Colson Whitehead’s third novel could be called a black comedy, if not for the unfortunate pun: This black comedy is partly about being black. It’s also about brand names. Branding and blackness run in very odd tandem, since one is a chosen process and thought to be superficial yet lingeringly consequential, and the other—also a Read More
This is a book that people will find cute and charming—or it’s a book they’ll find cloying and false and illiterate. Since it comes garlanded in endorsements from accomplished writers and a movie star, too (Lucinda Rosenfeld, Nell Freudenberger, Sam Lipsyte—and Claire Danes), I expect many reviewers to go for option No. 1 and Read More
This is a book that people will find cute and charming—or it’s a book they’ll find cloying and false and illiterate. Since it comes garlanded in endorsements from accomplished writers and a movie star, too (Lucinda Rosenfeld, Nell Freudenberger, Sam Lipsyte—and Claire Danes), I expect many reviewers to go for option No. 1 and not Read More
The inability to make a decision turns out to be a rich comic subject.
I think.
In any case, it’s the problem of Dwight Wilmerding, the likably indecisive narrator of Indecision. One may wonder why someone likable has to be saddled with such a name (though maybe not, coming from an author stuck with Read More
The inability to make a decision turns out to be a rich comic subject.
I think.
In any case, it’s the problem of Dwight Wilmerding, the likably indecisive narrator of Indecision. One may wonder why someone likable has to be saddled with such a name (though maybe not, coming from an author stuck with Kunkel), Read More
Whatever Makes You Happy, by Lisa Grunwald. Random House, 238 pages, $23.95.
This novel says New York in its first sentence, which is about the courtyard of the narrator’s childhood building, recognizably on the Upper West Side. The opening of the story pro-per, in the present time-”Lying in bed with my husband one Read More
