Volume 57, Number 6 · April 8, 2010
New Fiction
Margaret Atwood
What to make of E.O. Wilson's first novel, Anthill? Part epic-inspired adventure story, part philosophy-of-life, part many-layered mid-century Alabama viewed in finely observed detail, part ant life up close, part lyrical hymn to the wonders of earth: yes all these. But hidden within the novel is also a sort of instruction manual.
Deborah Eisenberg
Dezso Kosztolányi's Skylark seems to encapsulate all the world's pain in a soap bubble. Its surface is as smooth as a fable, its setting and characters are unremarkable, its tone is blithe, and its effect is shattering.
Jennifer Schuessler
Sam Lipsyte's characters are the kind of smart-mouthed, vaguely artistic, no longer quite young guys who went to good colleges but are still living in the basement of the culture, bingeing on junk food, junk TV, and self-abuse, with few marketable skills beyond the knack for folding every synaptic twitch into a mini-aria of rage, resentment, and oddly cheerful self-loathing.
Joyce Carol Oates
Jerome Charyn has invented for Emily Dickinson an active, at times frantic counterlife the poet never had: a "secret" life of unrepressed erotic desire.
Michael Tomasky
One of the main obstacles to health reform has been the power of money. Despite the recession, federal lobbyists and their clients spent an all-time high of $3.47 billion last year, of which $544 million came from the health sector. About half of that—$267 million—came from the "pharmaceutical and health products industry," which stands as the largest amount ever spent on lobbying Congress by a single industry in one year.
Willibald Sauerländer
Though his work has been little-noted outside his homeland, Jean-Antoine Houdon is probably the greatest French sculptor of the eighteenth century. While often brilliant, his works possess an unadorned naturalism that avoids the fashionable flourishes and sentimentality of contemporaries like Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Samuel Richardson. One is tempted to call him the physiocrat among the sculptors.
Edmund White
Stendhal once said that writing should not be a full-time job, and John Cheever's unhappy life seems to lend substance to his remark. He had too much free time, too much creative energy, too many hours to feel lonely or to drink or to get up to sexual mischief that he immediately regretted. He was both a reckless hedonist and a starchy puritan, just as he was also a freelancer with pretensions to being a country squire, both unfortunate combinations.
Plus: Alexander Stille on the Berlusconi scandal, Jeff Madrick on how Joseph Stiglitz would stop the recession, two memoirs by Tony Judt, Adam Kirsch on Christopher Ricks, John Gross on Alberto Manguel, and more.
