I intended to link to this earlier, but it seems that Daniel Mendelsohn has a new hobby: responding at length to anyone who invokes his name. A post on Barking Kitten caused Mendelsohn to take offense to Ms. Kitten’s use of a commonplace expletive expressing the frustrating divide between print and online critics. Barking Kitten followed up with another post, hoping that the conversation doesn’t “devolve into a flame war,” with Mendelsohn cheerily announcing that he’s happy to “debate this point in a serious medium, and at length.” Mendelsohn has remained silent. Perhaps he still doesn’t view the Internet as a serious medium because some of us use Dell laptops. (For the record, Mr. Mendelsohn, my laptop is a Toshiba. So hopefully this disqualifies me from any misinterpreted broad brushes. I’m game, as time permits, to discuss “the novel as a genre that has reached its end.” And isn’t the novel a medium and not a genre?)
Does Daniel Mendelsohn Spend All His Spare Time on Technorati?
– April 1, 2007Posted in: mendelsohn-daniel
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (