ny times book review book

The Book Review

• UPDATED BIWEEKLY

The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

What It's Like to Write a New John le Carré Novel

The works of John le Carré are among the most beloved spy thrillers of all time. So it was a perilous task that author Nick Harkaway, one of le Carré's sons, set out for himself. On this week's episode, Harkaway discusses how he picked up the torch from his father, who died in December 2020, to write a new tale starring George Smiley, the Cold War spy who has appeared in more than a half dozen novels.

Sally Rooney's "Intermezzo": Our Book Club Conversation

Sally Rooney is a writer people talk about. Since her first novel, “Conversations With Friends,” was published in 2017, Rooney has been hailed as a defining voice of the millennial generation because of her ability to capture the particular angst and confusion of young love, friendship and coming-of-age in our fraught digital era. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses “Intermezzo,” her fourth and latest novel, with his fellow editors Joumana Khatib, Sadie Stein and Dave Kim.

OCT 26 • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

Two Horror Authors on the Scary Books You Should Be Reading

Halloween is just around the corner, so we turned to two great horror authors — Joe Hill and Stephen Graham Jones — for their recommendations of books to read this season.

OCT 18 • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

The Ezra Klein Show: Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie's "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder," has been nominated in the nonfiction category as part of this year's National Book Awards, which will take place in mid-November. This week, we are running Rushdie's conversation with Ezra Klein from earlier this year.

OCT 11 • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

Stanley Tucci on His Year in Eating and a Look at the National Book Awards

The actor-director-producer Stanley Tucci is also, famously, an avid eater. He explored his enthusiasm for food in his 2021 memoir “Taste,” and now a food diary, “What I Ate in One Year." In this week’s episode, Tucci discusses his new book with host Gilbert Cruz and talks about bad meals, his food idol and his path to tracking a year’s worth of eating. Gilbert also chats with The Book Review's Joumana Khatib about the National Book Award finalists in fiction and nonfiction.

OCT 4 • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

Jean Hanff Korelitz on "The Sequel"

The writer discusses her follow-up to her best-selling 2021 novel “The Plot.”

SEP 27 • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

Book Club: 'The Hypocrite,' by Jo Hamya

Jo Hamya’s novel “The Hypocrite” follows a famous English novelist as he watches a new play by his daughter, Sophia, in London. The lights go down in the theater, and immediately the novelist realizes: The play is about him, the vacation he took with Sophia a decade earlier and the sins he committed while they were away. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with editors Joumana Khatib and Lauren Christensen.

SEP 20 • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

The Fall Books We're Looking Forward To

This weekend marks the official start of autumn, so what better time to take a peek at the fall books we’re most excited to read? On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz chats with Joumana Khatib and Anna Dubenko about the upcoming season of reading and the books on the horizon that they’re looking forward to most eagerly.

New York Times Podcasts

Shows with Subscription Benefits

This is what the news should sound like. The biggest stories of our time, told by the best journalists in the world. Hosted by Michael Barbaro and Sabrina Tavernise. Twenty minutes a day, five days a week, ready by 6 a.m. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

• 4.4 (98948)

Each Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation on something that matters. How do we address climate change if the political system fails to act? Has the logic of markets infiltrated too many aspects of our lives? What is the future of the Republican Party? What do psychedelics teach us about consciousness? What does sci-fi understand about our present that we miss? Can our food system be just to humans and animals alike? Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 4.5 (10420)
• SOCIETY & CULTURE

“The Run-Up” is your guide to understanding the 2024 election. Host Astead W. Herndon talks to the people whose decisions will make the difference. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

“Hard Fork” is a show about the future that’s already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

For 20 years, the Modern Love column has given New York Times readers a glimpse into the complicated love lives of real people. Since its start, the column has evolved into a TV show, three books and a podcast. Each week, host Anna Martin brings you stories and conversations about love in all its glorious permutations, dumb pitfalls and life-changing moments. New episodes every Wednesday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

Thoughts, aloud. Hosted by Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat and Carlos Lozada. Every Friday, from New York Times Opinion. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Subscribe via The NYT app to access past episodes.

Hosts & guests, gilbert cruz, stanley tucci, george saunders, sarah jessica parker, min jin lee, colson whitehead, ratings & reviews, hope you can reconsider the recent changes.

Lion's Ridge

Very disappointed that you have taken out all the old episodes. I have a shared subscription and can only see the latest 3 episodes. Hope you can reconsider this decision.

Hosts audio quality is painful

allofthepodcasts

I love the content of this podcast, but the mic for the host must be of poor quality. It’s painful to listen—almost like a dull buzz. So unlike other Times podcasts.

Was a Must Listen for Book Lovers

Updated: can't believe you put all the past episodes behind a pay wall. Such a disappointment that you would go for the money grab. Instead of a subscriber, you have actually lost a listener. Only discovered a few months ago but I'm addicted. Great variety of shows between interviews, lists, spotlights, "what we are reading." The only problem is after every episode my "To-Read" book list grows and grows and I'm going to need to live to 105 to finish it.

Disappointing

I hope the reviews are being taken into consideration since there is a consensus that the editor of the book review is not a good podcast host. This podcast has been beloved for so many years. Please do something to improve it and bring back the quality of talent that we have enjoyed for so long. NYT can do better than this.

Information

• Channel The New York Times
• Creator The New York Times
• Years Active 2006 - 2024
• Episodes 512
• Rating Clean
• Copyright © 2023 The New York Times Company
• Show Website The Book Review
• Provider The New York Times Company

More From The New York Times

Updated 09/12/2017

Updated 02/03/2017

Updated Weekly

You Might Also Like

Updated Semiweekly

Updated Daily

Updated Monthly

Updated Biweekly

To listen to explicit episodes, sign in.

Stay up to date with this show

Sign in or sign up to follow shows, save episodes, and get the latest updates.

Africa, Middle East, and India

• Brunei Darussalam
• Burkina Faso
• Côte d’Ivoire
• Congo, The Democratic Republic Of The
• Guinea-Bissau
• Niger (English)
• Congo, Republic of
• Saudi Arabia
• Sierra Leone
• South Africa
• Tanzania, United Republic Of
• Turkmenistan
• United Arab Emirates

Asia Pacific

• Indonesia (English)
• Lao People's Democratic Republic
• Malaysia (English)
• Micronesia, Federated States of
• New Zealand
• Papua New Guinea
• Philippines
• Solomon Islands
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• France (Français)
• Deutschland
• Luxembourg (English)
• Moldova, Republic Of
• North Macedonia
• Portugal (Português)
• Türkiye (English)
• United Kingdom

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Antigua and Barbuda
• Argentina (Español)
• Bolivia (Español)
• Virgin Islands, British
• Cayman Islands
• Chile (Español)
• Colombia (Español)
• Costa Rica (Español)
• República Dominicana
• Ecuador (Español)
• El Salvador (Español)
• Guatemala (Español)
• Honduras (Español)
• Nicaragua (Español)
• Paraguay (Español)
• St. Kitts and Nevis
• Saint Lucia
• St. Vincent and The Grenadines
• Trinidad and Tobago
• Turks and Caicos
• Uruguay (English)
• Venezuela (Español)

The United States and Canada

• Canada (English)
• Canada (Français)
• United States
• Estados Unidos (Español México)
• الولايات المتحدة
• États-Unis (Français France)
• Estados Unidos (Português Brasil)
• 美國 (繁體中文台灣)

Spotify is currently not available in your country.

Follow us online to find out when we launch., spotify gives you instant access to millions of songs – from old favorites to the latest hits. just hit play to stream anything you like..

Listen everywhere

Spotify works on your computer, mobile, tablet and TV.

Unlimited, ad-free music

No ads. No interruptions. Just music.

Download music & listen offline

Keep playing, even when you don't have a connection.

Premium sounds better

Get ready for incredible sound quality.

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

125 years of literary history.

edited by Tina Jordan & Noor Qasim ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 2, 2021

An ebullient celebration of literature.

A capacious history of the influential publication.

To commemorate the 125th anniversary of the New York Times Book Review , current deputy editor Jordan, assisted by Qasim, offers a fascinating selection of reviews, letters, interviews, essays, announcements, book lists, bits of gossip (Colette, on a ship, wore sandals without stockings!), and op-ed pieces published in the supplement since its first appearance on Oct. 10, 1896. Organized chronologically into five sections that comprise around three decades each, and profusely illustrated with author photographs, plates, advertisements, and assorted literary artifacts, the volume amply fulfills the editor’s goal of revealing how the Review “has shaped literary taste, informed arguments and driven the world of ideas in the United States and beyond.” Book critic Parul Sehgal prefaces the selections with an astute essay examining how the Review has covered works by women, writers of color, and writers in the LGBTQ+ community. In its early years, White male perspectives dominated, with reviewers worried about the proliferation and popularity of women writers. Overall, however, the collection amply represents reviewers “contemptuous of anxious gatekeeping,” bringing to their task “nerve, wariness and style.” Anxious gatekeeping, however, as well as wafts of condescension, can be found. For example, in 1904, the reviewer of W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk remarked, “Many passages of the book will be very interesting to the student of the negro character who regards the race ethnologically and not politically, not as a dark cloud threatening the future of the United States.” In 1933, assessing two feminist histories, the Review ’s editor saw the success of the women’s movement as “one of the major tragedies in the history of mankind.” Reviews by acclaimed authors include Eudora Welty on Charlotte’s Web ; W.H. Auden on Tolkein’s The Fellowship of the Ring ; Kurt Vonnegut on Tom Wolfe; and Margaret Atwood on Toni Morrison’s Beloved . A long list of other famous reviewers appends the volume.

Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-593-23461-7

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Clarkson Potter

Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021

HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL NONFICTION

Share your opinion of this book

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Award Finalist

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

More by David Grann

BOOK REVIEW

by David Grann

More About This Book

BOOK TO SCREEN

A WEALTH OF PIGEONS

A cartoon collection.

by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020

A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.

The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.

Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker . So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny .” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.

Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020

ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

More by Steve Martin

by Steve Martin ; illustrated by Harry Bliss

by Steve Martin

by Steve Martin & illustrated by C.F. Payne

PERSPECTIVES

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC.   All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

• Literature & Fiction
• History & Criticism

Buy new: .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } -71% $14.69 $ 14 . 69 FREE delivery November 14 - 18 Ships from: Book_Outpost Sold by: Book_Outpost

Save with used - very good .savingpriceoverride { color:#cc0c39important; font-weight: 300important; } .reinventmobileheaderprice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerdisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventpricesavingspercentagemargin, #apex_offerdisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventpricepricetopaymargin { margin-right: 4px; } $6.00 $ 6 . 00 join prime (function(f) {var _np=(window.p._namespace(""));if(_np.guardfatal){_np.guardfatal(f)(_np);}else{f(_np);}}(function(p) { p.when('ready').execute("npa-prime-signup-ingress", () => { p.load.js("https://d1nruqhae353qc.cloudfront.net/primesignup/widget.js"); }); })); to get free delivery thursday, november 14 ships from: amazon sold by: montes books and more, return this item for free.

We offer easy, convenient returns with at least one free return option: no shipping charges. All returns must comply with our returns policy.

• Go to your orders and start the return
• Select your preferred free shipping option
• Drop off and leave!

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History Hardcover – November 2, 2021

Purchase options and add-ons

• Print length 368 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Clarkson Potter
• Publication date November 2, 2021
• Dimensions 8.82 x 1.56 x 10.3 inches
• ISBN-10 0593234618
• ISBN-13 978-0593234617
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Similar items that may deliver to you quickly

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Clarkson Potter (November 2, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593234618
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593234617
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.75 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.82 x 1.56 x 10.3 inches
• #106 in Literary History & Criticism Reference
• #293 in General Books & Reading
• #2,564 in Sociology Reference

About the author

New york times.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 81% 14% 3% 1% 1% 81%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 81% 14% 3% 1% 1% 14%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 81% 14% 3% 1% 1% 3%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 81% 14% 3% 1% 1% 1%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 81% 14% 3% 1% 1% 1%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Customers say

Customers find the history of books interesting and wonderful. They appreciate the depth of the content, saying it's comprehensive and entertaining. Readers describe the book as fun to read and blissful. They also praise the writing quality as well-written and clear.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the history of the book wonderful and interesting. They say it's a great reference.

"This was a gift and it has been a fascinating read . There are reviews of great literature and not-so-great...." Read more

"I liked the 124 year history of books and all the pictures of the authors and the times they wrote about." Read more

"... Very interesting ." Read more

" Excellent history of the Book Review . Comprehensive and entertaining as well." Read more

Customers find the book's content depth great. They say it has lots of information, is a great reference, and entertaining.

"...Well written and an excellent guide and research tool !I just wish it had arrived in pristine condition...." Read more

"I liked the depth of the book and wondered why these articles were included. What were the criteria for selection...." Read more

"Cool concept, lots of info . Open up to any page and you will learn something." Read more

"Excellent history of the Book Review. Comprehensive and entertaining as well." Read more

Customers find the book fun to read and blissful for readers.

"...This one from the NY Times is best in show. If you're a reader, it's bliss ...." Read more

" Fun to read !..." Read more

Customers find the book well-written and an excellent guide and research tool. They appreciate the clear, full-sized photos.

"...There are reviews of great literature and not-so-great. Some that flew beneath the radar and some that didn’t live up to the hype." Read more

"... Well written and an excellent guide and research tool!I just wish it had arrived in pristine condition...." Read more

"...You'll find the reviews of those classics you read, along with clear , often full-sized photos of the authors...." Read more

Reviews with images

19 pages in - I’m hooked!

• Sort by reviews type Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Registry & Gift List
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Is the Twentieth-Century Novel a Genre?

Genres are the Sirens of literary criticism. They seem friendly and alluring, but they are dangerously elusive shape-shifters. You really have to lash yourself to the mast.

Genres tend to be pictured as the bones of literary texts, the formal properties onto which the imagery and details of character, plot, and setting are grafted. These skeletons are transmissible across time. So “Oedipus Rex” (circa 430 B.C.E.), “Hamlet” (circa 1600), and “Death of a Salesman” (1949) are all called tragedies. But, apart from unhappy endings, those plays are more different than they are alike. It is hard to extract a robust definition of “tragedy” that works for all three. Similarly, we call the Odyssey an epic. But why isn’t it a novel? Because it’s written in verse? Then how about a prose translation: would that be a novel? It’s not obvious why it wouldn’t. The Odyssey is a story about a family separated by war. So is “War and Peace,” and we don’t categorize that as an epic.

There is also the problem of basing our generalizations about literary types on a highly selective group of texts. Of the hundreds of tragedies estimated to have been written in ancient Greece, we know of only thirty-two complete ones, attributed to just three playwrights. We don’t know all the forms that tragedy, as the Greeks understood it, might have taken.

In the case of a genre like the novel, too, we are operating with a ridiculously small sample size. As Franco Moretti pointed out, in an article published in 2000, when literature professors talk about “the nineteenth-century British novel” they are talking about roughly two hundred books. He estimated that this is 0.5 per cent of all the novels published in Great Britain in the nineteenth century.

His work inaugurated a wave of data mining, in which formal elements of the novel—such as the use of quotation marks or chapter titles, or the rise and fall of subgenres, like detective fiction—could be charted on graphs. He founded the Stanford Literary Lab to undertake this kind of quantitative scholarship. Hard hats were required inside the building.

Moretti touched a nerve because no genre had received more critical attention in the twentieth century than the novel. For many critics, the novel was the king of genres, a literary form that enjoyed a unique intimacy with reality. Everyone seemed to know which books the term picked out, what the generic bones of the novel were, and why novels mattered. People talked about “the death of the novel” as though it could mark an inflection point in the history of civilization.

In the nineteenth century, few people had thought of the novel as an art form in the same league as painting or classical music. The novel was a mode of middle-class entertainment. One of the first writers to insist on fiction as an art was Henry James , who analyzed the formal features of the novel in the prefaces he wrote for the multivolume New York Edition of his work (1907-09); these analyses are still cited today. (James launched the New York Edition in the hope of boosting his book sales. Alas.)

In 1916, the Hungarian critic Georg Lukács published (in German) “The Theory of the Novel,” another influential treatment of the genre. “The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” was his memorable definition. The genre was further explored by Mikhail Bakhtin, in Russia, in essays collected in “The Dialogic Imagination,” and by F. R. Leavis, in England, in “The Great Tradition.” But the definition that became standard in literature departments was the one put forward by Ian Watt in “The Rise of the Novel” (1957). The term Watt used was “formal realism.”

The novel’s mission, Watt said, is to provide “a full and authentic report of human experience.” This is the effect that a novel’s formal features, from the types of characters it invents to the kind of language it uses, are all devised to produce. When we read a novel, Watt said, we feel that we are getting “the facts,” even though what we are reading is pure make-believe. To the extent that what we are reading seems fragmentary or discontinuous or not credible, we are not reading a novel.

Watt was writing about the eighteenth-century English novel—Defoe, Richardson , and Fielding. Lukács was writing about the nineteenth-century European and Russian realist novel. The question Edwin Frank asks in his new book, “Stranger Than Fiction” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is whether there is such a thing as the twentieth-century novel. Is it profitable to talk about the twentieth-century novel as something different from the nineteenth-century novel or, for that matter, from the twenty-first-century novel? Frank thinks so: in his view, the twentieth-century novel is a distinct literary genre, and his book is an ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious effort to map it.

Frank was inspired, he says, by “The Rest Is Noise,” Alex Ross’s history of twentieth-century music. “Could the same thing be done with the novel?” Frank wondered. After overcoming some doubts, he decided that maybe it could, and so he set out to help readers understand the literary equivalents of twelve-tone music and bebop. The result is a book about books that can seem demanding or off-putting, books that are particularly long (like James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” ) or particularly weird (like Gertrude Stein’s “Three Lives” and Machado de Assis’s “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas” ) or both (like Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” and Georges Perec’s “Life: A User’s Manual” ).

Frank is not a literature professor, and this is not a literature professor’s book. He is the editorial director of New York Review Books and the founder of its Classics series—a wonderfully eclectic array of reprints, collections, and fresh translations of works famous and neglected, most with new introductions by well-known writers. This is the imprint’s twenty-fifth year. A big trade house wouldn’t touch the vast majority of its titles, but New York Review Books finds its readers. There is no publisher quite like it.

“Stranger Than Fiction” is not a survey, which is good, since surveys can be fire hoses of names and dates that barely register and are quickly forgotten, and it is not a work of critical revisionism, which is O.K., since it allows Frank to ignore the secondary literature. Which he does. He rejects the term “modernism” as “overused”; the word “postmodernist” does not appear once. His book is an exercise in what he calls “descriptive criticism,” and “descriptive” is a pretty accurate descriptor. Frank explains what is happening in the books—thirty-one in all, by thirty writers—that he has selected to represent “the twentieth-century novel.”

“Plot summary” is the dismissive term academics use for this kind of criticism, but it is actually not that easy, first, to see accurately everything that is going on in a text and, second, to distill it in a form that can be both sympathetic to the writer’s intentions and critical of the result. A lot of Edmund Wilson ’s criticism was plot summary in this sense. Wilson just had a brighter flashlight than the rest of us. He could see things most readers cannot. There is enough biographical information in Frank’s book to give us a sense of who the writers were and the worlds they inhabited. Historical context is mostly broad-brush (the First World War, the Holocaust). “Stranger Than Fiction” is chiefly about fiction.

Frank is interested, as literature professors generally are not, in the feel of certain books and writers, and he is adept at capsule characterizations. Henry Green “has the gift of falling asleep at the start of a sentence and waking up in some entirely other place without batting an eyelid.” The prose of the Russian writer Vasily Grossman is “as simple as an outstretched hand.” W. G. Sebald writes in a “soft-shoe, rather priestly way.” Colette “takes a cat’s view of human life.”

Frank calls “The Man Without Qualities” “the world’s longest feuilleton, a philosophical digression, a pilgrim’s progress.” He describes Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” as “at once a monument and a caprice . . . an immense book that is also in a sense an empty book.” D. H. Lawrence could seem “a sort of ventriloquist’s doll, perched on the century’s knee.” Elsa Morante’s “History: A Novel” is “openhanded and trouble-hearted and a little out of control.” Ernest Hemingway ’s prose: “Writing like that is as much as anything about writing like that.”

Frank says that he has chosen to write about books he likes—“books that move me”—and the books he likes are typically books that, although they may be easy to admire, are not really all that easy to like. There are exceptions. Colette’s “Claudine at School” has to be one of the funniest books ever written. “Lolita” is funny in bits, and seductively narrated, which is, as Frank says, Nabokov’s intention, to implicate us in the self-justifications of a child abuser. Grossman’s Tolstoyan novel about the Battle of Stalingrad, “Life and Fate,” is—I don’t know a better word—powerful.

Link copied

But “Life: A User’s Manual,” a six-hundred-and-sixty-page anatomy of a Paris apartment building which describes in exhaustive detail its occupants, their apartments, their multigenerational backstories, and every piece of furniture and bric-a-brac they possess is not exactly beach reading. Frank’s unpacking of that novel, on the other hand, is one of the best things in his book.

Seven of Frank’s thirty-one novels are by women. Three of the novels are from Latin America, one is African (Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” ), and one is Japanese (“Kokoro,” by Natsume Sōseki). Only four novelists are from the United States, and they don’t include William Faulkner or John Dos Passos , which is an unusual choice since those two had a big influence on not just the American novel but the French novel in the nineteen-thirties and forties. Faulkner gets a little attention in “Stranger Than Fiction,” Dos Passos almost none. Of the American novels Frank chooses to write about, two are by expatriates (Stein and Hemingway), and one is by an émigré (Nabokov).The fourth American novelist is Ralph Ellison, and Frank does devote a chapter to “Invisible Man,” Ellison’s only completed novel.

Although “Naked Lunch,” “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “American Pastoral,” and “Beloved” make it onto a long list of books in an appendix mysteriously titled “Other Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel,” postwar American fiction largely goes missing, Ellison aside. The simple reason is that Frank doesn’t think much of it. “There was something insular and retardataire about the postwar American novel,” he writes, “as if it wanted to cast aside the questions and quandaries of the twentieth-century novel and retrieve and enjoy the good old authority and amplitude of the nineteenth-century novel in new and improved form.” Saul Bellow , John Updike , and Norman Mailer may have been prize-winning best-sellers domestically, he says, but they had little influence on world literature. (Well, Bellow did win a Nobel Prize, which is surely international recognition of a sort.) In other words, the term “twentieth-century novel” does not include many well-known novels published in the twentieth century. So how does a writer make the cut?

Frank’s theory of the novel is a traditional one. It dates back at least to Stendhal’s definition in “The Red and the Black,” from 1830: “A novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects the blue skies, at another the mud of the puddles at your feet.” The twentieth century was a period of violent change; therefore, violent change is what the twentieth-century novel reflects—not, or not only, in its subject matter but in its form. When things become disjointed and unreliable, when the world turns upside down, so does the novel.

“The writers of the twentieth century are ambushed by history” is how Frank puts it. “They exist in a world where the dynamic balance between self and society that the nineteenth-century novel sought to maintain can no longer be maintained, even as fiction.” The twentieth-century novelist therefore rejects the “sanctimonious and sentimental and hypocritical” (Frank’s words) fiction of the nineteenth century. Twentieth-century writers found in the novel a form that had emerged from the nineteenth century “as a robust presence with a tenacious worldly curiosity and a certain complacent self-regard, a form that was both ready to shake things up and asking to be shook up.” They duly shattered the complacency and shook up the form. The novel was gut-renovated.

A great deal of this generic refashioning involved stripping the nineteenth-century novel of its genteel surface, exposing what Frank calls “those realities of the bedroom and the abattoir that the novel in the nineteenth century had tended to keep in the background.” This is why Colette makes the cut: she writes about sex with a flippancy that (in Frank’s theory) would have made George Eliot blush. And few writers have ever been as ungenteel as Joyce. “Ulysses” has frank depictions of defecation, urination, masturbation, menstruation, flatulence, eructation, and rhinotillexis (nose-picking). Virginia Woolf found the book vulgar. She had to force herself to read it—and then, in “Mrs. Dalloway,” another of Frank’s thirty-one, she borrowed many of Joyce’s techniques. (Mrs. Dalloway does not pick her nose, though, at least not on camera.)

The rejection of nineteenth-century sanctimony and hypocrisy is why Frank’s list includes André Gide’s “The Immoralist” and Jean Rhys’s “Good Morning, Midnight” —unpleasant stories narrated by unpleasant people. The twentieth-century novel is not out to please. It is “an exploding form in an exploding world.”

Of course, there is another way of looking at all this. If we drop the mirror metaphor, we can describe the history Frank is tracing as the emergence of the art novel. Around 1900, writers began experimenting with the formal properties of their medium, something that painters, sculptors, composers, choreographers, and even artists in a brand-new medium, cinema, were doing at the same time.

What is striking about this period of lively artistic change in Europe and the United States is that it does not seem to have been a response to world events. It may be intuitive to associate movements that undermine traditional conceptions of how a novel should read or what a painting should look like with traumatic change, but we are much more likely to see artistic risk-taking when times are good than when they are bad. New art needs a cultural infrastructure—publishers, gallerists, impresarios, critics, prize juries, little-magazine editors, bookstore owners, even professors—to help create an audience for the scandalous and iconoclastic. It’s hard to mobilize those agents when the bombs are falling.

Because of books like Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory” (1975), twentieth-century styles in art and literature are often explained as responses to the rupture in Western self-consciousness created by the First World War. The war was a traumatic event in both Europe and the United States, and it led people to wonder whether they had really understood the apparently tranquil and prosperous North Atlantic world that preceded it. “The tide that bore us along,” Henry James wrote in a letter to a friend ten days after fighting broke out, “was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara. . . . It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way.”

But the war had nothing to do with the new art, because formal innovation was well under way before August, 1914. Alfred Jarry’s play “Ubu Roi” was first performed in 1896, the same year that the French director Georges Méliès began experimenting with the properties of film. “Claudine at School” came out in 1900, “The Immoralist” in 1902. Picasso painted “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in 1907. One of Arnold Schoenberg ’s first atonal compositions, “Three Piano Pieces,” was written in 1909.

Gertrude Stein wrote “The Making of Americans,” among her most ambitious and radical texts, between 1903 and 1911. T. S. Eliot finished “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1911. Marcel Duchamp painted “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” in 1912. Vaslav Nijinsky ’s “Afternoon of a Faun” premièred in 1912. “Swann’s Way,” the first volume of “In Search of Lost Time,” was published in 1913, the year Igor Stravinsky ’s “The Rite of Spring” had its début. Joyce began “Ulysses,” Franz Kafka began “The Trial,” and Stein published “Tender Buttons” in 1914. Almost all the modern “isms”—Cubism, Post-Impressionism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Symbolism, naturalism, and stream of consciousness, too—preceded the war. The first English use of “avant-garde” in the arts was in 1910. The spirit of Frank’s “twentieth-century novel” had its origins in peacetime.

When the war came, those innovations found new uses, but a cultural infrastructure to sustain them was largely in place. Hemingway’s “In Our Time” reflects the experience of war, and it is one of the books Frank discusses. But Hemingway got his prose style, in part, from writing that Gertrude Stein had done before the war began.

It’s not that the art novel lacked ambition or was intended for a coterie audience. Frank thinks that the mission Watt ascribed to the eighteenth-century novel, to make “a full and authentic report of human experience,” did not change. It just got problematized. After 1914, history seemed more uncertain, surfaces more deceiving, and the conventions of novelistic storytelling had become obsolete. “A sense of the novel as both mattering immensely, as being a crucial way of getting certain things right, but also being misbegotten, inspires and haunts the novelists of this book,” Frank says. “The problem of approaching the problem always lurks in the background.” By modernizing itself, the novel preserved its cultural relevance.

It didn’t last. Frank thinks that the novel ran out of currency thirty years ago. Novelists, in his view, are no longer pushing the envelope. I’m not sure that’s so. What does seem true, though, is that the novel is no longer at the center of the cultural conversation. People don’t ask today, “What are you reading?” They ask, “What are you streaming?” The television series is the middle-class entertainment medium of the twenty-first century. Or maybe it was , since people are already writing about the end of a golden age of television that began with shows like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.”

Has prestige television changed the novel? Many nineteenth-century novels enjoyed a second life in the twentieth century as film adaptations. Henry James would, one hopes, be gratified to know that “The Portrait of a Lady” has been adapted as a miniseries, on the BBC, and as a feature film, directed by Jane Campion, plus a television version in Urdu—all together almost surely attracting a much bigger audience than the print edition.

Today, a novelist can hardly avoid fantasizing about the home-viewing market. And that market now includes not only popular writers like George R. R. Martin ( “Game of Thrones” ) and Mick Herron ( “Slow Horses” ), but authors of art novels, such as Elena Ferrante ( “My Brilliant Friend” ), Margaret Atwood ( “The Handmaid’s Tale” ), Sally Rooney ( “Normal People,” “Conversations with Friends” ), Colson Whitehead ( “Underground Railroad” ), and Patricia Highsmith (the “Ripley” books). Do fiction writers today design their stories to work well onscreen? The series themselves sometimes exhibit a fairly high degree of artfulness. Steve Zaillian’s “Ripley” is to “L.A. Law” as Virginia Woolf is to Charles Dickens. We may watch these shows relatively mindlessly, between dinner and bed, but that is how people read Dickens and Balzac in the nineteenth century. No one thought, Someday, there will be a Norton Critical Edition of “Oliver Twist.” But now there is. After this century is over, maybe an imaginative critic like Edwin Frank will cherry-pick the best of the television shows and write a book about them. Could be a genre. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

Can reading make you happier ?

Why walking helps us think .

The Vogue model who became a war photographer .

The perils of Pearl and Olga .

Sentenced to life for an accident miles away .

The resurgent appeal of Stevie Nicks .

Fiction by Lore Segal: “ Ladies’ Lunch ”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

An unreliable narrator navigates shifting, shaky ground in a taut riddle of a novel

• Copy Link URL Copied!

Book Review

An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth

By Anna Moschovakis Soft Skull: 208 pages, $16.95 It you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Anna Moschovakis’ “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth” is my kind of novel: taut and narratively ambiguous, a book of riddles or a riddle of a book.

It takes place in an unnamed city at a moment not unlike the present, narrated by an actress who may be losing her mind. Early on, this unnamed figure recalls her final stage performance, which ended with her breaking character and acknowledging to the audience, “Something is happening that I don’t understand.” Meanwhile, the city in which she lives has been beset by earthquakes, not merely a swarm, or a main jolt followed by a series of aftershocks, but rather an ongoing state of disruption, seismicity as spasmodic “movements that convulse the ground beneath us, that almost never stop, not completely, so that now motion, rather than stillness, has become the rule.”

Or has it? Among the many strange and vivid pleasures of the novel is that we cannot be certain, since as the book progresses, the narrator appears to grow increasingly unstable, although this may be an illusion as well.

Moschovakis is a poet and the author of two previous novels, “Participation” and “Eleanor, or the Rejection of the Progress of Love”; she has translated works by Annie Ernaux, Albert Cossery and Georges Simenon. “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth” is reminiscent of these writers, propulsive and elusive at once.

If L.A.’s a mystery, 25 Harry Bosch books are a brilliant, gripping way to solve it

From “Black Echo” to his latest, “The Waiting,” Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch books keep taking readers to the dance — partnered with a detective you can’t help but root for, in an L.A. of risks and second chances.

Oct. 16, 2024

Like Ernaux, Moschovakis’ language is spare and neutral, although such neutrality may be a ruse. Like Cossery, she sets the book in a cityscape that is both recognizable and slightly off, as if rendered from a dream. Like Simenon, there is a murder in these pages, or the desire to commit one, and to reveal this is to give nothing away. From the outset of the novel, the narrator tells us that she means to kill her roommate, Tala, whose arrival is portrayed as a catalyst: “The movements, the shaking, the cracking of the concrete patio,” the narrator observes, “began shortly after she moved in.”

Still, in this moment, perhaps, we also find ourselves in the realm of the imagination, because Tala has disappeared. Did she ever exist? Do the earthquakes? The truth is that it doesn’t matter. What compels us is less the outer world than the narrator’s tangled inner life.

To develop such a sensibility, Moschovakis employs a variety of destabilizing strategies. To begin, there is the novel’s floating cast of secondary characters, including two loosely held friends, J.P. and Celia, and the mysterious barkeep at a neighborhood spot. “Before the ground physically started to shake,” the narrator confides, “I would describe conversations with J.P. in this way: how first you’re just talking, first you’re delighted or bemused, and it goes on, and it goes on and it goes on. And then, the ground you’re standing on starts to move.” Earthquake as emotional disruption, in other words, less a matter of body than of mind. Moschovakis makes this clear from J.P.’s initial appearance in the novel. “It’s going to stop,” he cautions of the shaking, “and you’re going to realize that it never really happened.” That admonition resonates throughout the book.

Richard Price returns with a story of urban disaster, grit, hustle and even hope

‘Lazarus Man,’ the ‘Clockers’ author’s first novel in nearly a decade, examines New York through a tenement collapse and its aftermath for a cast of characters.

Oct. 30, 2024

Even more, the narrator’s displacement emerges in the structure of “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth.” Composed of forms and fragments, it employs a range of typefaces and methods of delivery. Moschovakis augments the central narrative with lists, notebook entries, fliers, a brochure that J.P. delivers — a gathering of runes, of clues, that may or may not add up.

“What if all, or even half, the people in the world weren’t walking around with a headful of language all the time?” the narrator wonders. “What if all, or even half the people I knew weren’t?” The question is less rhetorical than reflective, addressing, as it does, the possibility that the inner life of others “was not reportable the way mine was, because it wasn’t happening in words.”

This may be the essential conundrum of the novel, or maybe “mechanism” is a more appropriate term. “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth” interrogates language as a means of analysis or observation, focusing on its incongruities. “[I]t becomes clear, at the end of every episode of extreme panic, pain, or fear,” Moschovakis writes, “that the opposite of intolerable isn’t tolerable but something more like ecstatic .”

A gay couple’s messy surrogacy journey is just the start of this very funny novel

Tom Pyun’s fast-paced ‘Something Close to Nothing’ uses everything from Meryl Streep to hip-hop dance to remind us that gay parents are as impulsive and conflicted as anyone else.

Nov. 4, 2024

Meanwhile, the narrator seeks meaning wherever she can find it — in the brochure’s pointed questions, for instance, which include “WHAT OR WHO IS HOLDING YOU BACK?” and “HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF THEY WERE GONE?”

And yet, for her, language remains shifting and ephemeral, difficult to interpret, or to see. Even the brochure blurs to irresolution. “The light made dark shapes on its bright surface, quicksilver abstractions,” the narrator recalls, “which prevented the words from capture. FL_R_LF it seemed to read, in big block type.” Later, after a nap, she feels “behind me for J.P.’s brochure, which I’d left on the side table. There was nothing there.”

The effect is of a profound dislocation, which separates her not only from the world around her but also from herself. “At some point,” she explains, “I lost track of who was asking questions, and who was answering them, of who was leading and who was being led.”

A blood test to predict behavior? This novel finds humor in that scary premise

Acclaimed author Charles Baxter takes on America’s absurdities, aided by technology, in his new novel “Blood Test.”

Oct. 14, 2024

That’s a tricky place for a novel to arrive at, a kind of stasis of the soul. It works, however, because of the depth and movement of the writing, which aspires not to resolution but to immersion, evoking how such dislocation feels. “The voice in my silent mouth,” Moschovakis writes, “was asking, Can we live with this? Can we live with all of this? Can we live? ”

These questions apply to every one of us. Where do we find ourselves, after all, but in a world defined by disruption, where earthquakes real or metaphorical and other uncertainties assert themselves at every turn? How do we “ [s]nap back . Snap into it. Snap to,” when we are constantly assailed?

“We were alone and not alone,” the narrator insists, “both things true at the same time.” For Moschovakis, then, it is the asking that’s important, since the answers are, as they have ever been, fundamentally unknowable.

David L. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinion. He is the former book editor and book critic of The Times.

More to Read

Richard Powers’ latest epic: Fragile oceans, fraught tech and exhilarating writing. At first

Sept. 16, 2024

30 books to read this fall

Sept. 3, 2024

10 books to add to your reading list in August

July 31, 2024

A cure for the common opinion

Get thought-provoking perspectives with our weekly newsletter.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

A mystery explores the darkness of French-ruled Vietnam

Nov. 9, 2024

Were Joan Didion and Eve Babitz really two sides of the same coin?

Nov. 8, 2024

Collected letters of Oliver Sacks offer a glimpse into the neurologist’s mind

Nov. 2, 2024

10 books to add to your reading list in November

Nov. 1, 2024

Most Read in Opinion

Editorial: This election showed L.A. voters are fed up with City Hall corruption and scandal

Nov. 11, 2024

Opinion: What did the Asian American vote this year tell us?

Nov. 10, 2024

Granderson: There’s no mystery. White women handed Trump the election

Nov. 7, 2024

Opinion: Much of the world is terrified by another Trump presidency. Here’s why

Oct. 11, 2024

Randy Fertel’s Winging It: The Pleasures And Perils Of Improvisation

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

Winging It by Randy Fertel

Let’s say you lived, for example, in California, or more particularly in the progressive community that is Santa Monica, you could well be inclined to wonder:

WHAT THE F*CK JUST HAPPENED?

Or even WHY?

I can’t tell you. No one really can. But I do have a theory. Maybe not “The” reason, but certainly “a” reason.

One night, about a month ago, I went to a book event at Diesel Books in Santa Monica to hear Randy Fertel speak about his new book, Winging it: Improv’s Power and Peril in the Time of Trump ( available at fertel.com ) is Fertel’s wide-ranging examination of improvisation in popular culture.

Fertel is a literary critic of wide and divergent knowledge who spent some thirty years on a discursive investigation that found book form in A Taste for Chaos , a 2015 work that elucidates and often free-associates what is art in improvisation across every possible incarnation or association.

Fertel appreciates that when one mentions improvisation, most people think of a form of comedy, or of certain sublime moments in Jazz. However, improvisation has been with us for as long as humans have had to come up with seemingly spontaneous reactions, comments, excuses, lies, or fashion instant solutions to pressing problems. Improvisation leads to wonderful flights of fancy, verbal, musical, theatrical, some lifesaving, some enlightening, some transcendent, some merely entertaining, but some so compelling and distracting as to be dangerous.

Randy Fertel

I will add that Fertel hails from New Orleans where improvisation is a way of life and, given that his mother is the Ruth of Ruth’s Chris Steak House, one can see his own literary and academic career as an improvisation.

Just as Nancy Mitford divided the world into U and Non U, and Lenny Bruce divided it into Jewish and Goyish, Fertel distinguishes between the truly spontaneous and those works which appear improvised (even when they are the result of much preparation and revision) such as Kerouac’s On The Road ( which was revised over a six-year period ) , or a Robin Williams stand up performance (which was often rehearsed).

Finally – finally, after publishing A Taste of Chaos in 2015, Fertel thought he’d put the subject of improvisation to bed.

Then a few short months later, Donald J. Trump rode down the escalator in the lobby of Trump Tower to announce what became his successful bid for the Presidency. Fertel saw the logic-defying success of the 45 th President as explained by one thing: Improvisation – and knew he had to write a new book.

Fertel’s exegesis, Winging It: Improv’s Power and Peril in the Time of Trump, was published before the election. I must confess that writing about it before the election would have appeared smart. However, given, the recent election results, it would also have been evidence of the arrogance inherent believing that knowing who Trump is or having some insight into what he does would make a difference to those who proved that it matters not at all.

To explain why, in Winging It , Fertel reaches back in time to the Mesoamerican character of The Trickster. The Trickster is known for his ability to seduce, to entertain, to shapeshift when necessary. In many tales, the Trickster is a heroic figure who defeats evil. However, as Fertel points out, The Trickster can be malevolent and an agent of Chaos. You get the point.

Reading Fertel’s book made me think of that moment in Howard Stern’s memoir, Private Parts (and the movie made of it), when the radio executive explains that the people who like Stern listened to him, on average, for three hours a day. And the number one reason they gave is, “because they never knew what he was going to say next.” And the people who hated him, listened for four hours a day, and the number one reason for them was, “they never knew what he was going to say next.”

I will also note that what makes the most money in TV, one of the only things that people are willing to sit through commercials for, is live sports because you never know how it’s going to turn out. In this context, it doesn’t matter how you feel about what Trump says. In fact, he knows that the more outrageous the better. Why? Because you never know what he’s going to say next.

To Fertel’s point, Trump is an improv that 74 million people want to keep watching; and that the other 70 million voters can’t avoid watching.

For the next four years, at least, we all be Winging it.

• Editorial Standards
• Forbes Accolades

Join The Conversation

One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts. 

Forbes Community Guidelines

Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.

In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site's  Terms of Service.   We've summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.

Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:

• False or intentionally out-of-context or misleading information
• Insults, profanity, incoherent, obscene or inflammatory language or threats of any kind
• Attacks on the identity of other commenters or the article's author
• Content that otherwise violates our site's  terms.

User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:

• Continuous attempts to re-post comments that have been previously moderated/rejected
• Racist, sexist, homophobic or other discriminatory comments
• Attempts or tactics that put the site security at risk
• Actions that otherwise violate our site's  terms.

So, how can you be a power user?

• Stay on topic and share your insights
• Feel free to be clear and thoughtful to get your point across
• ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ to show your point of view.
• Protect your community.
• Use the report tool to alert us when someone breaks the rules.

Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site's  Terms of Service.

Advertisement

Supported by

Book Review

I gave my son the books i loved. he chose ‘heidi’ instead..

What a 19th-century Swiss novel, and a young fan’s pilgrimage to the Alps, taught me about fatherhood.

  By Dave Kim

Jamie Oliver Pulls Children’s Book Amid Criticism of Insensitivity

The celebrity chef’s second children’s book, “Billy and the Epic Escape,” faced accusations that it stereotyped First Nations people in Australia.

  By Ali Watkins

A Coming-of-Age Novel That Crosses America’s Impossible Divide

“Us Fools,” by Nora Lange, is a tale of two sisters living through the diseased expanse of the country’s recent history.

  By Eleanor Henderson

Is Taylor Swift’s Superpower a Gift for Writing?

In “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem,” Rob Sheffield chronicles how Taylor Swift has made fans, foes and even journalists part of her story.

  By Amanda Hess

5 Vintage Crime Novels Spiked With Peril and Pitfalls

Our columnist on a handful of recently reissued crime novels, all of which are worth your time.

  By Sarah Weinman

Dorothy Allison, Author of ‘Bastard Out of Carolina,’ Dies at 75

She wrote lovingly and often hilariously about her harrowing childhood in a working-class Southern family, as well as about the violence and incest she suffered.

  By Penelope Green

How Do You Spell Rock Royalty? R.E.M.

In a new biography, Peter Ames Carlin chronicles the rise of an indispensable band and the evolution of its music.

  By Dwight Garner

Joan Didion and Eve Babitz: Contemporaries, Peers, Rivals — and Soul Mates?

In a dual biography, the journalist Lili Anolik casts the two writers as opposite sides of the same ambitious, 1960s-Hollywood coin.

  By Marisa Meltzer

Read Your Way Through Shanghai

Shanghai straddles the past and the future, a dizzying prism of many histories and cultures. The poet Sally Wen Mao shares books that illuminate this cosmopolitan city.

  By Sally Wen Mao

Books of the Times

A Heady History of the Novel Embraces Works That Shock, Not Soothe

In “Stranger Than Fiction,” Edwin Frank maps a path from Dostoyevsky to Sebald, finding mystical power and surprising ties among 20th-century writers.

  By Alexandra Jacobs

The Early Loves of Oliver Sacks: Medicine, Muscles and Motorbikes

A new collection of personal letters tracks the neurologist’s raucous self-discovery and venerable career.

Where’s Johnny? The Biography of a TV Host Whose Life Was a Closed Book.

Johnny Carson dominated late-night television for decades, but closely guarded his privacy. Bill Zehme’s biography, “Carson the Magnificent,” tries to break through.

Piet Mondrian: An Orderly Painter, a Deeply Eccentric Man

A new biography of one of the quintessential artists of the 20th century.

By Ali Watkins

The Booker Prize Is Tuesday. Which of These 6 Novels Should Win?

Percival Everett’s “James” is favorite for the prestigious literary award. But the likes of Rachel Kushner’s “Creation Lake” or Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” could take the prize instead.

By Alex Marshall

How ‘The Wild Robot’ Was Born in a Weedy Patch of Manhattan

Peter Brown’s obsession with the abandoned railway that became the High Line led to two best sellers — including “The Wild Robot,” which is now a blockbuster movie.

By Elisabeth Egan

By Sarah Weinman

By Dave Kim

Bruce Degen, Who Drew ‘The Magic School Bus,’ Dies at 79

He memorably portrayed a frizzy-haired science teacher roping her elementary school class into adventures aboard a shape-shifting yellow bus.

By Alex Traub

Was Wallis Simpson Really a Sex-Crazed Spy?

As Paul French argues in a new biography, the future Duchess of Windsor’s year in China was less lurid — and more interesting — than her critics knew.

By Thessaly La Force

She Inherited Her Family’s Mansion, the Site of Secret Traumas

In “The Magnificent Ruins,” an Indian expatriate reunites with her estranged family after her grandfather unexpectedly made her heir to his estate.

By Maham Hasan

In a Run-Down Movie Theater, She Found a Window on the World

Esther Kinsky reflects on the nature of seeing in a book about an old cinema in Hungary.

By Ben Libman

By Penelope Green