Entries categorized as ‘Book Reviews’
Reviewed by Andrew J Jepsen
McCullers is one of those authors whose prose seems strangely genderless, neither quite masculine nor feminine, who is neither ostentatious or austere and many of these stories are actually vignettes and brief character sketches where nothing much happens. In fact, some of these ’stories’ (McCullers may have been at the forefront of the Fast Fiction movement and never even known it) remind me of John Cheever – the same frankness, the same sorrow, the same pointlessness. An old Jew rides on a bus with a young hick who talks to him, before getting off the bus, no different than before. Some kids make a model airplane that doesn’t fly. A boy walks into a dinner and an old man tells him how love works. These are folk tales of the real sense – real people, real events that don’t signify if they don’t signify.
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Categories: Book Reviews
Tagged: Andrew Jepsen, Carson McCullers, Collected Stories
Reviewed by Andrew J Jepsen
The phrase I was searching for throughout “Sailor Song” was “wish fulfillment.” It’s difficult to read the protagonist, Ike Sallas, as anything but the same manhero that Kesey constructed in McMurphy of “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and, in that same vein, as really anything but a stand in for the agonized activist Kesey himself. I’m loathe to draw comparisons between authors and their subjects, but Ike Sallas is simply not a believable character, and if he’s just a construct, well, then I guess that’s the only option we’ve got.
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Categories: Book Reviews
Tagged: Andrew Jepsen, Ken Kesey, Sailor Song
By: Andrew J Jepsen
Discussed in this essay:
The Master’s Voice: Henry James’s curriculum vitae, by William H Gass. Harper’s Magazine. 7 pages. $1.41 (based on a year subscription)
As I opened William H Gass’s review of Sheldon M. Novick’s review of Henry James in the July, 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine, I had to stifle a groan of “Oh are we really going to navel-gaze for seven pages?” as I read William H Gass losing himself in and spinning off in a realm of self indulgent rhetoric while writing an essay ostensibly about Sheldon M. Novick’s biography of Henry James. In his review of the books, Gass blatantly ignored Novick and railed like an old man pissed on from a roof. He fixated on the curious minutia of James’s life such as some scholars’ attitude toward his possible homosexuality (“I had heard the gossip. The gossip was that [James was] a “hooray-he-as-a-gay-guy,” pooh-poohs Gass, dismissing it all as nonsense that didn’t get past Gass), James’s chewing habits, and in a tossed aside, blamed the vapidity, disquiet, dehumanization and alienation of our youth on text messaging.
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Categories: Book Reviews · Essays
Tagged: Ajjepsen, Andrew J Jepsen, Andrew Jepsen, Essay, Gass, Harper's Magazine, Harpers, Henry James, reviews, Satire, Sheldon Novick, William H Gass
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