David Grossman's New Novel is a Multigenerational Saga About Love and Loss
This article appeared in the New York Times MORE THAN I LOVE MY LIFE By David Grossman Translated by Jessica Cohen Like Aladdin and his...
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Daphne Merkin
The Laconic Verses
This article appeared in Book Forum. One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival by Donald Antrim DEPRESSION, FOR ALL THAT HAS...
Will We Ever Understand Addiction?
This article appeared in the New York Times. THE URGE Our History of Addiction By Carl Erik Fisher Our culture, ever on the lookout for...
The Books That Have Gotten Me Through the Pandemic
This article appeared in Vogue. As an omnivorous reader, I expected the start of COVID-19 to bring out all my high-minded readerly...
Roddy Doyle's Stories of Life in Lockdown
This article appeared in the New York Times. LIFE WITHOUT CHILDREN Stories By Roddy Doyle The act of pulling off good sentences, one...
The Cult of Saint Joan
This article appeared in the New York Times. In 1979, as a young and intrepid critic, I devoted my books column in The New Leader to Joan...
He Liked Having Enemies: The contested legacy of D. H. Lawrence
This article appeared in Bookforum BURNING MAN: THE TRIALS OF D. H. LAWRENCE BY FRANCES WILSON HAS THERE EVER BEEN A WRITER more reviled...
The Cant-Free Elegance of Jenny Diski’s Irresistible Mind
WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST DO WHAT YOU WERE TOLD? Essays By Jenny Diski I’ve never been quite sure what the phrase “an acquired taste” is...
The Afterlife: Revisiting Roth's Promise
PHILIP ROTH: THE BIOGRAPHY By Blake Bailey I SUPPOSE IT MIGHT BE SAID—and, in fact, has been said in one form or another since this...
Five Best: On Desire Selected by Daphne Merkin
What Endless Love By Scott Spencer (1979) 1. Before Scott Spencer’s novel was made into not one but two cheesy movies, it began life as a...
Red Comet: Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life
RED COMET The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath By Heather Clark What becomes a legend most? As suggested by the old...
A Very Lonely Business
Whenever I pick up a new book by a woman I check the author biography on the back flap to see whether she has children. I’m not entirely...
No Success Like Failure
From the wreckage of his life, Richard Yates salvaged a few good books Posthumous literary reputations are tricky affairs, as is the...
The Lady Vanquished
Jean Rhys articulated the plight of the abandoned woman Jean Rhys lived a hard-luck life and wrote, almost exclusively, about hard-luck...
The Upside of Anger
Claire Messud’s novel of a stalled woman artist From the outset, it’s been clear that Claire Messud has all the necessary equipment—a...
Behind the Green Baize Door
Two books explore England’s master-servant divide SERVANTS: A DOWNSTAIRS HISTORY OF BRITAIN FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO MODERN TIMES...
A Novel of the 'Post-Wounded Woman'
This is how much I liked Catherine Lacey’s début novel, “Nobody Is Ever Missing”: I read it over a summer weekend, mostly transfixed,...
So We Read On and Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers and Swells
Did the Jazz Age ever exist — apart from being a cultural construct, that is, a coinage credited to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and one that he...
The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Lévy
THE GENIUS OF JUDAISM By Bernard-Henri Lévy Translated by Steven B. Kennedy 240 pp. Random House. $28. What is one to make of...
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison
The idea that great psychic suffering is conducive to art—that mental illness and creativity are somehow intertwined—is a longstanding...
Writings & Reviews
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