Every year, there’s another attempt at writing The Great American Novel. And the latest instalment in that neverending series is David Gilbert’s latest novel, & Sons. Very early on, Gilbert sets out his stall with “Fathers start as gods and end as myths and in between whatever human form they take can be calamitous for their sons”. So we know what we’re dealing with. This is the story of A.N. Dyer, a Salinger-esque novelist, as reclusive as he is revered, and his three sons. The eldest is […]
Gone Again
After struggling to remember who Neil Patrick Harris is supposed to play in the movie, I decided I needed a reread of Gone Girl, so that I am properly prepared to see the movie with the appropriate mix of excitement and righteous indignation. Gone Girl opens on the day of Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Nick and Amy moved to Missouri two years ago after losing their jobs in New York City. In addition, most of Amy’s trust fund from her parents’ Amazing […]
Meh
This novel is not just a stream but rather a flood of consciousness, narrated by a woman who needs the help of mental health professionals. While I appreciate that the narrator reveals her state of mind to us with her endless, run-on rumination, as a reader, I just found it wearying after a while. And in the end, I’m not sure what to make of the odyssey of Elyria, a 28-year-old woman, writer for soap operas, unhappily married, trying to lose herself. Elyria has been […]
How Hannibal Became a Cannibal
Having never read Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris, when it was published in 2007, I thought I would go back and finish up the series, mostly to familiarize myself with the entire Hannibal cannon and potentially to help me have more information at hand as the television series continues in 2015. The reviews for the book when it came out, were not kind, and many thought Harris had crossed a line in the sand by establishing his imagined reasons for Hannibal Lecter’s childhood trauma and resulting descent […]
Blend In or Stand Out?
Everything I Never Told You is a novel about thwarted dreams, love, and parental expectations; about race in America in the 1970s, women’s rights, the desire to fit in and the desire to stand out. And the mysterious death of 16-year-old Lydia Lee. Was it suicide or foul play? The story begins with Lydia’s death. Her body has been found in the lake, and since it is known she couldn’t swim, foul play is assumed. Our initial image of Lydia is as a genius with […]
Mommy Wars, circa 1899
Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This classic of American Literature is the tragic story of Edna Pontellier as she awakens to the reality of her own desires and the limits her world places upon them. Like Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, this novel shows the unfairness of restrictions that men and society at large placed on women, and women’s growing […]
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