All The Insight of a Rabbit Updike, John (1960). Rabbit, Run. New York: Random House, 264 pp. This is the first of the “Rabbit” tetralogy, and the book that established Updike as one of the greatest American novelists (and won … Continue reading
Rushdie, Salman (1990). Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta Books. 212 pp. A Fantastic Essay on Writing This is perhaps Rushdie’s most accessible book, ostensibly a children’s fairy tale, set in a fantasy world far away. An Indian … Continue reading
Wright, Stephen (994). Going Native. New York: Dell Publishing. Writing For the Sake of Writing This widely praised novel is more like a collection of very loosely connected short stories. The writing is interesting, some of the sentences hallucinatory. That’s … Continue reading
Life’s Three Great Pleasures Considered Nickles, Sara, & Shacochis, Bob (Eds.) (1994) Drinking, Smoking, & Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 200 pp. This anthology of stories, essays, and poems (many of them excerpts from larger works) recalls a time … Continue reading
Wacky People Doing Wacky Things Toole, John Kennedy (1980) A Confederacy of Dunces. New York: Grove Press. The main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a modern-day Don Quixote, a manic, tragi-comic, delusional soul who believes, or at least pretends, that … Continue reading
Eye of the Beholder Saramago, José (1995). Blindness. New York: Harvest. A man sits in his car at a traffic light, staring at the red, waiting for the green. The light turns green and the cars around him roar ahead. … Continue reading
Wittgenstein’s Mistress on the Mezzanine Ridgway, Keith (2007). Animals. New York: Harper Perrenial. An unnamed, first-person narrator is a free-lance illustrator of animals, in or around London. He describes his ordinary, nerdy life in excruciating detail, reminiscent of Nicholson Baker’s … Continue reading
Magical Story of Humanity Marquez, Gabriel Garcia (1970). One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper and Row. It’s difficult to have an opinion about a book that is universally revered as one of the greatest novels of all time, … Continue reading
Second-Person in New York McInerney, Jay (1984). Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage. This short (182 pp) novel of 1980’s New York City is widely praised as having nailed that period and place. I don’t know – I wasn’t … Continue reading
A 75-Page Novel Shteyngart, Gary (2010). Super Sad True Love Story. New York: Random House. This is my second attempt to read Shteyngart, a darling of the literary fiction world these days. Earlier, I had attempted to read Absurdistan and … Continue reading