Initially, I thought: how could a book about a man confined to a hotel for life have enough plot or character development for 450 pages? Yet this turned out to…
Drama
Leave the World Behind
April 19, 2021I took this novel’s advice and left my world behind one recent weekend. My family and I enjoyed a long weekend at a friend’s beach house. The long drive there…
The Great Believers
August 16, 2020Ambitious novel set in two different time periods–1980s Chicago during the AIDS crisis and 2015 in Paris–with characters, timelines and plots that converged, but sometimes in confusing ways. The novel…
The Turn of the Key
April 20, 2020In the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, this new novel by Ruth Ware seeks to revise and update Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw…
Normal People
February 8, 2020I affirm that Sally Rooney is a very clever writer, attuned to nuance of language and social behavior. How else would I be so compelled to read a novel about…
Rebecca
July 11, 2019I can’t believe I’ve never read this novel before. I’m sure I’m about to offend someone but I’ll just say it: Rebecca is such a Jane Eyre knock-off. And I’m such…
Winter Garden
December 27, 2018God save me from women writers who hate their female leads. There must be some term for this–oh wait, Adrienne Rich calls it male-identification. In her essay on “Compulsory Heterosexuality,”…
Choir Boy
November 18, 2018Reviews of the play call it a coming-of-age story, but it’s too brief a blip in time to really be a bildungsroman. The play is fast-paced, covering maybe a year…