Oil! by Upton Sinclair
I had high hopes for Oil! by Upton Sinclair. Theses hopes rested in part on There Will Be Blood (2007), a movie based on the novel, a movie I loved. But the film, written and […]
Category Archives: The American Novel
The Spy Novel: Cooper’s The Spy
We all love a good spy novel. At least, I know I love espionage thrillers. I have already reviewed several on this blog, including Red Sparrow, The Rhythm Section, and Leaving Berlin. The spy has […]
Ladies’ Man by Richard Price
Something is broken in Kenny Becker’s life, but he doesn’t know what it is or how to fix it. At thirty, he’s stuck in a dead-end job, and he has mixed feelings about his relationship […]
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Edna Pontellier had followed the course of life laid out for women in the Turn of the Century America. She married young, and her choice of husband was a businessman with strong ambition and rising […]
The Reserve by Russell Banks
As you read a novel, you do not need to like the protagonists; in fact, it’s possible to hate the main characters and still enjoy the novel. You can sympathize with them, understand their problems, […]
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
Though I have a lot of good things to say about Blonde, I must confess it’s the novel that broke me. I read it as part of my ill-advised feature-writer series about Joyce Carol Oates. […]
Dune by Frank Herbert
Is Dune the perfect novel? Of course, perfection is what every piece of art—be it a painting, a sculpture, a poem, a song, a film, or a novel—strives to be. But what does it mean […]
Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
“The book can’t complete with the screen,” Philip Roth said in a 2009 interview with Tina Brown for The Daily Beast. “It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. it couldn’t compete with the television […]
Book Review: House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
The European conquest of the United States began in 1492, when Columbus dropped anchor off the coast of an island he named San Salvador. Historians often date the end of the conquest as December 29, […]
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
As a new nation, America lacks a national epic. We do not have an Iliad or a Gilgamesh Epic or a Beowulf to connect us to antiquity, to a time before written language, to the […]