Damon Garr
D'Ambrosio sometimes stretches for a self-important word when something more common would suffice, would better lend to understanding, but the essays each offer proof of how a personal essay should exist. Each is a mix of the personal, the outside world, and even the scholarly. Maybe the essays aren't as good as his fiction, but D'Ambrosio proves his talents here.
I think Lauren Groff may have made her way onto my list of favorite writers. She demonstrates real insight into how people think, how we make decisions or act in ways that don't always serve us, and how we think we're showing one thing but giving off something else entirely. These stories also show a variety of styles, showing Groff's abilities to tell a story that truly suits the story. Now, I've only read Florida and the novel Fates and Furies, so I'm excited that there's more work out there to read. And I can't wait to see where she heads from here.
Lauren Groff has incredible intuition. She knows how to get at the ambivalence that underlies every decision we make, the ways we can doubt every emotion we feel. At its core, Arcadia is about a relationship between a son and his mother, but it let me down when the son falls in love with another. We miss the true impact of the life-changing decisions he makes, especially in light of his relationships with his mother and other women. Still, I look forward to reading more of what Groff has written.
Told in a scattershot way, with multiple characters across generations, the novel is not as compelling as it could be. Still, Woodrell demonstrates his mastery throughout. I would have liked it if it his editor would have inserted a few more commas.
There are many ways in which I didn't like this novel. Before ever getting to the different sections and the supposed meta deconstruction of fiction or memory or whatever. I cringed many times after poorly constructed sentences and overused phrases. The story of the first section was compelling enough, though there wasn't a character to like. When we learn in the second section that the first was just fiction, maybe I could say that the poor writing in the first was a construction of the novel itself. But the second section was just as bad, using again some of the poor phrasing as the first. And if this twist of the second section was supposed to be mind blowing, it wasn't. The narrator of this section is more annoying than the first, but by now I'm reading only to get through. When that section ends in an implausible “shocking” ending, and we're given a third section that makes us doubt the veracity of even the second section, I could care less.
Maybe I can appreciate the exercise here, but a novel with these aims could have more carefully construction, with the doubt woven throughout, with language less cringy, and a plot that is compelling and not built upon shocking the reader.
I feel bad for putting this book off for so long. If only someone would have told me how good it was, how sentences would jump off the page, nailing emotions, confusions, context. Not to say the book doesn't have it's faults (it does), but I do wish I'd have read this some time ago.
I had read the first few pages a half-a-dozen times, and despite the sharpness of the writing in the first few paragraphs I always chose another book to read instead. I only had to get past those first few pages, past Rabbit's pick-up basketball game and his run home, to his home and wife and dissatisfaction with both, to the drive and I was hooked.
He drives through the thickening night. The road unravels with infuriating slowness, its black wall wearilessly rising in front of his headlights no matter how they twist. The tar sucks his tires. He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids. So angry his cheeks feel parched inside his mouth and his notstrils water. He grinds his foot down as if to squash this snake of a road, and nearly loses the car on a curve, as the two right wheels fall captive to the dirt shoulder. He brings them back but keeps the speedometer needle to the right of the legal limit.
He turns off the radio; its music no longer seems a river he is riding down but instead speaks with the voice of the cities and brushes his head with slippery hands. Yet into the silence that results he refuses to let thoughts come. He doesn't want to think, he wants to fall asleep and wake up pillowed by sand. How stupid, how frigging, fucking stupid he was, not to be farther than this. At midnight, the night half gone.
I hadn't expected this. I hadn't expected the run, right in the beginning, with narration so close and free-flowing. And then Rabbit turns out to be so exhasperating and simple. Always doing what he shouldn't do, but with no real good reason for it. Sure, he had been frustrated at home, but his initial flight was on a whim. There was no reason in it, and worse, he turns around and heads back. But does he go home? No. And this is the way it goes for the length of the novel.
Where the novel runs into trouble, besides the meandering, the pick-ups and drop-offs of motivation and reason, is when suddenly we leap from Rabbit's mind to the mind of others. It tends to happen for good reason, but I find it troubling to enter another character's mind halfway through the novel after being firmly established elsewhere. Yet, when Updike does this, he lets nothing fail (another long quote follows–my apologies).
Nelson's face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, “Pilly have–Pilly–” But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief's chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground. He rolls on his stomach and spins in the grass, revolved by his own incoherent kicking. Eccles' heart seems to twist with the child's body: he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vaccuum.
“The boy's taken his truck,” he tells Mrs. Springer.
“Well let him get it himself,” she says. “He must learn. I can't be getting up on these legs and running outside every minute; they've been at it like that all afternoon.”
“Billy.” The boy looks up in surprise toward Eccles' male voice. “Give it back.” Billy considers this new evidence and and hesitates indeterminately. “Now, please.” Convinced, Billy walks over and pedantically drops the toy on his sobbing playmate's head.
The new pain starts fresh grief in Nelson's throat, but seeing the truck on the grass beside his face chokes him. It takes him a moment to realize that the cause of his anguish is removed and another moment to rein the emotion in his body. His great dry gasps as he rounds these corners seem to heave the sheet of trimmed grass and the sunshine itself. A wasp bumping persistently against the screen dips and the aluminum chair under Eccles threatens to buckle; as if the wide world is participating in Nelson's readjustment.
The brilliance is everwhere in this novel, despite the way it bumps along at times, infuriating in its twists and the impending tragedy. You know that things must truly fall apart for Rabbit, and you know that he may learn nothing from it. And you wish he'd have kept driving south to the beach and avoided all of this.
Again, I wish I'd have read this sooner. There is so much to learn from the way Updike captures emotion, the way his close third-person narration takes you behind the scenes. You are not a witness to the thoughts of the character, but you experience what he experiences. Makes me wish I'd have really seen the brilliance in the writing workshop staple “A&P” and read more Updike sooner.
Capote's retelling of the murders of the Clutter family in Kansas in 1959 certainly blurs the lines between fact and fiction. The events leading up to the murders are told novelistically, based on interviews, though much imagination was involved. In the end, I found myself surprised at just how dry and passionless the writing was.
As much as I was annoyed by the melodrama and the length of the thing, I did enjoy the book. There are many diversions that don't take us very far and characters that are so pathetic at times. In fact, by the end, I wanted to throw Anna down onto the train tracks myself.
Russian society in the 19th century is not something I could much relate to, but I found myself instead picture Southern society. It made much more sense that way. I'd love to see it retold in a movie like that.
The melodrama is a bit over the top much of the time, but Tolstoy has a wit that had me emitting a loud HA! on more than one occasion. And I did really appreciate the character of Levin. Though his thoughts do get him in a bad way, I do appreciate his searching for answers that takes us all the way to the novel's conclusion.
The book is a long haul, but one worth getting through. I'm sure that I'll feel its influence for some time.
As a fan, I have to enjoy learning the many details in this book and Peter Hook keeps it light with anecdotes of raucousness. Yet, when the story of Joy Division ends with the suicide of Ian Curtis, I expected something more profound at the end of this book.
This is undoubtedly a psychological novel, but I found the long stretches of wallowing hard to endure. The characters are well drawn, in their psychology and their physicality, and Highsmith knows how to turn up the tension and surprise. Despite wishing some sections would hurry along, I did enjoy it and am encouraged to read more Patricia Highsmith.
I came to this, the first of Lauren Groff's books, after admiring the intuition in her more recent work. Her short story collection Florida will go down as one of the best books I've read this year. The Monsters of Templeton, though, is overly ambitious with its era-spanning narration and convoluted genealogy, lacking in the depth of her other work. The scope here is too grand, with a mystery that is in itself pointless from the beginning. Though my expectations were high, I don't know that I would have been any less disappointed by this novel had I come to it unfamiliar with Groff's work. I may be unimpressed with this work, but it does demonstrate the growth in the abilities of its author. I look forward to reading her next work.
The movie was laughably bad and the screenplay itself was just as much of a mess. I read it hoping to gain some insight from the many philosophical monologues but even in print, these passages came off as staking out some profound meaning where not exists. And it all was made worse by being stuck picturing Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt in these roles. Cormac McCarthy is a genius, but it doesn't show here.
In these times, when truth has gone the way of books have in this book and the threat of war for distraction's sake, Fahrenheit 451 is particularly unsettling. Still, Bradbury's writing is surprisingly beautiful and descriptive. There is probably plenty I could criticize here, plenty that might modify a positive review, but it is difficult to do anything other than praise a book that celebrates, protectively, literature.
I'm a slow reader in general, and especially slow when I'm not enjoying a book. So, make it over 800 pages and it will take me a while to get through it. With multiple story lines (I'll be generous) and different time periods, this book takes some work to read. DeLillo's writing always impresses me, but the overall structure of the novel just didn't work for me.