I like Ian McEwan’s particularly British way of handling drama. By that I mean he picks smoldering topics – forbidden lust, crime, unreciprocated yearning – and presents them in a cool, tempered way. The hot-bloodedness…
Posts Published by Will A
Mrs. Fletcher’s Rude Awakening
Tom Perrotta has a talent for creating very relatable, very human characters and setting them in novels that feel timely and contemporary. With the exception of The Leftovers, which had a fantasy element, reading his…
Everything I Ever Crammed Into A Melodrama
Celeste Ng’s debut novel If you say “Harvard” a lot and have your characters work as professors and aspire to be doctors, can you make A Serious Novel out of a soap opera plot? That’s…
Ballad of the Sad Middle-Aged Man
There are times when there’s a comfort to cliched material. It’s pleasantly familiar, devoid of the unexpected – like a favorite meal or well-worn sweatshirt, it holds only satisfaction, not surprise. One Last Thing Before…
Imagine Me Gone
To call Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett “uneven” isn’t fair. That isn’t quite the right word, although, since I can’t think of a better one, it may be the best. That Haslett can create…
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
We like to be alone, it seems. Fewer of us are getting married. More of us live by ourselves than ever. Lots of us prefer to work remotely (read: on our own) rather than come…
Unlocking ‘Tony and Susan’
Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan is a Matroyshka doll of a novel – a story within a story in which the main character’s reality blurs with the fiction she’s reading. When the plot is interesting…
Modern Romance
It’s not that Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance isn’t interesting. It’s just that if you’re young-ish, single, and have a smartphone, you already know most of what it covers because you’ve lived it. Ansari was inspired…
Intimacy Idiot
In a few past reviews for this site, I’ve mused aloud whether I didn’t quite enjoy a book as much because it didn’t reflect my life. (See: Dept. of Speculation and The Buried Giant) If…
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
I tend to get a little irritated with novels that use really improbable or bizarre setups, because it seems sort of cheap or easy. Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, though, lands…
Yawning Through Britain: ‘The Buried Giant’
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant was one of those books that made me think, “Well, if there was a deeper meaning here, I didn’t get it.” Just as I wasn’t sure I could fully appreciate…
‘Master Of Us All’
Cristobal Balenciaga was, by the account of his contemporaries, the best fashion designer of the last century. He was also notoriously private, nurturing an aura of mystery and shunning the concept of celebrity. Mary Blume’s…