I reviewed Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs for Dallas Morning News. Here’s how the review begins:

The Woman Upstairs

Claire Messud

(Knopf, $25.95)

Nora Eldridge, a woman scalded by the fallout from an unusual relationship, narrates Claire Messud’s bracing fifth novel, The Woman Upstairs. Nora details the events that wounded her in retrospect, serving them with a mix of vivid anger, self-loathing and genuine appreciation for the objects of her affection that led to her unusual seduction and disgrace.

Nora reflects, “It was supposed to say ‘Great Artist’ on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say ‘such a good teacher/daughter/friend’ instead.” Nora wanted to have children and create stirring art, but instead at 37 she’s a childless schoolteacher, and when she meets Sirena Shahid, an up-and-coming Paris-based Italian artist, mother of Nora’s enchanting student Reza, Nora is particularly vulnerable to her charms.

The Woman Upstairs is not so much the story of the road not taken as it is that of the longed-for road that never appeared. Some of the blame for this lies in a lack of luck that found Nora at 30 still struggling to become an artist, and soon after spending years caring for her dying mother — but some fault lies in Nora’s restraint, her tendency to cleave to the practical, and her inability to pursue her passions at full tilt.

Please click through to read the rest:

dallasne.ws/10wdP6a 

I’ve been lucky to have a string of review assignments for three impeccable and very different novels this spring, all of which I’d categorize as feminist: The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, and Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Here’s my review of the first, which ran today in Dallas Morning News:

The Interestings

Meg Wolitzer

(Riverhead, $27.95)

“Talent,” Meg Wolitzer writes in her sweeping, thoughtful novel The Interestings, “could go in so many directions, depending on the forces that were applied to it and depending on economics and disposition, and on the most daunting and most determining force of all, luck.”

The Interestings dramatizes this idea through a four-decade unfurling of the lives of six characters who meet at an idealistic summer arts camp, Spirit-In-The-Woods, in rural New York in 1974.

Although the perspective shifts throughout this engrossing, panoramic novel, the main guide is Julie Jacobson, at the camp on scholarship after her father’s death. The beautiful and brainy aspiring actress Ash Wolf invites Julie to join a group of friends that includes Ash’s handsome and arrogant brother Goodman, an aspiring architect; Cathy, a dancer; Jonah, a musician and son of a famous folk singer; and Ethan Figman, a skilled artist and animator. They call themselves “The Interestings.”

These friends, who live in Manhattan and seem sophisticated, dazzle suburban Julie. “Irony was new to her and tasted good, like a previously unavailable summer fruit,” Wolitzer writes. When Ash calls Julie “Jules,” she keeps the name for life, a symbol of her dream to change herself from “an outsider and possibly even a freak” into an admired comic actress. “They all seduced one another with greatness, or the assumption of eventual greatness. Greatness-in-waiting.”

The novel jumps back and forth in time, propelled by the repercussions of a dramatic incident involving Goodman, whose life, Wolitzer writes in the first chapter, has “an alarming trajectory.” As the friends’ lives develop, whether they fulfill their early artistic promise depends on a number of factors — money, connections, desire and hard work, and the quality of their talent. Jonah is among the first to drop off the artistic path, setting aside his musical gifts after a bizarre exploitation and studying engineering at MIT. Cathy’s womanly body dooms her dance career.

Please click through to read the rest: http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20130419-book-review-the-interestings-by-meg-wolitzer.ece

After reading two of Karen Russell’s three books, I’ve decided she’s a writer whose every book I need to read. From now on. I reviewed “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” for Dallas Morning News:

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Karen Russell

(Knopf, $24.95)

Please click through to read the rest:

http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20130215-book-review-vampires-in-the-lemon-grove-by-karen-russell.ece

I reviewed She Matters by Missoula-based memoirist Susanna Sonnenberg for Dallas Morning News this week. Sonnenberg is a fantastic writer, and the topic, about the female friendships that sustained her, is a worthy one, but I agreed with the New York Times book reviewer Susan Chira, who noted, “There is much to admire in this book — its imaginative narrative structure, its arresting prose, its raw honesty — but some of it is exasperating, too. I wish it had been edited more tightly, with fewer friends, each one standing more precisely for a turn in Sonnenberg’s life or a moment of revelation.”

Here’s some of what I had to say for the Dallas Morning News:

She Matters

A Life in Friendships

Susanna Sonnenberg

(Scribner, $24)

Susanna Sonnenberg’s 2008 memoir Her Last Death detailed her Manhattan childhood with an extravagant, inappropriate and singularly crazy mother who followed “cocaine-fierce days” with “sluggish comas on the bed.”

She escaped her mother’s orbit, moving to Missoula to marry, work and raise two sons. In She Matters: A Life in Friendships, Sonnenberg chronicles the female friendships that sustained and challenged her in ways that are particularly acute due to her lack of a steady maternal figure.

Sonnenberg’s mother makes only a cameo appearance in She Matters, but it’s a telling one. “My mother always had a main best friend,” Sonnenberg writes, “a passionate, sudden sister who’d last a year, maybe.”

Although the Internet now makes it possible to maintain friendships that might have naturally sloughed off, Sonnenberg, like her mother, has a knack for forcing friendships to their conclusion. Her vivid prose is confessional and precise; she tackles her friendships with the same forcefulness, making a “sudden sister” out of women who often reject her when marriage, children or other obligations claim their time or when they change, no longer welcoming her bawdy conversation. One asks her, “Why are you sitting here, Susanna, telling me this, this, this unattractive story?”

Please click through to read the rest:

http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20130111-book-review-she-matters-a-life-in-friendships-by-susanna-sonnenberg.ece

I reviewed Bill Roorbach’s novel Life Among Giants for the Dallas Morning News. Here’s part of what I said: 

Life Among Giants

Bill Roorbach

(Algonquin, $24.95)

The characters in Bill Roorbach’s lush novel Life Among Giants are larger than life, some literally. He manages to make them real despite their outsize abilities.

The narrator, David “Lizard” Hochmeyer, a nearly 7-foot-tall star high school quarterback with the sensitive soul of a poet, is kicked off the team his senior year for refusing to cut his hair. He still lands a full ride to Princeton and becomes a backup quarterback for the Miami Dolphins. But what he really wants to do is own a restaurant and hang around with ballerinas.

That’s because the “world-famous ballerina” Sylphide lives in the mansion across from the house where Lizard grew up in Connecticut. She was married to an “even more famous husband, the English rocker Dabney Stryker-Stewart,” friend and equal to 1970s rock gods Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton. Stryker-Stewart died in a mysterious car accident, his body found at a distance from the car.

Lizard’s own roots are hardly humble. His beautiful and exacting mother, Barb, is a Michigan-raised social climber, whose country-club-tennis prowess earns her access to elite circles. His sister, Katy, becomes a tennis standout at Yale, and his dad is a loving but shady investment banker. Even Lizard’s high school girlfriend Emily becomes Sylphide’s protégé and world-famous in her own right.

Please click through to read the rest:

http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20121130-book-review-life-among-giants-by-bill-roorbach.ece

I have been a fan of Zadie Smith since her very first book, White Teeth. In addition to enjoying her brilliance and great sense of humor, we are the same age, so I love the pop cultural references in her book. In NW Smith refers to the ridiculousness of wealthy professionals becoming obsessed with The Wire, a TV series I adored, like all my fellow white people. (Mat Johnson once tweeted, “I wish I loved anything as much as white people love The Wire.” So true.)

Although perhaps 0.00000000001% of the number of people who have read Zadie Smith’s fiction have read mine, I still feel a writerly kinship with her. She’s interested in many of the same themes I explore in my fiction—such as race and class. I enjoy all kinds of writers without really relating to their subject matter, but Zadie Smith is one whose work I relate to through and through, despite the massive differences in our upbringings and backgrounds.

So I was champing at the bit to read NW, and happily I got to review it for Dallas Morning News. Like Jay-Z, I’m sure if I ever met Ms. Smith, I’d be moved to buy her a fish sandwich.

Here’s an excerpt from my review:

Zadie Smith invented a fresh structure for her fourth novel, ‘NW’

NW
Zadie Smith
(Penguin, $26.95)

By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor

Published: 14 September 2012 10:38 AM

In Zadie Smith’s innovative and moving fourth novel, she writes of one of the two main characters, “Leah is as faithful in her allegiance to this two-mile square of the city as other people are to their families, or their countries.” The same could be said of Smith, who grew up in the ethnically mixed working-class area in northwest London in which she sets NW.

This is a rich novel, as crammed with voices and layered with history and pop culture as is London itself. Smith’s flair for dialogue reaches a new height in NW, as she conveys the rhythms and diction of a variety of Londoners with wit and acuity. The characters revisit neighborhood landmarks as we follow them back and forth from childhood to a fraught period in their mid-30s. Leah thinks, “You live in the same place long enough, you get memory overlap.”

At its core NW is the story of two local girls done good. Leah Hanwell, a tall, pale redhead, and studious Keisha Blake, raised by her Jamaican single mother, are bonded forever when Keisha saves Leah from drowning (the “dramatic event”). They grow up best friends in the Caldwell estate, a low-income housing project.

Please click through to read the rest:

http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20120914-zadie-smith-invented-a-fresh-structure-for-her-fourth-novel-nw.ece?ssimg=713688#ssStory713689

High Country News just ran my review of an innovative memoir, Descanso for My Father, by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher. Fletcher grew up in New Mexico and then lived and worked as a journalist for many years in Denver. His wife is Tina Griego, a former columnist for the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post whose articles I’d never miss reading. The family recently moved to Virginia, where Candelaria Fletcher joined the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University. We in Colorado will miss their great writing that captures the spirit and the people of the West, but I’m sure we’ll be hearing more from both of them soon.

Candelaria Fletcher works in a form he calls “literary collage.” This technique, of piling images and scenes next to each other, was highly effective for his first memoir. Here’s a bit from my review:

Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life
By Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
147 pages, softcover: 
$14.95.
University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

When Colorado writer Harrison Candelaria Fletcher was almost 2 years old, his father, a pharmacist, died, leaving behind a wife and five children. His mother, who was 29 years younger than her husband, grew up in a Hispanic farming village on the Rio Grande, ‘a block away from his Route 66 drug store.’ ‘Following the advice of a child psychologist,’ Candelaria Fletcher writes, his mother ‘gradually erased his presence from our Albuquerque home,’ stowing his few remaining belongings in a closet.

Ever since then, Candelaria Fletcher has been searching for the parent he barely knew, using his skills as an investigative journalist to follow his father across the country. Descanso for My Father is the eloquent result of his quest, a collage of essays crafted with precision and grace. Together, they provide a full portrait of his father, Ray, and detail how his loss shaped his son’s life — a life that was marked by the boy’s own struggle to find his place as a pale-skinned biracial child.

Please click through to read the rest:

http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.15/a-parent-lost-and-found-a-review-of-descanso-for-my-father-fragments-of-a-life

People frequenly ask me for book recommendations, and the book I’ve been telling everybody about lately is Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins. Here’s a bit from my review of it which ran in High Country News today:

Beautiful Ruins
Jess Walter
352 pages, hardcover: $25.99.
Harper, 2012.

Beautiful Ruins, Washington author Jess Walter’s dashing sixth novel, spans two continents and five decades, creating a panoramic view of the lives it encompasses. The paths of its nine main characters intersect in places as various as Italy, Hollywood, Seattle, and Sandpoint, Idaho, in the course of this sweeping story about artists trying to create meaningful work in the midst of junk culture.

The novel opens in 1962 in Porto Vergogna, a minuscule coastal Italian town where young Pasquale Tursi carries on his late father’s business as the proprietor of the Hotel Adequate View. He receives few visitors apart from an American who comes once a year to scratch out a few pages of a novel about his experiences in World War II. But then beautiful actress Dee Moray arrives — on leave from the set of the movie Cleopatra — and Pasquale learns she has stomach cancer.

The book then shifts to present-day Hollywood, where a producer’s assistant, Claire Silver, encounters the now-elderly Pasquale, searching for the actress he met long ago. He arrives on the same day screenwriter Shane Wheeler comes to pitch his idea for a movie about the Donner Party, which Claire incredulously summarizes as,“An effects-driven period thriller about cowboy cannibals? Three hours of sorrow and degradation, all to find out the hero’s son is … dessert?” The three of them — joined by Claire’s boss, who worked on Cleopatra and feels guilty about his treatment of the actress — set out to find the elusive Dee Moray.

Please click through to read the rest:

http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.14/lights-camera-life-a-review-of-beautiful-ruins

The High Plains Book Awards finalists were announced today, and hip hop hooray, The Ringer is among them. My book is a finalist for the fiction award. There are a lot of great books by talented writers I’m fortunate to know in the running for awards. The other finalists in the fiction category are Robin Troy’s Liberty Lanes and David E. Hinton’s Kings of Colorado. I got to meet Robin at the Montana Festival of the Book last year, where we did a reading together, and I interviewed David back in the good old days for New West.

The Billings Gazette posted the complete list:

http://bit.ly/K4PLUv

I reviewed Deborah Copaken Kogan’s new novel The Red Book for Dallas Morning News. Here’s the beginning of my review:

The Red Book

Deborah Copaken Kogan

(Hyperion/Voice, $24.99)

Every five years Harvard alumni summarize their current lives for a volume known as “the red book,” distributed to all alumni. Deborah Copaken Kogan’s lively novel, The Red Book, concerns a group of friends from Harvard attending their 20-year class reunion. She weaves in fictional excerpts from red book updates to introduce her characters and track changes in their personal lives.