In this morning’s daily New York Times, David Haglund has written a generous, perceptive, funny review of my novel Necessary Errors. His review begins with a riff on this classic, all-too-pertinent scene from Kicking and Screaming.
Category: Necessary Errors
The NYTBR, Kirkus, and Slate
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.
Wenceslas Square, from Můstek
A postcard from the 1930s of Wenceslas Square, Prague. The back of the postcard reads “V.K.K.V. 126.”
If this image were included in an extra-illustrated binding of the novel Necessary Errors, it might follow page 30. (For an explanation of extra-illustration, click here.)
Bookforum, Newsday, and Sassy Peach Book Blogger
Three new reviews of Necessary Errors: For Bookforum, Zeke Turner has written a thoughtful, generous review, calling the novel “a slow, beautiful look at the process of assembly, destruction, and revision specific to coming of age.” Mark Athitakis calls the novel “elegant and intellectually robust” in Newsday. And on her blog, a writer who goes by the moniker “Sassy Peach, Book Blogger,” writes:
Let me tell you about this novel. It is STUNNING. Capital S-T-U-N-N-I-N-G. Like someone took a stun gun, pointed it at my side, and fired every time I set down to open this novel.
So you can’t say you haven’t been warned.
A review, two interviews, an essay, and a meme
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.