppressing” us. Going back to his fundamental notion, though, he reasserts that a state that cannot ultimately compel its citizens to fight a war in its defense is, in the end, no state at all. Liberalism, he insists, fails on its own premises when it exists within a state that reserves for itself the central necessary act of its survival.

The response that came most enduringly to me as I read is the idea that there remains the possibility of a transactional relationship with other political entities, one that leaves them neither friend nor enemy but simply other. Must there always be a winner or loser in, say, a trade deal. Donald Trump says there must be; it’s the foundation of his foreign policy that trade can result only in a win or a loss. Schmitt says so as well, declaring, “In the past, the warring nations had subjugated the trading peoples; today it is the other way around” (76).

In at least one of Schmitt’s iterations of that claim, I see a glimmer of anti-Semitism, though I might not have looked for it without his reputation preceding him. As he puts it, “With such methods one could just as well the other way around define politics as the sphere of honest rivalry and economics as a world of deception” (77). Given the association of “devious Jews” with international commerce, I see Schmitt treading ground that Hitler would plant, that Hitler was just then seeding.

There’s no easy way to grapple with a thinker who’s so absolute and who, as the supporting material here from, among others Leo Strauss – himself a teacher and mentor to the neo-conservatives who under-girded the administration of George W. Bush – makes clear, stands at the foundation of an entire academic discourse.

That said, I know I stand with the liberals he dismisses as standing on philosophically tenuous ground. Granting him – just for the sake of argument – the premise that states confront one another with ever implicit existential stakes, I can’t help believing that contemporary nations have collectively come to understand the extent to which we threaten one another. We may no longer face the Mutually Assured Destruction of the late Cold War, but the simple truth is that we can do each other more good than harm. Neo-liberalism has its clear limits, and it shouldn’t have taken Trump to show them to us. That said, and acknowledging the many left behind as markets become increasingly global, it is possible for states to negotiate to their mutual benefit. That is, it’s possible to confront our neighbors neither as friends nor as enemies but simply as partners.

That may not be ideal, but it’s better than the dark alternative Schmitt proposes. He argues tightly that there’s no alternative, but he does from a fearful and straitened place himself. It’s not surprising that the same German despair that gave birth to Nazism would give birth to such an uncompromising conception of how we can live within the larger world.


View all my reviews

Review: The Mars Room

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There are a lot of ways into this powerful novel, but, as I got toward the end, it occurred to me that it’s most insistently about the nature of loneliness.

That’s a bigger claim than it seems, since this novel is so clearly about other things as well. For one, it’s about the way women suffer in the penal system, how the poor and unfortunate can lose everything because they don’t know how to defend themselves. Here, for instance, Romy might not have gone to jail at all, or might have gone for something dramatically less than two life sentences-plus, if she’d had an attorney able to demonstrate that she’d been the victim of sustained and disturbing sexual stalking.

It also reflects one kind of post-modernist school. A quick search tells me she understands herself as inspired by Don DeLillo (a fine inspiration to select, I’d say) and there’s evidence here of someone who acknowledges the difficulty (impossibility?) of rendering characters in all their dimensionality yet who attempts it all the same. This is a novel of ideas, but it’s simultaneously a story of characters, above all Romy, who recognize the extent to which their denied the full experience of life. One reflection of that is the impressive way Kushner de-eroticizes the business of sex. There are graphic parts here – Romy is a stripper, after all – but we get them as transactional experiences.

And this is also a powerfully feminist novel, one where the experience of women matters in and for itself, independent of men or even masculinity. Yes, most of this is set in a women’s prison, but it’s deeper than that. Romy defines herself on her own terms, on the basis of her own desires and choices. She’s not concerned with what others think or even what they might think. She is entirely of herself, and she shows a refreshing self-awareness throughout.

But I’m struck by the nature of loneliness here because I think part of what Kushner is expressing – depressingly – is that the human condition makes true connection much harder than we can imagine. In what may be my favorite quote in a novel full of rich language and insight, Romy describes her first time shooting up heroin as, “an experience exactly the way a young girl dreams love can be.” The idea is all there in that moment. Romy falls “in love,” but it isn’t with anyone. It’s self-absorbed and detached.

We see this at the level of the story itself. I hope it isn’t much of a [SPOILER] to report that Romy loses everyone she cares even remotely about. The novel opens with her stuck on a bus taking her to the maximum-security prison where she’ll spend the rest of her life, and it follows her through life inside, the eventual death of her mother, the loss of her son as he’s adopted away from her, and through to her brief pointless escape. No one gets in. No one matters. The man she’s killed thinks of her by her stage name as he stalks her; she thinks of him as “Creep” Kennedy. Each casts the other as a character in a private experience, transparently so.

We see it as well at a macro level. I’ve been struck by a species of contemporary novel, informed by postmodernism, that I describe as the “rhizomatic” novel. I think of Colum McCann in particular, but it includes Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Joan Silber’s Fools among others. The striking feature of those novels is that we see a fragmented story that, from a novelist’s eye view if none of the characters’, connects disparate characters in an interconnected web.

In this case, though, Kushner does the opposite. For all that her characters overlap in their encounters, they affect each other only incidentally and without enduring influence. The close of the novel, for instance, brings her heartbreaking realization that, with her recapture, she’ll never get to know her son’s experience. “He is on his path as I am on mine,” she says, and that truth extends in other directions. She learns only very late that her best friend, Eva, has died, and she learns that from Eva’s father who confesses to having been so estranged from his daughter that he didn’t know of the death for years himself. Our second most significant character, Gordon, a would-be English professor who teaches in the prison for a time, agrees to mail a letter from a woman he thinks is crazy; he never knows that it results in the near murder of another character, and he never has cause to reflect on what he might have learned from his throw-away favor for someone. And the Unabomber makes an appearance, writing his manifesto against technology – and against the possibility of human connection – at the same time but isolated and removed from everyone else.

That is, there is something that might look like a vast web connection these characters, but it tears the moment we put any weight on it. None of these characters ultimately influence the others. They’re in dark situations that overlap, but even darker is the sense that we can never come to know them since they can never get beyond the narrow limits of their own experience. It’s a grim picture of a lonely world.


View all my reviews

Review: Remembering Roth

Remembering Roth by James Atlas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I never got to meet Philip Roth. I never even got to see him read from a distance. I did read him, extensively, and I did get to write and lecture a fair bit about him. (Shameless plug: my summative lecture on his career is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqZf7... ) I was demographically like a lot of his younger friends – that is, like Adam Gopnik and James Atlas, I’m a Jewish writer (Atlas even went to my cousins’ high school – but somehow I never got the chance to hang out with him.

I still regret that, but I’m grateful to Atlas for giving me a sense of what I missed.

Above all, there’s confirmation of what I’ve heard often before: Roth was, in person, one of the most charming and magnetic personalities you can imagine. He enjoyed Atlas’s early biography of Delmore Schwartz, wrote Atlas to tell him, and the two became friends.

This isn’t long at all – it’s an extended essay as much as an almost-book – but it’s rich in detail about Roth’s humor, in both its good and ill dimensions.

My favorite amusing anecdote is from the time Atlas saw Roth sitting to talk with Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez. When Roth asked Hernandez how he was able to play so well on the field, Hernandez said, “It’s mental.” When Hernandez asked Roth how he was able to write so well, he answered, “It’s physical.”

Another winner comes when Roth asks Atlas to join him in the country with the “rich and famous.” “But I’m neither of those,” Atlas replies. “I know,” says Roth, “but they hate you as it you were.”

There are many others, though, and Atlas does a fine job of not overdoing their shared cleverness. It’s two men who enjoyed talking with another.

And then, in ways also famously characteristic of Roth, it isn’t. Atlas can’t put his finger on what soured their friendship. It may have been Atlas’s perhaps too aggressive biography of Saul Bellow, and it might just have been Roth aging into irascibility, but they stopped being as close.

This part of the memoir works just as well as the beginning. It shows the two continuing their friendship but in strained fashion. In a poignant moment, Roth writes him as “James” rather than as “Jim,” and Atlas sighs at the implication of estrangement.

In the end, Atlas is sad to think he’s not one of the thirty friends gathered around Roth’s bedside at his death – thirty being a very large number for a man who claimed so often to be alone, and a number large enough for Atlas to think he might have been part of it.

Atlas tells us he was in the running to write Roth’s biography, and I’m confident he’d have done a good job. What we have here, though, is something else. It may be slighter than a full biography, but it seems more personal than any biography could have been. It’s the account of a strong writer coming to terms with what it meant to be friends with one of the great voices of our time.


View all my reviews

Review: Last Orders

Last Orders by Graham Swift
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have to admit, I didn’t give this one the attention it deserves. I gave it a shot because it’s a Booker Prize winner and because it was on sale. I liked the tone, the sense of overhearing the conversations from the “gentleman” farther down the bar who talk as if there’s no one else in the room, but it turns on so much subtlety that I lost track of much of the underlying context.

I couldn’t always tell, for instance, which friend had which frustration over the charge to bury their friend Jack. Some were drawn to Jack’s wife, Amy, and Amy herself was so full of resentment that she didn’t want to be part of the journey to scatter the issues. I never found out why, and I lost track of how Jack and Amy’s son Vince fit into the plot, but in some ways I didn’t care. That’s because, while tedium is a part of the narrative method, it also seems a large part of the context. These are men who haven’t seen their lives turn out as they hoped. Their pleasures are a pint at the pub and pretending the old times were better than they were.

To my surprise, though, I didn’t stop reading (well, listening). The rhythm of the speakers themselves kept me going. Like those too-loud gentlemen at the bar, they entertained me sometimes, often enough, that I could never quite pull the plug on the story. I sensed its general outline – they’re carrying the ashes and getting ever closer to their destination – and that crossed with the rich language of the speakers kept me going.

I wish this one reset itself more often than it does, that it caught us up periodically, but I think that reflects some of its moment. It’s a dated work in some ways, both in its echoes of a Modernist structural ambition and in its unreflective display of the working class as objects, but it seems a strong example of its kind.

From quick digging, I see that this had some notoriety for echoing the plot of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I suppose I see that, but I’d say it has more in common with a favorite of mine, Wallace Markfield’s To an Early Grave, which also tells the story of a group of friends as they venture to their dead friend’s funeral. Or throw in Daniel Fuchs’s wonderfully playful Homage to Blenholt about a young man determined to pay his respects at the funeral of the neighborhood Jewish gangster boss. Or, for that matter, Antigone, who’s determined to see her brother buried despite Creon’s edict otherwise.

So, as a quick retort, I’d say I don’t hold it against this at all that some people saw parallels to Faulkner. If you’re going to steal, steal from the best, right? And remember that Faulkner was stealing as well.

This one falls short of the greatness I’ve come almost to take for granted from more recent Booker prize winners, but it’s a striking experiment in form and tone, so I’m glad I didn’t put it all the way down.


View all my reviews