Chamber Four

Nicole Krauss was recently named one of the “20 Under 40” writers in the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue. After reading The History of Love, it’s easy to see why. This is a beautifully crafted, multifaceted novel about love, survival, and deceit. The writing is consistently strong across a number of distinct voices, each one funny and lyrical without being indulgent. It’s a pleasure to read, and a pleasure to know that such a talent is at work today.

I didn’t know much about Bernard Malamud before I read The Fixer. I’d heard his name before, but that was where it ended. Not one of his books appeared on any syllabus in any class I took in undergrad or in graduate school, and only one person ever recommended him to me. So now I’m a little miffed that I’ve only just discovered him. How did I miss this? Forget that Malamud won a couple of National Book Awards and the Pulitzer, forget that there’s a PEN award named after him, this is just some of the best prose I’ve ever read. His name belongs next to Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth, and The Fixer belongs next to some of the most important books of the 20th century.

For a challenging read, this book is full of simple pleasures. The writing is excellent, and the plot is surprisingly suspenseful considering how much of the future it reveals to the reader. After introducing a number of characters and story lines, the novel manages to draw all its disparate threads into a tragic climax and resolution. The Known World is worth reading and rereading, and then maybe rereading again. It takes a little work, but the effort yields rewards, and the rewards are abundant.

A Man Without a Country was the last book Vonnegut published before he died in 2007. (Two more collections, one of essays, one of stories, have appeared posthumously.) Every piece conveys a sense of the terminal, of a man near the end looking back for all the hope and insight that his life could possibly offer others. His pessimism over the state of the world is as unabashed as his basic faith that better things are still possible. He finds that humanity’s potential survives in willful acts of rebellion, like reading books.

Author: Ian McEwan 2007, Jonathan Cape Filed under Literary C4 Ratings…..out of 10 Language….. 7 Entertainment….. 7 Depth….. 6 I had mixed feelings about McEwan when I started Enduring Love.  I hesitated to pick it up because Atonement had left such a mixed impression on me.  Right after I finished it, I found that novel [...]

Reading at times like a western romance, at others like a hardboiled thriller, and finally as a modernist family tragedy, this epic offers a stylistic survey of a century of American letters. The prose is simple, rarely calling attention to itself, but always worth a little further consideration. The sentences unwind, like the narrative, slowly, leading to observations about memory that redeem the long road you took to get there.

Theoretically, a firm will maximize profits by producing to the point where the marginal cost of one more unit is equal to the marginal revenue generated by that unit. If we assume MC = 0, then a firm will maximize its profits where MR = 0. Beyond this point, it could sell more copies, but only at lower prices and a net loss to total revenue.

When I read last January that J.D. Salinger had died, that’s where my mind went first, not to Cornish, New Hampshire and his forty five years of literary silence, not to the vault of unpublished works we’re all crossing our fingers for, but to a stuffy room I last saw twelve years ago. It was a hot day near the end of the school year. The chair was upholstered in a heavy fabric that made me sweat. There was no clock on the wall, and I hardly moved for hours.

Put aside everything you’re doing and read The Emigrants, by W.G. Sebald, immediately. (See the other entries in this series here.) I was waiting for a professor of mine who was meeting me for lunch.  He was running a few minutes late, but I hardly noticed or cared.  I had The Emigrants open in front of [...]

Here’s the fourth installment of our Best Books of 2009 series, all about nonfiction. Keep up with the rest of the series here. And now for something a little different… Yes, the books I’m about to recommend all came out this year (at least in paperback), and, yes, I can absolutely recommend these books to [...]