My Review of William T. Vollmann's 'The Lucky Star' in NYTBR

In his new novel, William T. Vollmann riffs on such themes as bigotry, idolatry, gender fluidity, vulnerability, consent, resilience, and love—at length. I think Vollmann is a genius in so many ways, and his depth of compassion is extraordinary. But in this book, I fear the torrent of prose obscures what he’s trying to accomplish. An excerpt from the review:

Two-thirds of the way into the book, after hundreds of pages of tongues gliding, organs throbbing, nipples hardening, bodies rutting, lips opening and mouths guzzling, the narrator invokes a letter — apparently real, addressed to Vollmann from his longtime editor — saying: “To be honest, I do wonder whether some readers will simply tire of, for example, all the climaxing.” To be honest, this reader did. …

With each passing page, I was more likely to groan not from pleasure but from boredom. This applied to the climaxing, but also to the chatter: the gossip, the confessions, the barside bromides, the characters’ ceaseless whining and rehearsals of anxieties and slights. Although eliciting boredom may be the point — look, bonking can be as stultifying as working for the I.R.S.! — it’s not the strongest sell.

My Take on 'The Farm' in the NYT

Here’s my latest for the New York Times Book Review: a review of The Farm, by Joanne Ramos, a novel in which women offer up their bodies as baby-making factories—and things get complicated.

I was conflicted about the book, but happy when, during the writing, I realized I could quote my dear doula, who reminded me of the following during my second pregnancy: “Bodies are chaos.”

My Review of 'Insurrecto' in the NYT

I was thrilled to be asked by my old employer, the New York Times Book Review, to review the latest novel by Gina Apostol, Insurrecto. My dad’s side of the family hails from the Philippines, and many of Apostol’s preoccupations—about politics and colonialism, language and voice, truth in narrative, and split (or doubled) identities—are also my own.

For craft-minded readers: Apostol does some crazy-brilliant things with structure, voice, and point of view, all of which she touches on in this interview she gave to the Los Angeles Review of Books, which came out the day after my review was published. A snippet:

To read the novel, you have to locate the gaze — which can shift without much warning. It seems to be the soldier’s voice at first, for instance, then it’s really the gaze of the socialite photographer upon him, but actually there is that hint of everything being seen really through the eye of some script-maker, et cetera, et cetera.

My constraint was that I knew every gaze was mediated, usually by an actual piece of media. But I knew my reader would not be fully aware. It was fun to write! That was part of the novel’s structure — a kind of game with free indirect discourse (a technical matter I was working on), to which I added the destabilizing spin of moviemaking.

In the interview she also comments interestingly (and movingly) on humor and grief, the comedy in tragedy, the relationship between historical and personal trauma. In the review I’d wanted to write more on the undercurrent of grief running through Insurrecto, but I ran out of space. So I was glad to see Apostol expand on it here.

'The Subversive Copy Editor' Returns

Back in 2009, when my byline still matched my maiden name, I wrote a brief review of The Subversive Copy Editor, by Carol Fisher Saller, for the NYT’s old book blog, Paper Cuts (RIP). Now, Saller is back with a revised, slightly thicker edition that includes updated references, a couple of additional chapters, and an expansion of the chapter geared toward writers—should they be wise enough to pick up the book for themselves.

The writers’ chapter offers some excellent tips for self-editing, such as these on things writers often miss:

• Throat-clearing. Writer Richard Peck claims that when he finishes a novel, he throws out the first chapter without reading it and writes it anew. He reasons that when we begin a work, we’re rarely certain of where it will end. Revisiting the beginning after the end has emerged makes sense. This time it will be easier to eliminate unneeded windup verbiage.

• Personal tics. Most writers have a few pet words or phrases: decidedly, or by no means, or incredibly, or most important.* Ditto for favorite sentence constructions: “Not only X but Y” is popular. Once you identify your own foibles, they become more difficult to ignore.

* For the record, my biggest tic is the overuse of just—followed by an overreliance on em dashes. (See?)

I was immediately charmed by this book the first time I read it and continue to recommend it to anyone who asks, What are some good books on editing? Full disclosure: Since moving to Chicago I have had the pleasure of meeting Saller in the flesh. (Can you imagine? It’s like groupie : David Bowie :: copy editor : Carol Fisher Saller.) But even had I not met her, I’d still be pushing The Subversive Copy Editor on all the editors I know. What I said about the book last time remains true:

'I Hate Adverbs'

Cue the violins! In the latest issue of New York magazine, Christian Lorentzen offers a clever, thoroughly cranky rant on a matter of craft that bedevils many a writer. "I hate adverbs," he declares, and goes on to enumerate the reasons. Among them:

Anything an adverb does can almost always be done more elegantly by the adverbial deployment of the other parts of speech. Almost always more elegantly: in most cases with more elegance.

See what he's doing there? (Nudge nudge, wink wink.) Also:

An excess of adverbs in prose signals a general lack of vividness in verbs and adjectives. You might have to say someone ran swiftly or walked slowly, but you’d never have to qualify galloping or lumbering. The adverbs easiest to hate are the so-called sentence adverbs — also known as conjunctive adverbs. Writers who lean on the crutches of “moreover,” “accordingly,” “consequently,” and “likewise” are declaring a lack of confidence in the sequence of their own logic or a lack of faith in their readers’ ability to follow it. Deploying “indeed” is tantamount to saying, “I’ve just had a thought and, indeed, I’ve just had another.” Next time you come across the word “meanwhile,” ask yourself when else all this could have been happening. What is the adverbial phrase “of course” but a smug duo dropped in to congratulate writer and reader for already agreeing with each other. “Nevertheless,” “nonetheless,” and the atrocious “however” are symptoms of an anxiety over a proliferation of the word “but.” But you can never have too many helpings of “but,” and sound thinking will make hay of contradictions.

I give some version of this feedback to clients and writing students all the time. (We'll cover adverbs in the class I'm teaching in June-July, in fact.) Lorentzen rightly notes that adverbs cannot, should not, be banned from the language. Moderation is key. As is intention. In adverbs ... as in life?

Book Review: Eleven Hours, by Pamela Erens

Just in time for Mother's Day—my latest review for The New York Times Book Review, of a novel about childbirth (and much more). Spoiler: I liked it.

In Which Something I Wrote Is Actually Read

A few years ago, I wrote a short piece on Joan Didion for Nieman Storyboard's "Why's This So Good?" series. I'm tickled to learn it made Storyboard's list of the five most-read WTSGs of all time. I'm also completely convinced this had very little to do with me, and almost everything to do with the fact that the words "Joan" and "Didion" were in the headline.