Though only the first act of Denis Johnson’s Angels takes place in transit, the book has the feel of a road novel—specifically, an American road novel. The story is straightforward: Two people, Jamie Mays and Bill Houston, meet aboard a Greyhound. One is in flight from an unfaithful . . . . Continue Reading »
The Golden Bowl was Henry James’ final novel—and it remains the most morally challenging of his tales. The 1904 book tells the story of an American heiress named Maggie Verver who marries Amerigo, an Italian prince. But she is deceived about Amerigo’s past love affair with Charlotte . . . . Continue Reading »
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 247 pp. $23. Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, published in 1981, is an extraordinary work of art, and many readers have waited impatiently for Robinson to publish a second novel. I’m among them, although I’ve waited more in dread than . . . . Continue Reading »
It is a timeworn literary conceit, but some writers seem to be several people. There always exists some disparity, of course, between writers and their work. Yet a kind of multiple personality disorder keeps turning up in writers—and writers with a religious bent seem particularly susceptible, . . . . Continue Reading »
Frank Schaeffer’s latest book, a novel, provides many signs that the author has at last found his genre. Living in the shadow of his father, Francis Schaeffer, ardent Calvinist and self-proclaimed missionary to the fundamentalist intelligentsia, the young Schaeffer grew up in the . . . . Continue Reading »
Ron Hanen’s Mariette in Ecstasy is a haunting, enigmatic novel that is almost impossible to categorize, and it represents a radical departure from Hansen’s previous work. His first two novels, Desperadoes and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert . . . . Continue Reading »
The Book of J translated from the hebrew by david rosenberg interpreted by harold bloom grove weidenfeld, 340 pages, $21.95 The J of the title was discovered in 1711 by Henning Bernhard Witter, an obscure Lutheran pastor of Hildesheim, so obscure, in fact, that his role in the naming of this source . . . . Continue Reading »
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