Our Critic\'d5s Tip Sheet On Current Reading: Week of October 8th, 2007

The New York Observer, October 2nd, 2007

Commentary on the new Philip Roth novel (see page C18) has ranged from the ecstatic (in Newsweek, David Gates declared Exit Ghost “an ideal farewell” to Nathan Zuckerman—“at this point, Roth is everybody’s daddy”) to the lethal (Christopher Hitchens, in The Atlantic Monthly, airs the opinion that Mr. Roth “is now using his fiction, first to kill off certain characters and to shoot the wounded, and second to give himself something to masturbate about”). Smack in the middle—joining there a surprisingly mellow Michiko Kakutani—is novelist John Banville, writing in the London Review of Books (Oct. 4, $3.95). He offers an unusual, skeptical view of the novels Roth has written in the past two decades: “Roth’s work since The Counterlife has shown a marked artistic decline.

Too often in more recent books, such as Sabbath’s Theatre and The Dying Animal, what used to be passion has become mere stridency. Roth’s discovery of Death, which in the later work has largely replaced Sex as the driving obsession, has been in ways bad for him; it has made him by turns excitable and sullen, as young boys are during puberty.” And yet Mr. Banville has some nice things to say about Exit Ghost: “Despite its manifest flaws … this ‘desperate story of unreasonable wishes’ has an urgency to it, a sense of desperate measures precipitately entered on, that make it, at the least, an exciting read.” Almost as thrilling as the reviews.…

To judge from (Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions (Random House, $21.95), Steve Almond is anyway peculiar and possibly mad. And funny. His long, loopy essay on Kurt Vonnegut begins with this sheepish admission: “I read all of his books in high school and college, most of them six times, and I’m sure I walked around for a good number of years spouting little Vonnuggets of wisdom, as his followers so incessantly do.”

Jim Shepard’s talent is so flexible and various, the list of reasons to read him could stretch for pages. For brevity’s sake, I’ll put forward just one sentence, from the last story of his new collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Knopf, $23): “And when her mouth touched him, she smelled like a linen sheet in the sunshine.”