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...observing and recording with the laser eyes of an ancient sibyl, not a Midwestern undergraduate with low self-esteem. As the drifts of perfectly turned moments mount up about the reader's shoulders, along with a corresponding paucity of dramatic incident, forward motion becomes increasingly difficult. Moore is a great writer, but you wish that every once in a while, she would settle for just being good...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Noble Failures | 10/5/2009 | See Source »

...twins, incestuous twins, conjoined twins, spooky dead-little-girl twins. We make handy symbols for any writer who feels inclined to muse on the nature of human identity, which is basically every writer ever. But twins aren't symbols; they're people. There are not, to my knowledge, any great identical-twin novelists (though I think John Barth has a twin sister), and I have never yet read a fictional account of twinness that I found convincing, with one exception: Darin Strauss's excellent Chang and Eng, about Barnum & Bailey's famous Siamese twins. As Elspeth tells her lover Robert...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Ghost World | 10/5/2009 | See Source »

...Elspeth, who is perplexed to discover that she has become a ghost. "What am I supposed to be learning from the spiritual equivalent of house arrest?" she wonders. "Is this an oversight on the part of the celestial authorities?" She can't leave the apartment, though she can, with great effort, nudge physical objects. (Thus vindicating the "noetic science" of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Ghost World | 10/5/2009 | See Source »

...Fearful Symmetry is not a book of great emotional force, not the way Time Traveler's Wife was. It's marred by a wrenching plot twist that, to me, sails way beyond the bounds of plausibility. And there's ultimately something strangely toylike about the little world of Her Fearful Symmetry. Everything in it--the apartment, the cemetery, the two sets of twins, the crossword-composing, obsessive-compulsive classicist upstairs--is fashioned with such twiddly bespoke neatness, such fussy perfection, that the whole affair is like a tragedy performed by exquisite dolls: lovely and precious and lifeless. Only the spectral...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Ghost World | 10/5/2009 | See Source »

Kristol, who died Sept. 18 at 89, once joked that when he had a problem, he started a magazine. The quarterly he co-edited, the Public Interest, subjected the bright new ideas of the Great Society to intense scrutiny--and opened the door for the conservative intellectual revolution of the 1970s that he both led and chronicled. Not least among his accomplishments was his marriage to the equally brilliant historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. A glimpse of the two was a picture of happiness...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Irving Kristol | 10/5/2009 | See Source »

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