Stephen King gets The New York Times’ royal treatment:
As for the prose, it’s not all smooth sailing. Given King’s extraordinary career-long dominance, we might expect him at this point to be stylistically complete, turning perfect sentences, as breezily at home in his idiom as P. G. Wodehouse. But he isn’t, quite. “Then it came down on her again, like unpleasant presents raining from a poison piñata: the realization that Howie was dead.” (It’s the accidental rhyme of “unpleasant” and “presents” that makes that one such a stinker.) I felt the clutch of sorrow, too, when I read this: “What you’re planning is terribly dangerous — I doubt if you need me to tell you that — but there may be no other way to save an innocent man’s life.”
But then, King has always produced at pulp speed. “Nov. 22, 2007 – March 14, 2009” proclaims the final page of “Under the Dome”: that’s 1,100 pages in 480 days. We shouldn’t be too squeamish about the odd half-baked simile or lapse into B-movie dialogue, is my point. Writing flat-out keeps him close to his story, close to his source.
Barbara Kingsolver
John Irving’s new autobiographical-type novel is out:
Given Irving’s skill, it’s especially frustrating to see him working so hard to spell out the import of the fiction. Even if some of the explanations are meant to be inflected with irony (we shouldn’t necessarily believe everything this narrator tells us), they still aren’t convincingly integrated with the events and characters. The coy hints of connections between the author and the narrator have been forced onto a plot that can’t accommodate them, and the fact that Danny is a famous novelist too often seems a mere contrivance, giving Irving a convenient opportunity to include rambling background information and to air his own ideas about writing. In his bid to make something “serious,” Irving has risked distracting readers from what otherwise could be a moving, cohesive story.
Adrian Mole is almost 40 and has cancer.
Juliet Nicolson listens to the great silence:
What happened in November 1918 when the “incessant thunder” of four years and four months of war came to an end? Juliet Nicolson’s book is about “the pause that followed the cataclysm”. Her absorbing account of “the interval between the falling silent of the guns and the roaring of the 1920s” is dominated by the continuing presence of the dead in the minds of the living; 750,000 British soldiers, sailors and airmen had died, and the memories of their “half-smoked lives”, in the description of one young woman mourning the loss of her male friends, hung over everything.
For the men who had survived the fighting, different problems presented themselves. How could they communicate to those back home any sense of what it had been like to experience what one called ‘‘hell with the lid off’’? Some who had stayed in Britain wished to learn more of what their loved ones had endured. Tourism to the deserted trenches began almost as soon as the roar of the guns ceased. There were frequent casualties among visitors in the first few months of 1919 as unexploded bombs claimed peacetime victims.
Tove Jansson
Paul Auster’s Invisible gets a review in The Telegraph:
The enigma of Invisible is whether its reveries on identity and self-imagining constitute a serious philosophical inquiry, or are merely decorative details. As an entertainment, Invisible is a brilliant success; but as one turns the final page and the dazzle of Auster’s beautiful prose begins to fade, there is a sense that the journey has been an exploration of a very stylish blind alley.
Sue Townsend
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