As celebrities and other flimsy public figures have broadcast their opinions on the question of war with Iraq, wise policymakers and commentators generally respond with silence. With good reason-these self-absorbed, self-important faux experts tend to be willfully ignorant and astonishingly naïve. That they have a platform is laughable; that some Americans actually pay attention is Read More
A Brief and Risky Business:
Nine Who Nurtured Artists
The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired , by Francine Prose. HarperCollins, 374 pages, $25.95.
First, a confession: Sometimes I think that Clio, the muse of history, has come to earth in the human form of Condoleezza Rice. Consider 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
Blue Angel , by Francine Prose. Harper Collins, 314 pages, $25.
Inside every comic Francine Prose novel is a serious Francine Prose novel struggling to get out. As with the proverbial thin-man-inside-a-fat-man, this dynamic is in no way damaging to the host. There are no signs of fracture, no tears in the seamless skin. Read More
The excerpt from Jonathan Franzen’s forthcoming third novel that appears in the spring issue of Conjunctions brings to mind the 19-page essay that he wrote for Harper’s in April 1996. Many novelists, myself included, have never forgotten the Harper’s piece, “Perchance to Dream,” Mr. Franzen’s account of the obsolescence of the novel as a literary Read More
