Nonetheless, it’s useful to know what good writers are reading and thinking about, and if Oates the critic doesn’t always...
A seventh collection of the tireless Oates’s industrious literary journalism: 38 recent reviews and essays.
A grouping rather coyly titled “Not a Nice Person” includes understandably lukewarm considerations of the presently overrated Patricia Highsmith and the wildly uneven Sylvia Plath, a nicely reasoned defense of Willa Cather, and balanced assessments of Robert Penn Warren (whose classic All the King’s Men is, Oates cogently argues, in its “restored text” version a deeply flawed novel) and Richard Yates (whose downbeat stories have a saving intensity that seems to elude her). Oates is a generous and perceptive commentator on “Our Contemporaries, Ourselves,” notably E.L. Doctorow (whose City of God strike her as “that rarity in American fiction, a novel of ideas”); underrated British novelist Hilary Mantel; William Trevor (whose great strengths and frustrating weaknesses she deftly analyzes); and several writers (including Mary Karr, Alice Sebold, and Ann Patchett) of what Oates calls “the New Memoir: the memoir of sharply focused events, very often traumatic”). “Homages” include generic and only moderately interesting essays on Emily Brontë, Ernest Hemingway, and the painter Balthus—but also a welcome endorsement of Carson McCullers’s brilliant early fiction and a summary meditation on the complex, often misunderstood figure of heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali. Several concluding “(Re)Visits” look backward at Hawthorne, Thoreau, emergent major novelist Don DeLillo, Tod Browning’s 1931 film Dracula, and the aesthetic choices that shaped her own earlier books, lately revised and reissued. Throughout, Oates writes clearly and states cases persuasively—but does tend to burden reviews of individual books and writers with needlessly detailed contextual information (e.g., informing us that Ed McBain/Evan Hunter “virtually created” the contemporary police procedural).
Nonetheless, it’s useful to know what good writers are reading and thinking about, and if Oates the critic doesn’t always dazzle, she seldom disappoints.Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-077556-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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