In his essay collection Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut assigns grades to all of his works thus far. Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle get A-pluses while Mother Night, Sirens of Titan and Jailbird get As. And as for Slapstick, this novel gets a D. I first read Slapstick in the week after Vonnegut’s death, because after hearing the news I had run to the campus library and checked out every one of his books that I hadn’t yet read. Both then and now Vonnegut’s harsh appraisal […]
Third Trip to Gilead
Marilynne Robinson returns to post-war Gilead, Iowa for a third novel, following up on the prize-winning Gilead and Home for this tale of the much younger wife of the Rev. John Ames and her fractured upbringing. As a child, Lila is neglected and disdained by her relatives until the day Doll runs off with her without turning back. Raised on the edges of society, by the team she meets Rev. Ames she has seen some of the worst it has to offer, and knows almost nothing […]
The Reason I Won’t Complete the Cannonball This Year
Either Jonathan Lethem has forgotten how to write or I have forgotten how to read. This book is so incredibly boring and bad it feels like a practical joke. It took me so long to read this book that when I started people still thought Hillary Clinton would be our next president. Even now I have only “finished” by speed-reading the last 80 pages with the result being a complete lack of comprehension. Not that I understood too much of what was happening when I […]
Practical Tactical Brilliance
Sarah Vowell’s books defy easy classification, which can make it annoying when people ask you about them. They are part history, part travelogue, part personal essay and yet that still does not seem to cover it. Her latest book, just out in paperback, concerns the relationship between the United States and the Marquis de Lafayette, the Frenchman whose support was so key during the American Revolution. Vowell begins fifty years after the start of the war, when Lafayette returned to the United States for […]
Oh, Brother
This novel is a curious thing. Co-written by the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, the book focuses on the little-seen older, supposedly smarter brother of the great detective Sherlock Holmes. However, superfans of the Conan Doyle stories are unlikely to recognize the Mycroft Holmes presented here. Whereas in the stories Mycroft is middle-aged, portly, decidedly single, and constitutionally lazy. Abdul-Jabbar and Waterhouse instead conjure up a 23-year-old just embarking on a promising career in civil service, athletic, adventurous, and most surprisingly, engaged to be married and […]
From the Siege of Chicago to the Recent Past
An unsatisfied Midwestern suburban housewife abandons her husband and young son, only resurfacing decades later when she suddenly and inexplicably attacks a prospective presidential candidate. Suddenly drawn back into his mother’s orbit, her failed writer of a son finds himself torn between an opportunity to cash in on the notoriety and the chance to finally learn his mother’s secrets. Along the way, the narrative will connect a disparate crowd of characters including video-game playing hoarders, entitled college students, Norwegian evil spirits, bankers, violinists, soldiers, poets, […]
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