I’m not arguing against critical reviews. I’m all for critical reviews, both the ones that point out misogyny or racism or homophobia in books, and the ones that simply express an opinion about something that didn’t work — plot, character, prose, etc. Reviews are subjective. If someone doesn’t like a book, and they can explain why without using the words “I wanted,” that information can help other readers decide whether or not they want to read it. But if that review is just sentence after sentence trolling the book because it wasn’t the book that reviewer wanted to read — that’s not helpful, and it’s not even a real critical review.
Sometime this year, or maybe the next, Bruce Willis’ final movie will be released, almost certainly to minimal press attention and even less audience interest. To someone who grew up in the 1990s, this seems impossible. Tinseltown is usually very good at paying tribute to its bygone stars. But it seems entirely likely that Willis will miss the entire Hollywood lionization machine in the final years or decades of his life: no career achievement awards, no late-life Oscar nomination for a surprising indie, no wave from the balcony at the Kennedy Center. From 1988 to the end of the millennium, no one made bigger hits, flopped bigger flops, and grinned more shit-eating grins. He used to be one of the coolest movie stars around. It feels painfully unfair to watch his work end with this kind of whimper.
But behind him he leaves a fascinating cinematic record. To look back at Bruce Willis’ career is to see a man who became a megastar in an instant and spent the following decades torn: searching for ways to complicate his persona, retreating to what was familiar. There’s nothing to see in a movie like Wire Room, no hint of the Willis who commanded $20 million per movie and, ever so briefly, deserved every penny. But you don’t need to watch Wire Room when you can watch so many other movies.
For veteran members of Club Purr, the reasons are clear. A purr is warm tea, a roaring fire, and fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies, all rolled into a fleece-lined hug; it is the auditory salve of a babbling brook; it is coffee brewing at dawn. It is emotional gratification incarnate—a sign that “we’ve made our pets happy,” which just feels darn good, says Wailani Sung, a veterinary behaviorist at the San Francisco SPCA.
But purrs—one of the most recognizable sounds in the animal kingdom—are also one of the most mysterious. “No one, still, knows how purring is actually done,” says Robert Eklund, a phonetician and linguist at Linköping University, in Sweden. Nor can experts say, exactly, what purring means. Cats purr when they’re happy—but also sometimes when they’re anxious or afraid, when they’re in labor, even when they’re about to die. Cats are perhaps the most inscrutable creatures humans welcome into our homes, and purring might be the most inscrutable sound they make.
Cruz’s quick-reading character study is only simple on the surface; Ms. Romero is a complicated woman. Shouldering (and shrugging off) middle age, frayed community, fractious friends and family and the hard squeeze of economics, she has a keen social prowess that often misses its target. But Cruz never misses. Her new novel aims for the heart, and fires.
senseless here’s the man with the crystal contractions
with the rumor of sand with a doll’s past tense
at the hollow step in a bed of distress
nevertheless present at the passage of spring