Volume 52, Number 13 · August 11, 2005
Love's Wreckage
By Lorrie Moore
Ideas of Heaven
by Joan Silber
Norton, 250 pp., $23.95; $13.95 (paper)
When the National Book Award nominations were announced this past autumn, they were greeted with a great amount of grumbling—grumbling that I began to feel was fueled in part by the national malaise presidential politics had caused to befall every conversation in the country. But grumbling nonetheless. The nominated books were criticized for having been written by relatively unknown women who all lived in New York City—though such a demographic fact might equally have been reason for celebration. (The choice of Elfriede Jelinek for this past fall's Nobel Prize for Literature was faulted too, not for her uninflected pessimism or the threads of caustic misanthropy that weave through her work, and which in fact group her with many other recent winners, but for her insufficient fame outside Vienna, which does not.)
Review, 3296 words
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