This collection of essays by hot novelist Wallace (Infinite Jest, 1996, etc.) is sometimes tiresome but often truly rewarding.
Wallace is a fine prose stylist of the post-Beat school. His long sentences overflow with prepositional phrases; commas are scarce. At his best—which is to say, about half the time here—Wallace writes with an intensity that transforms rambling reportage into a sui generis mode of weird philosophizing. He makes deft use of footnotes to pile up insights beneath the flow of his main line of thought. Especially brilliant is the collection's opening essay, in which Wallace looks back on his childhood experiences as a Midwestern junior tennis star through the lens of his collegiate obsession with mathematics. The tennis world, treated at length in Infinite Jest, resurfaces in a sensitive profile of rising American player Michael Joyce. Otherwise, Wallace's best work comes in two pieces that originally appeared in Harper's: a ferocious investigative report on the culture of luxury cruises, and the record of another carnival voyage, this one a trip to the Illinois State Fair. A book review competently discusses literary-theoretical debates over the death-of-the-author thesis. Elsewhere in the volume, Wallace takes determined dives into banality. A more judicious, albeit less focused, effort finds Wallace on the set with filmmaker David Lynch, whom he presents as a contemporary artistic hero. A sprawling meditation on television and contemporary fiction lays out many intriguing theories, but its main point, that TV irony snares rather than liberates viewers, doesn't make news. At his best, the exuberant Wallace amazes with his “Taoistic ability to control via noncontrol.” But—to continue quoting from his opening tour-de-force, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley''—eschewing discipline exacts a price: “Force without law has no shape, only tendency and duration.''
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-91989-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An effective, in-depth evaluation of the life and work of the master movie mogul. One increasingly circulated variation on the auteur theory holds that certain remarkable producers, like Zanuck, have had a profound shaping influence on the movies they oversaw. But even in these terms, Zanuck enjoyed a remarkable, perhaps unique career. With close to 1,000 movies to his credit, he painstakingly crafted (working at an extraordinary level of detail) an unprecedented string of noteworthy—and usually successful—films, from All About Eve to The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. As Custen (Performing Arts/CUNY, Staten Island) notes, Zanuck ``would not give up the belief that although filmmaking was a collaborative enterprise, ultimately he and he alone possessed the judgment to successfully run the machinery of storytelling and to regulate the enterprise surrounding it.'' Zanuck was also responsible for any number of cinematic milestones. From the first major talkie, The Jazz Singer, to the first gangster movies, to Cinemascope, he had a sixth sense for surprising the public with its own unsuspected wants. As Custen demonstrates, Zanuck, an artiste among businessmen, was quite unlike any of the other men who ran studios. He came to Hollywood during the Silent Era, vaguely determined to be a writer. His real break came with his creation of the Rin Tin Tin series. From there he giddily ascended to the control of his own studio at the age of 31, a position he maintained until he was in his 50s, when in the fit of a middle-age crisis he moved to Europe and pursued a peripatetic and priapic existence, producing occasional movies as the mood took him. While Custen's story has great legs, his writing suffers from feet of clay—he can't resist constantly repeating himself. Nonetheless, a significant reappraisal of a major, often neglected, moviemaker. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-465-07619-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
Relevant but reductive.
In a three-volume set, Klees boils down an estimable collection of legend, lore and literature in an attempt to make classic writings relevant to today.
In composing his new anthology, Klees retells (often in truncated form) some 110 well-known stories. Each twice-told tale is accompanied by a succinct moral that delivers to the reader in quick strokes what the author believes to be the tale’s ethical content. In the process, he brings together a wide-ranging and fascinating variety of stories that draw upon the mythology of many nations and cultures, from Native American lore (“The Legend of Hiawatha”) to biblical myth (the story of Job) to more modern prose (Twain’s Tom Sawyer). Most frequently, Klees simply paraphrases extant material–a sometimes dubious technique given that he pulls from some of the most enduring literature in history. However, his summaries are largely successful, thanks in no small part to a levelheaded narrative style. The author never tries to outdo his lofty predecessors, and is more likely to cleave closely–and sometimes with obsessive care–to their prose than skip out in flights of fancy. Many readers might agree with the collection’s implied thesis–that much literature and legend carries real moral weight. However, there is something oddly reductive about the project. To suggest that the some of the greatest stories ever told can be distilled to a pithy ethical statement seems simplistic and perhaps naïve. Take, as only one example, Klees’s “moral” for Leo Tolstoy’s beautifully nuanced short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”: “Greed is not a desirable trait. Blatant greed can be death of you.” Does the author really need to trot out the greatest Russian author of all time to deride avarice? And does such a précis do justice to what Joyce considered the best story ever written? It seems unlikely.
Relevant but reductive.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-891046-21-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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