Category Archives: Reviews

Maggie O’Farrell is seductive and shameless. She teases out every plot point and twist; she catches your attention and then makes you read through paragraphs of fine—at times poetic—prose only to reach a resolution that leaves you eager for more. Hamnet is an invented history constructed around a few broken bricks and half-rotted historical facts, and is written to please. The characters come vividly to life: the mysterious Agnes, John, Mary, Bartholomew, Eliza, Susanna, Hamnet, Judith, and Agnes’s never-named husband … Continue reading →

STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE BY D.H. Lawrence In this work, first published in 1923, Lawrence comments on the following American writers: Ben Franklin, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. And he pontificates from front to back. Probably the most famous sentence in the book: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.” Thus the book is more about Lawrence than it … Continue reading →

I read this novel in 1962 shortly after it got free of the censors and almost thirty years after it was first published in France. Now at 85 I have read it again. Readers who take it on should be prepared to tolerate frequent use of the C word, a few of the N word, occasional commentary that some might consider antisemitic, and a text containing more spiel than narrative. But there is humor, commentary on art, music and literature, … Continue reading →

The Diners, Stephen Fox’s latest novel, takes us to a Christmas dinner where nine long-time friends gather in an unnamed community in northern California. This is the seventh year the clan has met at the home of Betty Crown, a widow, and a teacher of philosophy. At the beginning, Tom Whelan, a history teacher, is not enthusiastic about yet another Christmas dinner at Betty’s. But he and his wife Sarah, another philosophy teacher, pack up their shrimp dish, grab their … Continue reading →

Alexandra Fuller has written three memoirs about herself and her family: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness and Leaving Before the Rains Come. Cocktail Hour is the first I have read, though I have also enjoyed her novel, Quiet Until the Thaw. Cocktail Hour focuses on the author’s extraordinary mother Nicola Fuller, a white woman of Scottish heritage, who grew up in Africa and has lived most all of her life there. … Continue reading →

Kim Thúy is a Vietnamese-born Canadian novelist who writes in French but whose work is available in English translation. The title of the novel, Mãn, is also the name of the story’s female narrator. The name means “perfect fulfillment” and one could interpret the novel as Mãn’s journey to achieve the potential promised by her name. On the opening page we learn that one woman gave her birth, a second found her in a vegetable patch and a third, Maman—”my … Continue reading →