Resumo de Fiction & Poetry

First, the poetry; this week, it's on the cover. Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments has prompted a stinging rebuke from Helen Vendler, at The New Republic. Ms Vendler is opposed to publishing "maimed and stunted siblings" of Bishop's best work. David Orr, in the Book Review is almost wildly enthusiastic. "You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop," he begins. Well! Mr Orr's piece is not a book review but an encomium, making arguably extravagant claims for Bishop's verse. It is noted in passing that Alice Quinn, poetry editor at The New Yorker, edited the collection.
Colson Whitehead's is a name that I've heard a lot without, however, hearing anything very tempting. David Gates's review of Apex Hides the Hurt doesn't alter the situation. The review is for the most part a summary of the apparently non-naturalistic novel, and one clogged by comment. It's not at all fun to read. "There happens to be a perfectly good word to characterize Whitehead's enterprise, but to tell you would ruin his ending," writes Mr Gates. If a book's ending could really be ruined by the premature ejaculation of le mot juste, then it's not the enterprise for me. I would say that only a fan of Mr Whitehead would get anything out of this review, but the only thing to get is warm fellow-feeling, not insight.
Liesl Schillinger DOESN'T LIKE Lucy Ellmann's Doctors & Nurses, expressing her annoyance with Ms Ellmann's reliance on capitalized words.

There's no reason an overweight, self-destructive female character can't beguile the reader. ... But Ellmann's readers will have difficulty deciding whether the reaction she wants Jen to provoke is laughter, commiseration, guilt or the gag reflex.
Top marks, Ms Schillinger!

Jacob Heilbrunn's review of The Last Supper, a Cold War novel by Charles McCarry, is somewhat less felicitous.

So where does McCarry's nearly faultless performance leave him in the cold war novelistic pantheon? He easily bests his American rivals, but whether he topples his British contemporaries from the perch is another matter.
It is a matter that ought to have been the topic of the review; instead of which, Mr Heilbrunn summarizes the plot.
There are two historical novels this week, both based on real people, Marie Curie and Bertolt Brecht respectively. Francine Prose pretty much blasts The Book About Blanche and Marie, by Per Olav Enquist (translated by Tina Nunnally).

The fact that one so often pauses in mid-sentence to think "How interesting if this were true!" signals a disquieting lack of engagement with the sentence one is actually reading.
A quick, effective thrust. Neil Gordon's review of Brecht's Mistress, by Jacques-Marie Amette (translated by Andrew Brown) is clouded by the novel's reception in Europe, where it has been praised by A N Wilson and awarded the Prix Goncourt. Mr Gordon does not share the enthusiasm. "The events of the novel, while historically exact, are undramatized." One finishes the review wondering if Mr Gordon is the right reader to review an understandably prickly French novel.
Nonfiction
Two books in this week's Review criticize, directly or indirectly, the grip of globalizing free trade on the lives of millions. In similarly-structured pieces, both are praised but ultimately judged to be naive. Contents are admiringly summarized, and then hands are thrown into the air. I like to think that this sort of thing can't go on much longer: somebody has to start calling for restrictions on unfettered free markets, because it is palpably not the case that everyone benefits from unrestricted commerce. Indeed, Robert B Reich, reviewing Fair Trade For All: How Trade Can Promote Development, by Joseph E Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton, points out that the "wealthy are growing much wealthier while the middle class is being squeezed." But Mr Reich, a former labor secretary, has nothing more to say than his hope that wealth will be morSurely he could do better. He writes,

Without these other institutions [roads, schools, &c] in place, the authors say, trade by itself can do more harm than good.
It is precisely the development of new institutions, designed to encourage and protect widespread productivity, that thinkers on this subject should be working on. Such institutions will counter the otherwise irresistible pull that drives capitalists to employ as few human beings as possible. That this pull is currently wreaking damage in the United States is the subject of Louis Uchitelle's The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences. Economist Brad DeLong writes,

Uchitelle's diagnosis that mass layoffs are a serious national problem is convincing. But for this card-carrying economist, his desired prescription is not. I see no examples anywhere in the world of economies that have taken steps in the directions he desires without severe side-effects.
All right, so the European model has its flaws. Again, Mr DeLong ought to be formulating constructive questions. I repeat: neither of these reviewers is a layman. It's extremely demoralizing to see such a lack of creative spirit.

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