Radish’s (A Grand Day to Get Lost, 2013, etc.) latest work of nonfiction is a collection of vignettes taken from her own life, from her self-conscious childhood to her days as wild child, hard-boiled reporter and devoted mother.
These stories offer a vast, eclectic array of experience, depicted with the grit and incisiveness of a journalist who’s covered brutal events such as domestic violence, murder and war. Radish’s prose is a joy—energetic, attitudinal, often hilarious and perfectly suited to the anecdotal form. Having met a man claiming to be Jesus, for example, Radish quips, “Well, I’m not dressed for this encounter.” Readers become well-acquainted with the author’s oft-espoused “fearless broad” philosophy, and she’s at her best when recounting experiences in which she takes center stage. In “The Little Girl and the Tomatoes,” for example, she describes a childhood job in which she picked tomatoes in stultifying heat and how it engendered her lifelong sense of tenacity. In “Paper Clips, Two-Sided Paper, My Penis Please,” Radish recounts, with equal parts dark humor and rage, attending the funeral of an editor who sexually assaulted her under the guise of mentorship. However, the essays about marginalized individuals are less convincing, as they present the people almost entirely through Radish’s own perception, projecting attributes, pasts and even afterlives onto them instead of describing their own lived experience. An encounter with writer Eudora Welty, for example, is less about the woman herself than about Radish’s visceral reaction to Welty’s presence and advice, and in “Soldier Boy,” the author recounts a brief encounter with a young soldier about to go to war, imagining a hypothetical trajectory of his life and a detailed scenario for his death.
A bold, rollicking work that often reveals more about the author than her subjects.
Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1940716435
Page Count: 240
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.
Gornick’s (The Odd Woman and the City, 2016) ferocious but principled intelligence emanates from each of the essays in this distinctive collection.
Rereading texts, and comparing her most recent perceptions against those of the past, is the linchpin of the book, with the author revisiting such celebrated novels as D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Colette's The Vagabond, Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris. Gornick also explores the history and changing face of Jewish American fiction as expressions of "the other." The author reads more deeply and keenly than most, with perceptions amplified by the perspective of her 84 years. Though she was an avatar of "personal journalism" and a former staff writer for the Village Voice—a publication that “had a muckraking bent which made its writers…sound as if they were routinely holding a gun to society’s head”—here, Gornick mostly subordinates her politics to the power of literature, to the books that have always been her intimates, old friends to whom she could turn time and again. "I read ever and only to feel the power of Life with a capital L," she writes; it shows. The author believes that for those willing to relinquish treasured but outmoded interpretations, rereading over a span of decades can be a journey, sometimes unsettling, toward richer meanings of books that are touchstones of one's life. As always, Gornick reveals as much about herself as about the writers whose works she explores; particularly arresting are her essays on Lawrence and on Natalia Ginzburg. Some may feel she has a tendency to overdramatize, but none will question her intellectual honesty. It is reflected throughout, perhaps nowhere so vividly as in a vignette involving a stay in Israel, where, try as she might, Gornick could not get past the "appalling tribalism of the culture.”
Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-28215-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.
This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground.
In terms of the calendar, Smith’s latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would “have coffee at Caffé Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead”; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person’s spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, “I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.” She refers to herself as the “poet detective,” and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. “I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges,” she writes, “the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost.”
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65768-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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