American literature, American fiction, American novel, contemporary fiction, Classic fiction
More years ago than I wish to confess, when a friend was leaving the country to work abroad, I gave her my copy of On the Road. I had just finished the book and enjoyed it enough that I wanted to share it with another avid reader. She asked, “Why this book?” I answered,...
On Mars a group of android-slaves rebelled against their owners, stole a space ship, and came to Earth. Bounty hunter Rick Deckard must hunt them down and “retire them,” an euphemism for killing them. No doubt, you recognize this as the plot for the 1982 movie Blade Runner, an adaptation of Do Androids Dream...
“Laborious,” one Goodreads reviewed wrote. Another compared it to getting a “workout at a gym.” And a third called it “needlessly long.” I understand their feelings. I have to confess that I struggled with this novel. I struggled with it, even though this was my third reading and I knew what to expect. No...
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” Hemingway tells us, but John Wallace says, “The reading aloud of Huck Finn in our classrooms is humiliating and insulting to black students.” From the moment it was published, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn inspired both praise and condemnation. Despite...
Perhaps a novel written a hundred and fifty years ago about fictitious events that happened more than two hundred and fifty years earlier might seem irrelevant in our times. We have escaped our Puritan founding, haven’t we? But as I read The Scarlet Letter, I realized that it was not only still relevant,...
I have a personal policy that everyone I tell about it resents. If I read the book, and especially if I loved it, I won’t see the movie. I’m not sure why people resent this, except that it becomes the grounds for rejecting their movie recommendations. But I have no doubt that it’s the...
When you’re eighteen, rich, and have a month to kill in Beverly Hills, you have nothing to do but take drugs, have meaningless sex, and talk to your friends about nothing specific. At least that’s the situation Clay finds himself in during his Christmas break from college. He returns to Los Angeles from New...
Mysteries intrigue us and unsolved mysteries inspire us. As obsessed as we are with that age-old question, whodunit, we prefer not knowing, especially when the mystery is as shocking and gruesome as the murder of Elizabeth Short. In January 1947, Short was found in a vacant lot. Her killer had disfigured her face and...
Considering how long Dominick Dunne had been writing and the respect he had gained at it, I expected a better novel. I found the prose clunky, the dialogue stilted, and the plot uninteresting and loosely developed. I’m more forgiving about these issues with Too Much Money than normal, because it was Dunne’s final book....
There is a philosophy in this novel, but I fear I’m not smart enough to grasp it. So I come back to it every few years, read it again, and puzzle over what it is that I’m reading. What I find in its pages is a emotional pot simmering on the stove. It looks...
