REVIEW or retrospective

‘Nat Turner’s’ narrative structure

January 8, 2010 | 2 Comments

William Styron creates dreamy world in his slave rebellion novel. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. Vintage. 480 pages. Eventually I realized that William Styron’s poetic descriptions of weather and landscapes in The Confessions of Nat Turner aren’t supposed to represent the world as we know it—or even as the characters know it, save perhaps for the narrator, Nat Turner—but to create a feeling in the reader of tragic grandeur, of a doomed place saturated with significance and …

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The poetic prose of ‘Nat Turner’

January 3, 2010 | 2 Comments

William Styron’s great novel showcases the strengths of lavish, incantatory words and sentences. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. Vintage. 480 pages. William Styron told interviewers he worked slowly, writing his thick books by hand, in No. 2 pencil, on yellow legal pads. In Sophie’s Choice his alter ego reads his sentences aloud, testing them, as he goes. Styron had an ear for rhythm and a fearsome vocabulary that he wasn’t afraid to unleash. The lovely word motes …

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Reading and re-reading pleasures

November 6, 2009 | No Comments

Doctorow’s great story, Ragtime, and its fine sentence rhythms. Ragtime: A Novel by E.L. Doctorow. Random House. 336 pages. I read Ragtime more than thirty years ago when it first appeared, and was impressed by its prose—which seemed like nothing I’d ever read and which was rumored to be in ragtime rhythm—and was gripped by its story. What strikes me now, having just reread it, is the spare beauty of its language and its narrative audacity. So, much the same. The bestseller …

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Pitfalls of first-person

July 11, 2009 | 5 Comments

I’ve been struggling through Gilead this July, trying to ascertain why I’m lukewarm, at best, toward this acclaimed book so many have savored with such pleasure from an author I respect and admire. Marilynne Robinson’s novel won the Pulitzer and rave reviews from all the large-circulation review outlets that remain in America. Gilead has earned a raft of adoring reader reviews on Amazon—too many people to have been deceived by the superficiality and log-rolling of major book reviews. But there’s …

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A meditation upon ‘Infinite Jest’

June 28, 2009 | No Comments

This is a guest post by my son, Tom Gilbert, a college sophomore majoring in philosophy. David Foster Wallace expressed dissatisfaction with the reviews for his ambitious  Infinite Jest. The 1,104-page book is so expansive that any attempt at a plot synopsis is useless; any sweeping thematic summation seems to feel reductive.  However, the novel’s polyphonic structure and character voices are illuminating in its discussion. The novel bears numerous similarities to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in its character relationships.  Instead …

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Review: ‘The Inner Circle’

June 1, 2009 | One Comment

The Inner Circle, a novel by T.C. Boyle. Penguin. 432 pages. T.C. Boyle has a gift for bringing to life historical figures in his fiction. He did it to John Harvey Kellogg in his comedic novel The Road to Wellville, made into a movie by the same name, and he does it more movingly in The Inner Circle, also turned into a film, about Alfred Kinsey, whose sex research at Indiana University transformed scientific inquiry and helped change Americans’ sexual …

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Review: Griffith’s ‘A Good War’

April 28, 2009 | 2 Comments

A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America by David Griffith. Soft Skull Press. 189 pages. When Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil hath he done? And they cried out all the more exceedingly, Crucify him.—Mark 15:14 What America learned from World War II, after a billion people died and half the Earth was scorched, was to outlaw war on civilians (which works but at bestial cost) and to ban torture (because it’s ineffective, …

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