It’s more than the weather, the August doldrums: A dark mood seems to have descended on the city. You can actually see a sort of robotic anomie on the faces of people on the streets and in the subways, where New Yorkers have learned to take the psychic temperature of their neighbors. A guy in Read More
About a year ago, in a diner on eastern Long Island, I experienced one of those moments—to which writers seem especially prone—of rapt, unseemly over-interest in the people at the next table. Beautifully dressed for leisure, sleek and thin as whippets, the young, medicated-seeming mother and her slightly older husband were the sort of parents Read More
About a year ago, in a diner on eastern Long Island, I experienced one of those moments—to which writers seem especially prone—of rapt, unseemly over-interest in the people at the next table. Beautifully dressed for leisure, sleek and thin as whippets, the young, medicated-seeming mother and her slightly older husband were the sort of parents Read More
It’s more than the weather, the August doldrums: A dark mood seems to have descended on the city. You can actually see a sort of robotic anomie on the faces of people on the streets and in the subways, where New Yorkers have learned to take the psychic temperature of their neighbors. A guy in Read More
Look at Me , by Jennifer Egan. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 415 pages, $24.95
Given the sorry state of so much current fiction, the appearance of a novel with a narrative style that seems fresh, accurate, clear and inventive-especially when combined with a gift for observation and the delineation of character-is truly an occasion for calling Read More
The Virgin of Bennington , by Kathleen Norris. Riverhead Books, 256 pages, $24.95.
Plenty of bizarre conversations took place in the back room of Max’s Kansas City, but probably few more unlikely–or more touching–than the scene Kathleen Norris describes in her new memoir, The Virgin of Bennington . A hundred or so pages into this Read More
Radical Sanity: Commonsense Advice for Uncommon Women , by Elizabeth Wurtzel. AtRandom.com, 85 pages, $15.
All of us have times when we feel the need of sage advice, of that steadying hand gently guiding us toward the light at the end of the tunnel. My own dark several years of the soul spanned my early Read More
The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed , by Sara Gay Forden. William Morrow, 351 pages, $26.
The Gucci family, as everyone knows, accomplished something far more magical than turning the proverbial sow’s ear into the proverbial silk purse. They transformed the sow’s ear–or presumably some more tender part Read More
American Rhapsody , by Joe Eszterhas. Alfred A. Knopf, 432 pages, $25.95.
It’s a familiar scenario: You’re trying to watch a film, but all you keep hearing in your head is the pitch that got the movie made. Well, it’s sort of like Titanic crossed with Thelma and Louise , these two chicks hijack an Read More
The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America , by Jeffrey Rosen. Random House, 274 pages, $24.95.
Not long ago I asked a friend if he happened to have the address of a writer we both know. My friend didn’t, but said he could probably locate our mutual acquaintance with some help from the Read More
