Katherine Addison's Blog, page 8

Review: Alison, Meander Spiral Explode (2019)

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book looking at alternatives to Aristotle, which I'm always in favor of. (Aristotle, in this case, being the Poetics and the rising action-climax-falling action pattern that we're taught to expect our narratives to take.) Alison looks at narratives in the traditional wave form to start with, but spends most of the book looking at other ways of putting a text together.

I enjoy reading people analyzing books they love (and Alison's enthusiasm for her examples is very clear), so I found this book pleasant to read, even though the books she's discussing are probably not books I myself will ever want to read. And it is interesting to get away from Aristotelian precepts and see other ways to do things.



View all my reviews

comments

Review: Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927)

Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I regret not coming across this book sooner, for I find it delightful. I disagree with Forster about almost everything, but such is the pleasure of listening to him talk about books he loves that I don't mind.

I don't know that I would call it useful, either for novelists or critics, because Forster's way of looking at novels is extremely individual (he's right about Tristram Shandy, though), but it was thought-provoking, and I like how much he's able to extract from a single sentence of Mansfield Park.



View all my reviews

comments

Review: Hills, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular (1977)

Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by Lawrence Rust Hills

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I was a lot less impressed with Mr. Hills than he seemed to be with himself, but then I don't actually think the "literary short story" is the be-all and end-all of creative writing.

He said three things I liked.

1. "Most of the playwright's theories about 'plot structure' and 'dramatic action' are solutions to problems the fiction writer doesn't even have" (p. 94).

2. "For surely a great part of what is called a writer's 'vision' comes from how he listens" (164).

3. [about writing] "The truth is that the only way not to feel really terrible is to work.

"But sometimes it seems easier just to feel really terrible" (190).



View all my reviews

comments

Review: Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (2014)

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Crawling back through the funhouse mirror that was 2016, this is a collection of topical essays, mostly on politics, although there's a great one about Virigina Woolf and negative capability. Solnit is an good writer and she's very passionate about women's rights and the culture of male violence, about which she is still, in 2020, not wrong. She keeps looking for the paradigm-shifting event, the one that will make domestic violence and rape suddenly matter to the dominant culture, and I don't think she finds it.

(Her title essay is NOT where the word "mansplaining" comes from, but it is calling out the same phenomenon.)



View all my reviews

comments

Review: Mittelmark & Newman, How NOT to Write a Novel (2008)

How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them—A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide by Howard Mittelmark

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I found this mildly amusing, occasionally helpfully pithy ("When there is a plan, things cannot go according to it."), and a quick read. They don't stick consistently to their conceit that they are trying to teach readers how not to write a novel, which is mildly irritating. (Rather, the conceit is mildly irritating; I much prefer the parts of the book where they forget to cleave to it.)

They do explain very clearly why their 200 mistakes are mistakes (they do a great job with all the ways you can misuse a speech tag) and provide good advice about avoiding them.

Three and a half stars, round up to four.



View all my reviews

comments

Review: Tyson, Using Critical Theory

Using Critical Theory: How to Read and Write about Literature by Lois Tyson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


(3rd edition)
This is a textbook. It teaches the basics of writing papers using critical theories (New Criticism, feminism, postcolonialism, Marxism, etc.) It's clearly written and laid out, and it boils down the process of writing an English paper into a series of very simple steps. It also defangs the most common student questions (E.g. My interpretation is my opinion, so how can it be wrong?) and I think provides a pretty good understanding of what it is you're being asked to do when you write an English paper. I disagree with it in places (she does not do a good job of explaining the concept of "othering" and I think misuses it), but overall, yes, this would have been super helpful to have when I was teaching intro lit courses.



View all my reviews

comments

Review: Chee, How To Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In a lot of ways, this collection of essays IS an autobiographical novel, told out of sequence and very subtly. You have to be watching the details to see what he's doing.

Chee is a literary writer, and it always amazes me to get a glimpse into that world, where novels are expected to take years to write (as opposed to commercial publishing, where publishers would really like authors to produce a book a year) and the thematics of the novel are almost more important than the story. Writing a novel is a deep dive into the writer's own psyche; that's what it's FOR. It's not how I think about writing a novel at all, but it's beautiful.



View all my reviews

comments

Review: Alexander, The New Jim Crow, rev. ed. (2012)

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


So this is a book about what the War on Drugs accomplished, which is not any significant decrease in drug use but instead an almost unfathomably massive explosion in the prison population and the trapping of millions of people in what Alexander calls an "undercaste" (even once you get out of prison, if you're branded a felon, mainstream society and the mainstream economy are effectively closed to you, and you are caught in a vicious circle that puts you right back in prison). Also the militarization and corruption of the police. I didn't realize I needed another reason to hate Ronald Reagan, whose administration created the billions of dollars juggernaut War on Drugs out of essentially nothing, but hey, have one anyway. Although the War on Drugs is nominally "colorblind" (itself an exceedingly problematic idea), in practice, the police target people of color (in particular young Black men) and leave young white (middle-class, college-attending) drug dealers alone. This is a perfect example of Ibram X. Kendi's argument that policy leads public opinion. The Reagan administration said, "Look! Black drug dealers everywhere!" and everybody looked and saw Black drug dealers. Clinton also comes out looking very bad through this lens, and Obama doesn't look so hot, either. (And of course she was writing in the era before Trump and 2020 and George Floyd---although not, let's note, before Black men started dying in police choke-holds---so everything looks a little odd.)

This is a horrifying book and rightly so. The most horrifying part is perhaps the section where she talks about what it's going to take to UNDO the War on Drugs, which has wound itself through the justice and penal system in ways that are both jaw-droppingly blatant and terrifyingly subtle. And of course the work that will have to be done to ensure that ANOTHER racial caste-making system doesn't replace the War on Drugs the way the War on Drugs replaced Jim Crow and Jim Crow replaced slavery.



View all my reviews

comments

Review: Trethewey, Memorial Drive (2020)

Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir by Natasha Trethewey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I've tried to start this review 3 times and each time come up empty-handed.

So. This is a book by Natasha Trethewey, a former US poet laureate. It is centered on her mother's murder. One strand is talking about family history and about who Gwendolyn Turnbough was. One strand is about domestic abuse and how Trethewey's stepfather went from faintly creepy to abuser to murderer. And one strand is about Trethewey, as an adult, trying to come to grips with a chunk of her life she has tried strenuously to forget but which she cannot shed. And, I think, trying to figure out how her mother ended up there, on that day, how she came to be murdered.

Trethewey's stepfather is a perfect example of why asking why don't women leave abusive partners? is asking the wrong question. Because it's not that she didn't leave. She did. It's that he wouldn't let her go, that to him killing her was (a) a reasonable option and (b) preferable to acknowledging in any way that she did not belong to him. The most harrowing part of the book is the seemingly endless transcription of a telephone call in which he shows himself incapable of recognizing, never mind respecting, that his ex-wife has a subject position of her own, that she exists outside his desires. Their conversation is a death spiral, going over and over the same ground, and ending finally in murder.

This book is full of regret and grief. It is beautifully and lucidly written. It is unsparing.



View all my reviews

comments

Review: Heath, Hitler's Girls (2017)b

Hitler's Girls: Doves Amongst Eagles by Tim Heath

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Unfortunately, this book turned out to be exactly what I expected after reading the introduction: amateur English historian of the Luftwaffe meets some nice elderly German ladies, gets them talking about their childhoods, and thinks, Hey, I should write a book! The book is mostly the women's stories about their childhoods, about the Jungmadel and the Bund Deutscher Madel, about their war experiences., with some pretty amateur history thrown around them. (I still almost can't believe Heath had never heard of Sophie Scholl before one of his interview subjects mentioned her.)

So as a source of primary information about what it was like to grow up in Hitler's Germany, this is okay. Where it really falls apart is where Heath makes a mistake that a lot of professional historians have also made, which is that he goes in for comparative atrocities. I understand his impulse. He's grown very fond of his interview subjects and they have told him some truly horrible things about the Russian invasion of Berlin. It's human nature to want to defend them. But nothing you can put forward makes the Russian invasion of Berlin worse than the Holocaust---or even the German invasion of Russia. My point is not that the German people somehow "deserved" what happened, any more than the Russian people "deserved" what happened. My point is that you can't do some kind of moral calculus and decide that what happened to the Germans was less deserved than what happened to the Russians (or the Poles or the Slavs or...) Heath's interview subjects are not, by virtue of being nice elderly German ladies, more innocent than the Russian people he doesn't go interview. What happened to German girls and women (and boys and men) in the Russian invasion of Germany was horrible. Full stop. It was not more horrible or less horrible than what happened to Russian girls and women and boys and men in the German invasion of Russia. You can say (as he does) that more German women were raped than Russian women: "It is certainly true that the Russians, civilians in particular, did suffer terrible cruelty at the hands of certain units of the German army during its victorious early successful campaigns on the eastern front, especially the SS, who were responsible for the murder of thousands. However, there was nowhere near the number of sexual violations carried out against very young girls and women, as there were by the Red Army in Berlin and surrounding Soviet-occupied territories clawed back from the Germans in the Second World war [sic]" (203)* But, even assuming that's true---and he doesn't offer any source for his information---how does mass rape stack up against mass slaughter? (And it's not thousands, Mr. Heath. It's millions.) How does it stack up against a deliberate policy of starvation? Rape is an atrocity. Murder is an atrocity. There isn't a point-system that lets you grade them and compare, and the attempt to do so merely shows a naivete that I (obviously) find both annoying and morally suspect.

---
*Also, he's wrong about the details. The Einsatzgruppen (which is what he means by "certain units of the German army") were NOT part of the Wehrmacht. They were part of the SS, which was a paramilitary organization answering to Himmler.



View all my reviews

comments