Lydia Davis writes in straightforward, elegant sentences about people whose thoughts are not straightforward at all. With gentle yet penetrating insight, she illuminates characters who are worried, puzzled about how to live their lives, not sure what to believe. They are drawn in by false notions, imagine nonexistent dangers, read philosophy but fail to understand […]
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D.H. Lawrence and the Future of Literary Sex
D.H. Lawrence is famous, among other things, for introducing sex to the modern British novel. Even in the unexpurgated edition of “Women in Love,” the sex scenes are veiled rather than explicit. But by using code words like “desire” and “fulfillment,” and with pace and intensity, […]
Read More ...Lionel Shriver: So Much for That
In her nine novels, the American writer Lionel Shriver has never been afraid to show her characters’ dark side. Grimly, and sometimes comically, she explores marriage and family life as sources of powerful, unsettling emotion. In 2005, she won the Orange Prize for “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” told from the point of view […]
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I did a guest post about my reading this year on the Aqueduct Press blog, edited by the brilliant L. Timmel Duchamp.
http://aqueductpress.blogspot.nl
Phoebe Hoban: Alice Neel
Alice Neel (1900–1984) was the most independent-minded painter in New York, “a grande, if often rude, dame” who turned her back on the art world to plant her flag in the neglected genre of portraiture. By the time her career took off in the 1960s, this ultimate bohemian had worked for the WPA, lived on […]
Read More ...Martin Amis: The Pregnant Widow
Has the sexual revolution, on balance, been a good thing? Rather than freeing us, sexual liberation seems to have subjected our sex lives to the laws of the consumer economy: unequally distributed resources, cycles of feast and famine, competitiveness, acquisitiveness (are other people getting more?). Is sex on the free market really what we wanted? […]
Read More ...The Ravaged House of Memory: Louise Bourgeois
A long-legged, looming metal spider, nine meters tall, bears, in its belly, a sinister clutch of eggs. In different versions, it frightens museum-goers in Bilbao, St. Petersburg, and, as of this week, The Hague. It looks more like a prop from a horror movie than a work of art. Yet the artist Louise Bourgeois liked […]
Read More ...Barbara Kingsolver: The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel begins in the year 1929, on a tropical island off the coast of Mexico. There, an American boy swims through an underwater cave to find himself in a secret pool in the jungle. There’s a ruined temple there, and in the pool lie the bones of human sacrifice. The underwater passage, […]
Read More ...Seeking the Sublime: Sara Maitland’s “A Book of Silence”
Sara Maitland doesn’t grow her own vegetables; she doesn’t knit; she wouldn’t want to do without central heating. She smokes. She spent all her life to the age of 50 talking, first as a member of a large and noisy family, then as a writer, lecturer, and activist living in London. She’s not the sort […]
Read More ...Hen party at Cormac McCarthy’s: Atwood’s “The Year of the Flood”
In Atwood’s funniest novel in ages, two women have survived a pandemic, one barricaded in a beauty salon, the other sequestered in an endangered-species-themed strip club. In flashbacks, we learn they’re both members of an environmentalist group called “God’s Gardeners,” which doubles as an ecoterrorist cell. Always a brilliant social satirist, Atwood lovingly parodies Christian […]
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