In the Boston Globe, Jon Garelick has written a generous review of my novel, in which he notes that “Crain is his own meta-critic, making literary analysis a convincing part of Jacob’s narrative.”
A couple of months ago, in the spring, Rich Fahle conducted an interview with me about the novel at New York’s Book Expo, and Fahle’s new website, Bibliostar TV, has just released a video of the interview.
There’s a somewhat mixed review of my novel in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Aaron Hamburger writes that he wishes there were more of a plot and that I had written explicit sex scenes. He praises the “lovely, sure-handed prose,” however.
Over all, I’ve been tremendously fortunate in the critical reception of the book so far, in its quantity and its tone, and I remain very grateful for it.
For example, also today, Kirkus has published an interview with me by Jaime Netzer, who has done a very artful job of letting me ramble on while somehow pulling together a story about the role that the critical impulse plays in the writing of a novel.
And in Slate, Jane Hu has written a generous and thoughtful essay that looks into, among other things, the novel’s debt to Auden, its lack of a conventional plot, and the question of its relation to postmodernism.
Lauren Christensen, writing for Vanity Fair’s VF Daily, has noticed parallels between Necessary Errors and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and argues that the center of both books is in “the psychological events of each well-crafted character.”
In Actuary Lit, I am interviewed by Evan Bryson, who has read a lot of my old writing and is correspondingly dangerous. He asked about the differences between the novella “Sweet Grafton” and the novel Necessary Errors, and we talked about Spark, Isherwood, Sontag, Hollinghurst, and Fitzgerald.
For the Paris Review Daily, Anna Altman has asked me about D. W. Winnicott, L. P. Hartley, and the function of the precinct in TV shows.
I’ve written a guest essay for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program about whether the critical half of one’s brain is at risk of eating the creative half.
And my novel’s place in literary history is secure now that Maris Kreizman has mash-upped it into a meme for her site Slaughterhouse 90210.
In a real-time phone interview, Michelle Dean of Flavorwire asked me whether I’ve written a flâneur’s novel and wondered how obsessed I am with the nineteenth century. Also recently published were two email-mediated Q&As: The Brooklyn Daily Eagle asked me about my neighborhood and my favorite Brooklyn authors, and I told CBS News that the answer to their question about my reading habits was classified.
Two interviews with me went online today. At the Daily Beast, I explain, among other things, why trading on a scholarly reputation in the real world is like trying to spend poker chips at the grocery store. And in a joint interview conducted by Jane Hu for Pacific Standard, Choire Sicha and I talk about defamiliarization, lost time, and how to use pagers to let your friends know which bar you’ll be at.
