In the foreword, Stern dismisses his previous two bestsellers, 1993’s “Private Parts” and 1995’s “Miss America.” He also distances himself from his previous persona. As he sees it, the old Howard was an insecure narcissist so terrified his audience would turn the dial that he bullied his guests to either submit or flee. The new Howard is a kinder, happier and more generous entertainer freed from the constrains of shock jockdom. The beginning of that transformation, he says, is easy to chart: The end of his 23-year marriage to Alison Berns in 2001. Miserable and disappointed, fearing how his three daughters would view him, Stern began seeing a psychotherapist four days a week.
Four or five years ago, if you asked someone about her book group, your ears were likely to be singed with anecdotes about the overconsumption of Pinot Grigio or various club members’ floundering marriages. Half the group didn’t even finish reading Donna Tartt’s book, your interlocutor would grouse; the other half kept referring to it as “The Goldfish.”
But ask today, and you might get a different response. A response betokening focused individuals and the intelligent chatter they make in the presence of their own kind. A response betokening a literal interpretation of the E. M. Forster dictum “Only connect.”
I am the least reliable narrator when it comes to the story of my brain exploding. This is because, from the time right before I suffered a freakish brain hemorrhage last year to the time I regained full consciousness roughly two weeks later, I remember nothing. My mind is an absolute blank. It’s like the fabled pause in the Nixon Tapes. I was not here. That time of my life may as well not exist. Oh, but it did.
As a critic, I’m obviously biased in favor of criticism. So I’m not going to use this space to convince you that criticism is important (although Todd VanDerWerff has a great argument on that front), or that it’s good and important to let people not enjoy things (although Esther Rosenfield has a great argument on that front). Instead, I want to try to figure out why all this antipathy is getting directed at critics right now.
A bar without booze sounds like an oxymoron, like an aquarium without fish or a bakery that doesn’t serve bread. But in cities like New York and London, where bars often function as second living rooms for apartment dwellers with little space, an alcohol-free nightlife option can appeal to people who, for whatever reason, would prefer not to drink.
Striking a balance between realism and artifice is a difficult task for any fiction writer, but for those whose work bends toward the fantastical, the problem is particularly acute. While Russell’s talent has always been obvious, in her earlier books she occasionally slipped into a territory that felt perilously close to weirdness for the sake of weirdness. But one of the great pleasures of reading an author’s body of work lies in observing the progression of her skills and sensibilities, and in “Orange World” the strangeness is never forced, the surrealism always grounded in recognizable emotion and experience.
In Molly Dektar’s somber debut novel, “The Ash Family,” the protagonist wrestles with these same questions. How can a progressive-minded individual protect our battered earth in the face of widespread indifference and corporate greed? Beryl (“Berie” for short) is a recent high school graduate whose life takes a sharp turn when she meets a group that purports to have the answer.
“Furious Hours” is a well-told, ingeniously structured double mystery—one an unsolved serial killing, the other an elusive book—rich in droll humour and deep but lightly worn research. If at the final page it seems curiously unsatisfying, that is because readers and writers both long for resolution—and Harper Lee’s story, like that of her proposed subject, stubbornly resists a neat ending.
It was through stories like these that Sacks became a best-selling author: they made science—particularly neurology—human. His writing is direct, transparent, accessible—too accessible for the British publisher Faber and Faber, which rejected the original manuscript of Awakenings (1973), telling him to “professionalize” it. But from the beginning, quite apart from his keen grasp of the clinical aspects of his work, he was a remarkable wordsmith.
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.