Nabokov’s masterpiece still occasionally has to be defended against the charge that it uses a high-art modernist veneer to excuse pornographic pleasures. In fact it is a complex, convoluted literary puzzle, a hall of mirrors where moral viewpoint is elusive,…
Charlotte Mendelson has abundant imagination and considerable comic gifts, but she would be well advised to pay more serious attention to the detail of her execution.
Like another smart New Jersey Jewish boy, Philip Roth, Paul Auster has rendered the texture of American life through reportage, but he is somewhat set apart from the Jewish-American literary milieu by the influence of Beckett and the French poetic…
Henry James’s great novel, with its melding of the social and psychological aspects of character, represented a broad bridge connecting the societal narratives mastered by Austen, Dickens and Eliot and the Modernist canon of the twentieth century.
Catherine O’Flynn’s new novel, which focuses on two generations of a Birmingham-Irish family and their distinct and contrasting experiences of dislocation, manages to be consistently comic yet also sad and moving.
Joseph Heller’s great novel is indeed a satire, not just on war but on McCarthyism and bureaucracy. But above all it is absurd –a sugar-coated pill to cope with the joke of war and the joke of life and a…
Clive James’s new Dante is the highly effective work of a poet who has absorbed tradition, who is aware of the demands of form, whose translations are imaginative and whose scholarship is immaculate.
Many critics focus on James Salter’s stylistic precision and love of detail as if he is all surface. In fact, his art ushers us towards a larger view, an understanding of American character that is rooted in history.
Generosity and largeness of vision seem to meet happily in the poems of Uruguayan-French writer Jules Supervielle, which seem to cover great distances in short spaces.
Some critics have found the protagonist of Claire Messud’s new novel unlikeable, which is not just absurd but ironic, given that the novel’s premise is society’s expectations of women’s behaviour.