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Joseph O’Neill, whose novel Netherland is this year’s recipient of the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award, has written a piece on Flannery O’Connor for the recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly (using Brad Gooch’s biography, Flannery: A Life, as the occasion). O’Neill describes O’Connor’s writing as “unfairly” and “wickedly” good: The narrating third person hovers in an [...]
reviewed by John Murphy There is something appropriate about David Lodge writing on the ruefully comic trials and tribulations of deafness. He is a master chronicler of the seriocomic frustrations of daily life, whether it be the sexual frustrations of young Catholics post Vatican II in How Far Can You Go, or the family frustrations [...]
by Ian McEwan reviewed by John Murphy Ian McEwan has built his reputation on elegant sentences describing horrific events: the abduction of a child, an out-of-control air balloon, an imagined rape, a break-in. In novels like Enduring Love, Atonement, and Saturday, these are personal calamities, domestic disasters, that burst lava-like from the dormancy of dailiness. [...]
reviewed by John Murphy How Fiction Works is a presuming title for a slim little book, made more conspicuous by a chapter called “A Brief History of Consciousness.” Oh, is that all? But the book’s author is James Wood, the New Yorker’s perspicacious literary critic, and his Preface quickly allays any fears of gassy pretension [...]
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