I interviewed him for Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair over coffee in the lobby of the Royalton, in August 1990. He was in town to push a book, of course—he always had a book to push! I forget which. It was the height of Vanity Fair and of the Royalton as the company cafeteria, and my Read More
There is a spookiness about athletic genius, a strangeness that resides in subtle contrasts. Why, amid others similarly gifted, does one competitor give us goose bumps?
You can talk all you want about stats, break down the biomechanics till the cows come home. Sportswriters used to rhapsodize about Ted Williams’ extraordinary vision, as did Williams Read More
It happens every August: The month drags along, too long, too long, tourists swarm the city, cicadas drone in the suburbs, fist fights break out in the Hamptons over a Sunday Times … until, suddenly, at the end of the month, the U.S. Open pops out of nowhere, to wake us up and yank us, Read More
One opened The New York Times expectantly, two days after Saul Bellow’s death, ready for the Op-Ed tributes that seemed as certain to appear as The Times itself: Surely one or more of American literature’s surviving phallocrats, a Mailer or a Roth or an Updike, would contribute a brief but feeling essay, hastily composed yet Read More
The Master , by Colm Tóibín. Scribner, 352 pages, $25.
In his new novel, The Master , the Irish writer Colm Tóibín has undertaken a triply difficult task. Historical fiction poses one set of challenges, fiction about fiction-writers poses another. To attempt a novel about no less a figure than Henry James might Read More
The Scarlet Letters , by Louis Auchincloss. Houghton Mifflin, 177 pages, $24.
“They will come no more, / The old men with beautiful manners.” So said Ezra Pound in 1915, and history has brought us to a point where, one feels, it must really be true. And so-in a post-9/11, BlackBerry-handheld, 1,000-channel, Jonathan Franzen and Read More
Venus Envy: A Sensational Season Inside the Women’s Tour , by L. Jon Wertheim. HarperCollins, 225 pages, $25.
Why would L. Jon Wertheim write a book about the women’s tennis tour, a group top-heavy with brilliant and fascinating players, and give it the sexy but ultimately misleading title Venus Envy ? I must begin my Read More
Bellow: A Biography , by James Atlas. Random House, 686 pages, $35.
Writers’ lives are boring, the axiom goes. Maybe someone should have come up with a corollary about great writers, whose lives often are a little too interesting for comfort.
Why should this be? There is a kind of monstrosity to literary greatness. Read More
It happens every August: The month drags along, too long, too long, tourists swarm the city, cicadas drone in the suburbs, fist fights break out in the Hamptons over a Sunday Times … until, suddenly, at the end of the month, the U.S. Open pops out of nowhere, to wake us up and yank us, Read More
The Human Stain , by Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin, 361 pages, $26.
Once, over a staticky radio in a bouncing taxi on a back road in Egypt, I heard what I could only guess to be a concert by one of the country’s star vocalists. On and on, the man yodeled and keened, winding gorgeous Read More
