When Pride and Prejudice turned 200 years old last year, the Guardian ran a wonderful collection of short pieces about the main characters by a variety of writers, who said the sorts of thing that literary people say when they are out partying: Mr. Bennett is a bully, Elizabeth doesn’t … Read More
Category: fiction
“It was terribly hot that summer Mr. Robertson left town, and for a long while the river seemed dead.”
What should the first sentence in a great novel do? Set the tone, establish the location and perhaps introduce the main character? The first sentence in Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout does more than that. It gives us the dying river image, which prepares us for the idea … Read More
“The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted.”
Oh, how I love an unreliable narrator! Our quote is the first sentence of the novel, and it’s clearly a flat-out lie. (The strangest thing about anyone’s return from the dead is that it happened — of course people thought it’s strange.) So, if the main character tells us in … Read More
“The menu, like love, was full of delicate, gruesome things — cheeks, tongues, thymus glands.”
No writer can make me laugh harder but wince longer than Lorrie Moore. Here is a sample of her humor: “Mike’s friends, however, tended to be tense, intellectually earnest Protestants who drove new, metallic-hued cars and who within five minutes of light conversation could be counted on at … Read More
“We can’t chose what we want and what we don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth.”
At 771 pages, this is a long novel. Is it worth it? Many of the 57 commentators on the Kirkus review didn’t think so. However, I love the way Tartt develops big themes. And she has sentences that are works of art. The NY Times review, written by Stephen … Read More
“I felt that this was my last moment to reach out and understand something of the world.”
Peter Taylor, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Penn Faulkner Award, is virtually unknown today. In a 1985 review, the New York Times said: “His narrative method is to hover over the action, to digress from it, to explore byways and relationships, to speculate on alternative possibilities – … Read More
“It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind.”
What was the question? Was it profound? Shocking? Revealing? Turns out, it’s all of these, and it’s laced with British humor. The question was, “Do we need a cup of tea?” This comes next: “She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realize that my question had struck at … Read More
“We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time.”
These are the final sentences in Alice Munro’s collection of short stories, Dear Life, which won the Nobel Prize. I believe that the character is lying and that she wishes she could forgive herself. I’m sure that other readers have come to different conclusions. These stories are complex, with characters … Read More
“I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.”
“To think I believed you were charming. It turns out you’re just a writer.”
“No one was coming toward the house yet, but things wouldn’t stay the way they were much longer.”
When Ann Beattie met John Updike, he said “You figured out how to write an entirely different kind of story.” Her stories were “the” stories my English department discussed in the 1980s because they were so revolutionary. T. Coraghessan Boyle wrote in the New York Times, “Her stories are … Read More
“His strong point [was] his odd ability to fall feetfirst into the little pocket of someone else’s world for those few seconds.”
My favorite book of 2013 is about three grown-up siblings and their families, all of whom have one important thing in common: they aren’t where they wanted to be. They don’t feel at home in the choices that they’ve made. What’s remarkable about this novel is the way we see … Read More
“Even then I sensed this . . . would be at the core of my imagination for the rest of my life.”
This novel is a collection of beautiful sentences about self-discovery. For example: “It was during these days that I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge some men into a deep, dark, lifelong loneliness for which there is no cure.” (52) When … Read More
“They could tell it was Jun Do who’d picked which orphans ate first and which were left with watery spoonfuls.”
When Jun Do was a child living in an orphanage in North Korea, one of his responsibilities was to decide which of his peers would be punished. That was just the beginning. As an adult, he was often in the impossible position of trying to let the most innocent suffer … Read More
