Julia

I will take ownership of my star rating as a personal failing - I read the first half of the novel in too many, too distanced spurts, and it took me recommitting to the read to feel the pace of the plot and keep the characters straight. I will say that I still have trouble imagining this as a movie (although perhaps I shouldn't doubt Gary Oldman's acting prowess) because it is mostly talking and psychological intrigue as opposed to action. It's great talking and psychological intrigue, though. Overall, it strikes me as an American reader as pleasingly British, and George Smiley is as lovable as an unglamorous-but-brilliant intelligence officer as one could ask for.

This is 4 stars for me instead of 5 is more related to personal idiosyncracy than anything else. I feel baffled reading the blurbs on the back cover: famous people are saying, “This is great comedy, threaded with tragedy!” and I'm all like, “This is great tragedy, threaded with comedy.” The just-slightly-futuristic and definitely dystopian tilt of many of these stories made them hard for me to stand because of how painfully accurate they seemed about certain aspects of our current world, even when I also really loved them. My tolerance for dark fiction is generally inversely proportional to how clinically raw my therapy caseload seems to me at the given moment, so that's that (I couldn't finishing watching “Chappie,” last night, for Pete's sake, because it was like watching child abuse, except with a robot).

What Sanders himself has to say about his darkness, though, is why I am glad to have read this collection (the following excepted from a conversation with David Sedaris at the back of the book):

“To some readers, this makes the stories seem a bit cruel. Of course, there is cruelty in the real world. And I'd argue that my stories are a good deal less cruel than the real world at its cruelest. We only need look at the newspaper or the history books to see that, over and over, things far too cruel to write have happened and are still happening. But I think what these readers may be feeling is that my stories are crueler than many other stories. And I think that's true...mine tend toward the cruel. And this may be - I mean, I think it is - a bit of a technical flaw, a sign of limitation on the part of the writer, a failure of subtlety....I'm trying to grow as a writer in such a way that I can produce more nuanced versions of the world. But I hope that in these new visions I retain some memory of the fact that cruelty is real - and it does its victims (and we are all its victims, to varying degree) no good to pretend that all thoughts of cruelty are extraneous, or gratuitous.”

It's appropriate that I'm writing this review on Valentine's Day. Dunn will rip your heart out, stomp on it, and then leave you to tend to your own wounds. But you can't even really resent her for it, because she's so damn funny. This book, about a family of traveling carnies, is deliciously, uncomfortably twisted. I'm not totally sold on the ending, but I think it might grow on me over time as the only possible way for things to have ended.

One of the better descriptions of childhood:

“It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.

Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark, saying, “Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we'll make it right.” The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.

Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites. We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or a toy bear's worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.”

Three stars doesn't totally capture this for me: I loved the subject matter, and the narrative arc Greenblatt traced through thousands of years of history. I discovered that I'm an Epicurean, pretty much, and it's astonishing how successfully the Catholic Church manipulated the connotations of that philosophy. So overall, it's great, but I found myself wishing that Greenblatt had spent a little less time on Poggio Bracciolini specifically, and more on the general sociocultural millieu. And it won a Pulitzer, so what the hell do I know.