Personal Western Cannon

More Books to Blog

2006-09-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

1. Roddy Doyles' A Star Called Henry
2. Cotzee Youth
3. Beattie Follies
4. Gaitskill's reading of Veronica at Pittsburgh's ON Gallery
5. Russell Banks The Darling
6. The Ron Carlson edited isssue of Ploughshares (still in plastic on my desk)

Reviewing Roth

2006-05-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

Phillip Roth's commerical and critical sucess, The Plot Against America, leaves me in a bit of a conundrum when it comes to writing any kind of review. I wholeheartedly agree that PAA is a big, important and generally successful novel with a hook that's both timely and not without lasting impact-- that being said -- I can't honestly say I'm a big fan of Roth's style of writing. It seems that there exists a level of granularity in the description of not only the physical world, but the characters' states of mind and motivations that serves to, rather than make the Roth's world more real, instead remind us that Roth is somewhere behind the curtain writing about it. If PAA were 50 pages shorter, it would be a better book.

Recent Read That Reveiews Are Being Drafted

2006-05-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

Tawni O'Dell-- Backroads, Coal Run
Ian McEwan-- Atonement
Ha Jin --War Trash
Jennifer Haigh -- Mrs. Kimble

Reader, Keep Going

2006-05-15T13:35:00.000-07:00

While Larry McMurtry's Horseman, Pass By is a strong first effort, it only begins to showcase the strength of his talent in the bringing to life the vast emptiness that is West Texas and its hard bitten, close-to-the-earth inhabitants. This novel is certainly worth reading, particularly if one is interested in doing a little compare and contrast with HUD, the film based on it. But if time only allows the purusal of one early McMurtry, select The Last Picture Show. Leaving Cheyenne is propably about half way between the two in in maturity -- just where you'd think it would be, considering it's date of publication.

Runaway...Sucess

2006-05-05T08:28:00.000-07:00

Alice Munro is at the top of her game in her latest story collection. And that's saying quite a bit. "Passion" is one of the finest stories I've read this year. I don't have a lot to add to Jonathan Franzen's NYT review. There are only so many ways to say "top of the literary foodchain"

Worth Its own Salt?

2006-04-22T09:59:00.000-07:00

Halfway through Kurlansky's non-fiction best-seller Salt, I'm thowing in the towel. I don't care how much praise got heaped on this puppy, it still fills like its 1/2 a revision and a whole linguistic polishing session away from being ready to go. Not to say the details presented aren't interesting. Of course they'd be more interesting if the narrative were more coherent.

A Not-Especially-Bad Man in Africa

2006-04-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

Robert Calibrisi's The Trouble with Africa: "Why foreign aid isn't working," while sensible in its perscriptions for the beleaugered continent goes a little heavy on anecdote and a little light on hard analysis for my liking. Also, whoever didn't think it was important to include a map for the American readership should be, as the expression goes, cashiered.

A Nelson in Full

2006-04-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

Antonya Nelson's Some Fun -- what is there to say. This collection kicks ass on every level. And the denizens of her complex, seedy and difficult worlds, well, they're my kind of people. Exactly what I claimed Amy Hempel was faking in The Dog of Marriage, Nelson bags, tags and more than brings home on the hood of the stolen pickup.

Bad Nerves and Cold Blood

2006-02-08T06:40:00.000-08:00

After seeing the 1967 film of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood at Film Forum earlier this winter, I felt a big interest in reading the novel I'd long dismissed (without, of course, ever actually reading it) as sensationalist popular entertainment.

Through the great majority of the book, I kept returning a singular conclusion: "The movie got this better." And indeed, most of ICB strikes me as too granular, too obsessed with minutia instead of meaning -- as if the meaning of events can be teased out or tricked into appearing solely by unending fusillades of detail. But when Capote gets Dick and Perry to their cells on death row, where they wait out their years of appeals, his powers really rise to the occasion.

Capote captures the internal programming that compels his characters to act the way they do and does it in such a way -- a way I believe film can not -- that one is forced to recognize (think of Richard Brautigan’s poem “10%”) that if I only had a little more x and a little less y, that could be me sitting there waiting to die.

Coming Back to Jamacia

2006-01-20T10:58:00.000-08:00

I saw Jamaica Kincaid read about 10 years ago. It was the kind of rare experience in which a single person standing in front of the room pulls her whole audience into that odd state akin to being gathered around the primordial campfire.

Rapt, we listen as a village elder tells one of the identity-establishing stories of the tribe - execpt in this case, the 'tribe' is the human beings and the point of her tale is, in essence, 'this is one of the things it can mean to be human.'

If I were a better person this would have sent me scrambling for more of her work. Well, I guess it did, but it took a while. While Annie John's reputation may have a good deal to do with its quietly scathing critique of the inequities of colonialism, it was the honesty and perspicatcity with which Kincaid approached adolecent freindships and the changing nature of mother-daughter interaction that pushes me to reccomend this short novel to everyone I know who's engaged in rearing an adolescent.

3 Round's w/ Craig Davidson's Latest

2006-01-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

Kudos to Craig Davidson for the title story in his new collection “Rust and Bone.”

An abolutely textbook example of a story in which the parts told through the interspersed flashbacks are as taut and suspenseful and capable of holding our interest on its own merits as the forward action.

The best boxing story I’ve read since “Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine.”

BTW- I missed it, but the NYT gave his collection a bad review. They are so full of shit.

Read It. Read It. Read It.

2006-01-04T09:53:00.000-08:00

That Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men is not on a whole lot more of 2005's best books lists ought to be shocking.

However, maybe not so much -- The New York Times' article Rejected by the Publishers may shed a little light on just how bad the decisioning process has gotten all around. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/04/books/04publ.html

At any rate, McCarthy's meditation cum interogation of the evolution of 20th century American masculinity is, along with Gaitskill's Veronica (subject of a future blog), one of the strongest books produced by a writer from any country in 2005.

Whorin... It Ain't Easy

2005-11-16T21:12:00.000-08:00

Read for the second time Richard Russo's The Whore's Child. I am so impressed with RR. I love his big sprawling books (and his big sprawling books are not my first love-- the first 200 pages of The Risk Pool was as influential as a parent) but the fact the same person who produced Empire Falls is also capable of such a trenchant collection makes me wonder if talent has simply been unfairly apportioned.

Also, big love for Joyce Carol Oates' The Faith of a Writer : Life, Craft, Art.

Almost good enough to make me late for the opera. You want to hate her. We all want to hate her. No one this prolific can be this good. But she is... and so we hate her- just a little less.

A Little Too Good...

2005-11-02T17:27:00.000-08:00

Saw Norman Rush read from his novel Mortals at this evening's Agni/Conjunctions-sponsored lit fest at The New School. Rush & Company were straight up good enough to cause panic attacks. I. Shit. You. Not. Lacking an appropriate degree of reget for time you've wasted drinking/chasing teenage girls/watching reruns of Deep Space Nine or just generally fucking off, instead of writing? Had ya been there, you'd be hating yourself for it now. You damn slackers! No one gets good as these folks without utter committment.

Also, reading Bobbie Ann Mason's 1989 Love Life. Let me be clear. I absolutely revere Ms. Mason and strongly believe Shiloh to be one the best short story collections of the 1980s. Love Life, however, seems to only occasionally approach its predecessor's brilliance. It should be noted that a few particularly dazzling stories like Hunktown and Marita make the whole ride more than worth the price of admission.

Update: Having both remembered that Big Bertha Stories was part of Love Life and read more of the collection I rescind my previous remarks.

Avatar of Nothingness

2005-10-30T19:07:00.000-08:00

Read about half of Amy Hempel's The Dog of The Marriage upstairs at the Housing Works Used Book Cafe http://www.housingworks.org/usedbookcafe/. Hempel's latest once again finds her compulsively probing the far reaches of just how isolated/alienated folks can get in this post-modern world. And as much as I'm a sucker for the standing with my thumb out at intersection of the disconnected and the seedy, I still get the feeling she should maybe leave this stuff to Joan Didion's more capable hand.

On the other hand, I also started The Devil You Know by Wayne Johnson. It sings.

Applause and Execration

2005-10-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

Laurels to Kathleen Wheaton for her prize-winning story, "Do Not Call" in the latest issue of The Baltimore Review. And speaking of narratives involving famous, foreign-born writers married to much, much younger women, Salman Rushdie's Shalimar The Clown receives quite a pasting in the New York Times Book Review. His interview in the new issue of The Paris Review, however, is certainly worth the time for anyone interested in developing a casual knowlege of 1940's life on the subcontinent or knowing what makes Salman run.

On a wholey unrelated topic -- at The New Yorker, I bitch. As evidenced by his very strong, if somewhat detached and slightly surreal, collection, After the Quake, Haruki Murakami has written many conspicuously good short stories. In selecting for its October 17 issue, "The Kidney Shaped Pile of Verbage That Takes Up a Bunch of Pages" or whatever it was called, the "best paying gig in lit biz" does a disservice to both Murakami's rep and its readers.

It's not that HM's story is so god-awful bad, or mediocre even. It's the fact that we're talking about the New Fucking Yorker. Every professional writer extent (not to mention MFA candidates from UC Irvine to Iowa) would joyfully drown their first born in boiling bleach to get a story published here. This is supposed to be the best contemporary fiction has to offer. Or at least the best contemporary fiction has to offer that can be read standing on a crowded subway car during a 40 minute commute. When a story is selected not because of some real or imagined surfeit of literary merit, but merely because the name of its author will get issues flying off of shelves -- can anyone say 'new Truman Capote story?' --it is injurious to all. There. Screed ended.

1st Pick for a 2005 O Henry Award Winner

2005-10-19T16:32:00.000-07:00

While not pyrotechnic in its prose or particularly innovative in style, Jeffrey Eugenides' "Early Music" in the October 10th New Yorker is one of the finest stories I've read this year. With unflinching alacrity Eugenides portrays a protagonist deeply in touch with the short comings of his life. His depiction is rife with the kind of artistry and compassion that reminds us just how much short fiction is really capable of when it comes to explicating the human animal.

Go Beth, Go.

2005-10-17T09:45:00.000-07:00

Beth Alvarado's story "Just Family" in the new issue of Ploughshares led me to her earlier essay in Spork available at www.sporkmag.com entitled "How I Quit Heroin and Other Toxic Substances." Enjoyable essay. Hopefully, we'll see a collection of short fiction from Beth sometime soon.

Sycamore Review - Get It While It's Good

2005-10-11T20:40:00.000-07:00

The new issue of SR features a terrific story, "The New Dress," from U of Montana MFA candidate Chad Dundas. Dundas deftly builds tension while enabling us to bond emotionally with his parolee protagonist as he schemes and struggles to build a life.

The Quiet Englishman

2005-10-08T17:40:00.000-07:00

Currently reading Ian McEwan's outstanding 1989 novel, The Innocent. Not unlike Greene or Coetzee, McEwan possesses the capacity to depict, at a marvelously granular level, the evolution of the individual in the context of the geo-political — and he manages this with depth, grace and the illusion of effortlessness.

Jennifer Egan's Kickass Novel

2005-09-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

Although a hefty chuck of the Hollywood studio pitch might be "Invisble Monsters MEETS Glamorama"Jennifer Egan's Look At Me is still one of the most outstanding pieces of new work I've read since Julia Glass's Three Junes.

A note: I may be exhibiting a bit of compensatory generosity here to offset the embarrassment of momentarily confusing Jennifer Egan with Jennifer Weiner a few years ago --and being entirely unable to understand why the hell she could possibly have been selected as a judge for the O. Henry Awards.

Welcome To Personal Western Cannon

2005-09-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

I read. A lot.

This is a place on the Internet where I'll be jotting down my thoughts about books as I read them. Maybe posting some reviews of books I'd like to read or throwing up the occasional quote that appeals to me.

People may comment.