Hannah Gersen

Review: Jack Holmes & His Friend

Photo: Christopher Street Liberation Day, 1971, via NYPL

Over the years, the novelist, memoirist, cultural critic and literary biographer Edmund White has been vocal about his decision to write from a gay perspective, for a gay audience. In the wake of the AIDS crisis, he became more firmly devoted to this audience, helping to found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and publishing his breakthrough autobiographical novel, A Boy’s Own Story, about growing up gay in the Midwest. Ironically, it was only as he began to focus more exclusively on gay themes that his work became known to straight audiences. In his recent memoir, City Boy, Mr. White wrote about the creative liberation that occurred when he realized, in the late 1970s, that he could create groundbreaking work simply by mining his own autobiography: “A straight writer, condemned to show nothing but marriage, divorce, and childbirth, might need a new formal approach or an exotic use of language. But a gay writer, free to record for the first time so many vivid and previously uncharted experiences, needed no tricks.”

Continued at The New York Observer

Review: The Art of Fielding

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding would make the perfect graduation present. That’s not to imply that one will necessarily outgrow this novel, only that it is preoccupied with the sort of questions most of us first grapple with in early adulthood. What are my ambitions? Who are my friends? What counts as success? The charm of this novel is that it approaches these concerns as earnestly as its college-aged characters do, but without the same angst. To put it another way, The Art of Fielding lacks pretension. With its short sentences, short chapters, and simple themes, The Art of Fielding is a novel unafraid to use what one character describes as, “those big little words: love, work, art.”

(continued at Tottenville Review)

Review: Then Again

(Photo by Annie Leibovitz)

In 1977, Dorothy Hall went to a screening to watch her daughter, Diane Keaton, star in a new Woody Allen film, Annie Hall. She wrote about the experience in her journal:

I only saw Diane, her mannerisms, expressions, dress, hair, etc, the total her. The story took second place … She looked beautiful … She chose her own clothes … It seemed real. Annie’s camera in hand, her gum chewing, her lack of confidence; pure Diane.

Three decades later, Ms. Keaton recalls her first screening of Annie Hall:

(continued at The New York Observer)

Review: The Ecstasy of Influence

For The New York Observer:

If Jonathan Lethem had gotten his way, his new book, The Ecstasy of Influence (Doubleday, 464 pages, $27.95), would be subtitled “Advertisements for Norman Mailer.” Both titles are borrowed from other writers: The Ecstasy of Influence is a play on literary critic Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, while the subtitle is lifted from Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. Mr. Lethem’s editor nixed the Mailer-inspired subtitle in favor of “Nonfictions, etc.,” which is more straightforward, but perhaps not as descriptive of this bursting-at-the-seams collection of essays, profiles, reviews, fictions and juvenilia. As its title suggests, the book explores Mr. Lethem’s many influences, literary and otherwise, but it does so in such a free-wheeling, frank and boisterous fashion that a nod to Mailer seems appropriate. At the very least, the collaged aspect of having one riffed-upon title jammed up against another would have hinted at the cut-and-paste extravaganza inside.

(Continued…)

Review: This Is Not Your City

For Ploughshares:

There are no small epiphanies in Caitlin Horrocks’s short stories, only huge, life-changing decisions. In her debut collection, This Is Not Your City, her protagonists commit crimes, seduce strangers, and, in the disquieting title story, cover up an accidental death. These stories take place in a variety of settings, from a small lake town in Michigan to a ship on the Baltic Sea, and often provide glimpses into little-seen communities and subcultures. “It Looks Like This” is set partially in Amish country, while “Steal Small” explores the lives of dog poachers in Missouri. In the collection’s final, heart-breaking story, “In the Gulf of Aden, Past the Cape of Guardafui,” Horrocks places her characters on a cruise ship, where she somehow manages to balance a plot concerning a pirate raid with a sensitive portrait of the parents of a mentally incapacitated child. (continued…)

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