Book Reviews

A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz Pollard, by Laura Beatty Chatto & Windus Inside the Whale, by Jennie Rooney Chatto & Windus Slaughterhouse Heart, by Afsaneh Knight Doubleday AFraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz, was one of two debut novels on the Booker shortlist — and is, one could argue, a more distinguished offering than the other debutant, which won. A rambling and hilarious tale about perpetual failure, it takes the form of an immense anecdote from a father, Martin Dean, to his son, Jasper. Martin has lived his life in the shadow of his brother, Terry, Australia’s most notorious (and oddly popular) criminal. Terry began life

There’s something awful about a bad review. By which I mean, one can sometimes feel rather sorry for the poor writer suffering under a prolonged and vicious barrage (one thinks of some of Dale Peck’s screeds in the New Republic for instance) that leaves him – and by its end, the reader too – shell-shocked. All that time and effort spent, just so some hack bastard can tear it to pieces for the (undoubted) entertainment of bastard readers who weren’t going to buy the bastarding book anyway. On the other hand, sometimes the author is Alastair Campbell. Fair game, in other words. And, to be honest, Peter Kemp’s Sunday Times

Chesterton refuses to go away. You may think he should have done so. Orwell tried to show him the door: Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. In the last 20 years of his life … every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. Given that Orwell asserted that everything he himself wrote was intended to advance the cause of Democratic Socialism, I’m not

Every new biographer of Shakespeare walks splat into the same old problem. What to say? Since he can’t tell us anything we don’t know, he must either tell us things we do know or things we don’t need to know. Jonathan Bate’s ingot-heavy volume announces, in its lackadaisical title, an intention to take all possible routes and to examine not just Shakespeare’s ‘life’ but his ‘world’ and ‘mind’ too. Where Bate offers facts he is sound, but he tends to theorise excessively and he devotes whole chapters to stimulating irrelevances like Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech of 1588 and the Earl of Essex’s botched coup of 1601. Like any sane earthling, Bate

More jobs Americans won’t do: write their own novels. Mind you, I wrote this post, so I’m in no position to carp or quibble. Still, this is ingenious: Admit it. Certain things make you desperately unhappy, and you don’t know why–the Sbarro at the mall, the taste of Jolly Ranchers in winter, the woman in the Buick station wagon you saw at the Kwik Trip, the Food Network after ten p.m. In 100 words or less, please answer the question, “What makes you so unhappy?” in the comments field below. Selected answers will appear in Dean Bakopoulos’s new novel, My American Unhappiness, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in late 2009

Reviewing Thomas Frank’s new book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, last week, Michael Lind wrote: But “The Wrecking Crew” is a polemic, not a dissertation. With rare exceptions like John Kenneth Galbraith, conservatives — from Juvenal and Alexander Pope to H. L. Mencken, Tom Wolfe and P. J. O’Rourke — have been the best satirists. In Thomas Frank, the American left has found its own Juvenal. Consider his update of a 1945 civics primer, “We Are the Government,” which followed the cheerful wanderings of a dime that paid for a variety of enlightened New Deal regulations. In Frank’s contemporary version, the dime travels from a private government contractor to