During this holiday week, The Common is presenting highlights from the past year. Today’s highlights come from “Reviews.”
Read Melinda Misener’s review of Townie by Andre Dubus III, here, and Sarah Malone’s review of NW by Zadie Smith, here.
AIDAN COOPER
A duck paddling in a pond is a memorial to the passage of time; winter snow doesn’t represent death nor sleep, but rather life at its most ferocious. With Cather, the world is flush with a force so powerful it can’t be predicted or contracted or even known, only guessed at and trusted in. A magic rushes from every stream, from every hog’s bark.
TERESE SVOBODA
This is the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York during the pre-Civil Rights era, the sticks. You’ve been there, but not with such generosity of spirit nor such precise sentences, which offer heft and clarity, and proceed their sinuous way down the page like one of that region’s rivers, weighted by the pull of print.
Review by JULIA LICHTBLAU
Frank weaves the lives and work of thirty writers who redefined the novel, the era, and themselves into a story, each in their own way struggling with how to write amid previously unthinkable possibilities unleashed by violence and technology on society, sexuality, and language.
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