In this newly egalitarian cultural field, one might expect a critical reappraisal of Donna Tartt: a Donnaissance, if you will. After all, her novels — though marked by lapidary language and sprawling narrative scope — all contend with genre in significant ways. The Secret History reconfigures the conventions of the classic whodunit, turning it, famously, into a whydunit. The Little Friend (2002) draws heavily from “girl detective” fiction like the Nancy Drew series and Harriet the Spy. The Goldfinch is indebted to popular film, with one character described as “some cool guy from a fifties noir or maybe Ocean’s Eleven, a lazy, sated gangster with not much to lose.” In other words, she writes literary takes on popular genres, purportedly the essence of the genre turn, and yet, somehow, she is omitted from this new canon as well. Tartt is not grouped with Whitehead and Egan any more than she is with Roth and DeLillo. Again, a look at the MLA Bibliography is illustrative: Whitehead returns over 500 peer-reviewed results, Egan almost 3,000. Tartt — though her career is longer — returns, again, a mere 80. Where authoritative old-school critics like Prose and James Wood regard Tartt with open hostility, her reception from the avant-garde genre-forward crowd might be summed up as awkward silence. Clearly, then, there are two ways to do the genre turn: the “right” way, and Tartt’s way.
In their work, the pair describe colorful legends from northern Europe and Australia that depict rising waters, peninsulas becoming islands, and receding coastlines during that period of deglaciation thousands of years ago. Some of these stories, the researchers say, capture historical sea level rise that actually happened—often several thousand years ago. For scholars of oral history, that makes them geomyths.
“The first time I read an Aboriginal story from Australia that seemed to recall the rise of sea levels after the last ice age, I thought, No, I don’t think this is correct,” says Nunn. “But then I read another story that recalled the same thing.”
“Don’t trust a writer who gives out advice,” McCracken warns in the first chapter. But the irony is, her words create an exquisite alchemy that makes a reader ready to follow her anywhere, believe every word she writes down. Is this book a novel or is it a memoir? It matters not at all. With every vital, potent sentence, McCracken conveys the electric and primal nature of that first fundamental love.
So The Hero of This Book is a hall of mirrors, a lightly fictionalized memoir that interrogates genre and the act of writing even as it strives to conjure up McCracken's beloved mother in all her splendid idiosyncrasy in order to prevent her from "evanescing." It features the snappy prose we've come to love in inventive novels like The Giant's House and Bowlaway, and in McCracken's most recent collection of profoundly hilarious stories, The Souvenir Museum.
Have you noticed lately that everything is shit? Things were very shitty the year before last, they became even shittier last year, and now everything is just indescribably shit. As a species, we’ve been stuck with this aspect of the human condition for around 300,000 years. But the question of how to respond to it intellectually and emotionally arises with fresh urgency in each new generation. And in the face of each fresh piece of shit.
Traditionally, one role of philosophy has been to aid us in this task. Friar Lawrence advises Romeo, banished from his city and the arms of his girl, to sip “Adversity’s sweet milke, Philosophie.” However, over the past couple of centuries, with the transformation of philosophy into an academic discipline, its connection with self-help has largely been severed. The aim of Kieran Setiya’s new book Life Is Hard is to recapture philosophy’s ancient mission of “helping us find our way” in the face of life’s afflictions.
When Constance Wu muses in “Making a Scene” that “true self-awareness requires context,” the 40-year-old actress is essentially posing the thesis of her illuminating new memoir. A gifted performer hounded by a diva reputation, Wu isn’t afraid to portray herself as volatile, cruel or conceited in enthralling essays that range from wistful recollections to uncomfortable confessions.
Go to New York.
Stay with your friends.
Meet with your friends.
Drink with your friends.
Marijuana and cocaine with your friends.
Nobu with your friends and farm-to-table Chinese with your
friends.