It’s surely not Jay McInerney’s fault that the author of the hilariously unconvincing Amazon review of his new novel is none other than James Frey, whose name is now synonymous with unreliable. Mr. Frey claims to believe that The Good Life is Mr. McInerney’s best book since Bright Lights, Big City (1984), and also that Read More
Beautiful Despair. The great country-and-western singer-songwriter, Rodney Crowell, was passing through town on a bitter cold February day, and I got a chance to talk to him about “beautiful despair,” which is also the title of a song on his forthcoming album, The Outsider.
He’s one of the masters of that singular emotion, that elusive, Read More
Phillip Noyce’s The Quiet American , from a screenplay by Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, based on the novel by Graham Greene, and Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine belong to that category of the cinema much beloved by the once-dominant practitioners of O Brother, Where Art Thou? film criticism, which enthroned movies with a “message.” Read More
“Good Lord deliver us,” the incomparable Murray Kempton once
wrote. “Everyone seems to be talking about Alger Hiss again.”
That was 1978. That was after three decades of interminable,
tendentious arguments over the Alger Hiss case. And now, a quarter-century
later, good Lord deliver us (and this
time for real, please), they’re still
talking Read More
Wait a minute, I’m not finished. I was just getting started. I’ve got more awards to bestow for Bests of the Century. I was just warming up last month when I named Pale Fire Best English Language Novel of the Century. In this column, I’m going to address a category I’m particularly fond of: the Read More
Neil Jordan’s The End of the Affair , based on the novel by Graham Greene, captures on the screen almost all of the power and the glory one has experienced in the pages of one of the most magical and most deeply felt love stories in all of the world’s writings. I say almost, because Read More
