Tag: fiction
-
Middlemarch, Eliot (1872)
Middlemarch depicts a very particular people, place, and time: the English provincial middle-class of the 1830s. Eliot cares about detail. The speech of the characters, their behavioral decorum, the parsing of status and misfortune, even the physical details of habitat are described with such fidelity that the reader experiences a gradual change in focus. What…
-
The Corrections, Franzen (2001)
There are good reasons why The Corrections is talked about in the same breath as the great 19th-century Russian novels. The book has similar ambitions—to explore psychological truths and social dilemmas through detailing the inner lives of a family—and Franzen is an undeniably talented storyteller. But I can’t recall having been more depressed reading a…
-
My Brilliant Friend, Ferrante (2012)
The New York Times recently released a list of the 100 greatest books of the 21st century, as chosen by over five hundred writers and critics. Number one on the list—the putative greatest book, fiction or non-fiction, of the last twenty-four years—is Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. I don’t see it. The novel is a…
-
Wolf Hall, Mantel (2009)
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the first in her trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, chief advisor to the 16th century English king Henry VIII, is a rebuttal. Narrowly, it’s a rebuttal to A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt’s 1954 play (and later Academy Award-winning film) about Thomas More, Cromwell’s contemporary and greatest antagonist. In…