Word: novelistic
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Short answer: the good stuff. In The Preservationist (St. Martin's; 230 pages), first-time novelist David Maine picks on Noah again, and with good reason. The story of Noah, crowded with incident though it is, gets just four brief chapters in Genesis, and Maine has a terrific time romping around in the gaps between the verses, mouthing off in the somber silences between those Old Testament phrases. How does it feel to be 600 years old, as Noe (Maine uses archaic spellings for biblical names) was at the time of the flood? The Bible offhandedly mentions giants--what were...
...When people used to ask John Updike what he was going to be after college, he would say, ‘I’m going to be a great American novelist,’” Limpert remembers. “And nobody who heard that ever laughed...
...fact, like Thomas Pynchon, Wallace is really a horror novelist. The best stories in the collection are the three-page take on a scalded baby (Incarnations of Burned Children), the nightmare of a sexually abused woman whose marriage has fallen apart because she and her husband can't figure out whether he's snoring or she's hallucinating (Oblivion) and Good Old Neon, which succeeds where thousands of 20th century novels failed, nailing the yuppie angst of being found a fraud. It alone is worth buying the book...
...Unlike the elegant prose of novelist Anchee Min's 1994 memoir Red Azalea (Min was similarly plucked from serfdom to join Madam Mao's cultural crusade), Li's straightforward narrative rarely delves into agonizing emotional battles, nor does Li use his experiences to comment on social and political issues. Mao's Last Dancer is nonetheless a moving story, and considering the books dedicated to Cultural Revolution horrors, it's heartening to read that someone was able to dance his way through...
...novelist, and a very fine one, Patrick McGrath has specialized in the modern Gothic, books in which madmen of one kind or another work their wiles. But his superb and unwholesome new novel, Port Mungo (Knopf; 242 pages), is not about anything so simple as abnormal psychology. It's about the brutal impulses available to anyone, especially artists, who would let slip the loose restraints of civilization...