Thomas Mallon on Harper Lee: “More troublesome than the dialogue, Lee’s narrative voice is a wildly unstable compound, a forced mixture—sometimes in the same sentence—of Scout’s very young perspective and a fully adult one. Phrases like ‘throughout my early life’ and ‘when we were small’ serve only to jar us out of a past that we’ve already been seeing, quite clearly, through the eyes of the little girl. Information that has been established gets repeated, and the book’s sentences are occasionally so clumsy that a reader can’t visualize the action before being asked to picture its opposite: ‘A flash of plain fear was going out of [Atticus’s] eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light.'”

Houston Chronicle: “‘When college is over, you’ll think about it for the rest of your life,’ he said Saturday. Grisham joked that adulthood is overrated, and said professional life is stressful and unhealthy. One solution, he said, is to stay in school.”

Let me set John Grisham, Esquire straight. The telltale sign that Jay Gatsby is one unbearably sad dude:

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”