News
Reviews for Fall books are starting to come in. One of the novels I’m most looking forward to reading is Marilynne Robinson’s Home. It was reviewed by Emily Barton in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times.
Unlike novels that delight in plot twists and structural play, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gilead” is seemingly straightforward and free of pyrotechnics. Instead, the novel takes its sweet, molasses-slow time, and in the process achieves depths of pathos and empathy rarely seen in contemporary fiction. What drives “Gilead” is the voice of its protagonist, the Rev. John Ames: his prose flexible and spare, steeped in Scripture and the writings of John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards. Yet Ames also has an abiding tenderness for the world; when he sees his son blowing soap bubbles, he describes one as floating “past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst.”
So little happens, in an outward sense, that Robinson barely divides “Gilead” into chapters. (There are two.) But events resonate so profoundly, they almost cannot be contained within the book. This is perhaps part of why Robinson has chosen to revisit certain scenes in her new novel, “Home,” this time writing from the perspective of Glory Boughton, one of “Gilead’s” minor characters. Yet this co-quel has a beauty all its own.
The rest of the piece is available online.
NPR’s Gregory Feifer files a short piece about what he calls a ‘literary renaissance’ in Russia. Readers have not been seduced by the availability of commercial literature after the fall of the Soviet Union and, in fact, are drawn to serious literature now, under Putin’s repressive regime.
Kind of puts me in mind of that line by Harry Lime in The Third Man: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
The most recent issue of Bookforum is available online, and I’ve already bookmarked several pieces to read: Jennifer Egan on Andre Brink’s Other Lives, Maya Jaggi on Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, and Amy Gerstler on Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chronicles.
As you can see, my website has a new design (courtesy of Being Wicked); I was getting tired of the old one, so it was time for a new look. I also used the occasion to re-organize all the information that was available here (about, books, writings, blog, events, and media) so that it will be easier for me to manage and for you to read. The blog has been moved from Movable Type to WordPress, so it may take me a few days to adjust to everything. Oh, and note that I use only one feed now. You can subscribe using the button on the right.
After four and a half years of writing, several months of research, a brief stay at a writer’s colony, and countless hours of travel, I am done with my novel. I’m elated and exhausted; I’m happy to be finished, and sad to have to let go; but, mostly, I’m just relieved. I was taking so long with this book that I was embarrassed whenever someone asked me about it. Often, I’d mention whatever new short story or essay or book review I was writing, just to avoid having to talk about “The Novel.”
But now it’s done, done, done. It’s called Secret Son. And it will be published in April 2009, so please look for it then. Next week I will be launching a brand-new website, with some information about the book, the tour, and more.