Moscow Journal, or the Bratislava Option (June 2017)

Twenty years ago I fulfilled a long-standing ambition to live in Russia. I had briefly visited St. Petersburg in the spring of 1994, but I wanted to work and live in Moscow, not simply visit, and feel that I had entered the life of the city. For most of my adult life, Russia had been a consuming interest. As an undergraduate, I studied Russian history, geography, and economics. I spent several semesters pouring over Russian language primers while listening to taped concerts from the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow. As a teenager I read George F. Kennan’s history of Soviet foreign policy and later his two-volume autobiography. Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers became an essential text. Russia since the Napoleonic wars, late-Imperial Russia, the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Isaac Deutscher’s biographies, the Comintern and the rise of international communism—these topics were keenly interesting.

My opportunity to live in the capital came after the fall of the party dictatorship in 1991. This inaugurated a spell of about ten years when a Westerner could freely explore Russian life in the capital without worrying about the authorities. So in February 1997, after laying careful plans from Chicago, I flew to Moscow to assume a teaching appointment at Moscow State University. I recorded my impressions in the journal that I have chosen to publish here.

Read Moscow Journal, or The Bratislava Option (Adobe .pdf 347 KB)

Berryman's Last Work (May 2017)

This winter and spring was a period of enforced immobility for me. When healthy, I follow a work-out routine at my gym and attend dance classes, but those options were taken away from me for a few months. While my ankle healed, I studied an unfinished novel of John Berryman’s that was published in 1973, a year after his death. Years before, I had read Recovery, which comes down to us in the form of a 200-page fragment and a set of notes suggesting the direction the story would have taken had Berryman lived to complete it. The figure at the center of Recovery, Alan Severance, is confined to Ward W of Northeastern Hospital in an unnamed city, recovering from decades of alcoholism. I decided to write a brief piece about the book.

Read Berryman's Last Work (Adobe .pdf 267 KB)

Mechanics (March 2017)

Tradesmen that we come to trust and depend on become important parts of our lives, as I explain in the following essay. In the fall of 1990 when I needed work done on my car, I chanced upon a mechanic that I used for another twenty-seven years. He was in charge of a body shop that was near the old Sears department store on Lawrence Avenue. About ten years later, he moved his business to the Far North Side of the Chicago, and though the neighborhood deteriorated with time, I followed the mechanic there.

Read Mechanics (Adobe .pdf 263 KB)

Flannery O'Connor's Bus Ride (November 2016)

Alfred Kazin observes in The Bright Book of Life that there are “many angry people” in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. He believes that her prolonged illness—she died of lupus at 39--affected her work more fully than critics believe. “The sourness, the unsparingness, the constant sense of human weakness in her work,” he writes, “may not need as many translations into theology as they get in contemporary American criticism.” A devout Catholic from Georgia, O’Connor belonged to a generation of Southern writers--Robert Pen Warren, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Walker Percy come to mind--who acquired renown in the post-war years. The story I set out to consider, “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” is a study of race relations in the South and remains one of her best-known compositions. It does indeed have many angry characters. I have kept the idiom of the day, including "Negro" and "colored," because it fits with the language of the 1950s, when the story was written.

Read Flannery O'Connor's Bus Ride (Adobe .pdf 344 KB)

Christmas with Russell Banks (October 2016)

Could Russell Banks find a publisher for "X-Mas" today? In the age of political correctness, one has reason to wonder. This five-page story first appeared in 1990 in Antaeus, a literary journal that lasted nearly twenty-five years until it was closed in 1994. (It was republished in the Banks collection Angel on the Roof.) A middle-aged college instructor ventures into a dangerous neighborhood in Boston and is attacked by a pair of black men on Christmas Eve. I think this excellent story is worth some discussion.

Read Christmas with Russell Banks (Adobe .pdf 329 KB)

Every Man, According to Philip Roth (September 2016)

Philip Roth would not relish the question, but after rereading Everyman, a novel from 2006, I wondered if he had drawn on his brother's experience in writing the book. Like most authors, Roth dislikes attempts to interpret his novels as autobiography, but the hero in Everyman seems a bit similar to Roth's older brother Sandy. Like Everyman, he spent most of his life in advertising but started a second career in the fine arts upon his retirement. According to Roth's biographer, Claudia Roth Pierpont, the older brother studied painting at well-known art schools as a young man, including the Art Students League and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. But he felt obliged to go into commercial art to support his family. In any case, Everyman's health deteriorates and he runs out of time and loses interest in art. By the end of the story, he descends into a period of torpor and inactivity.

Read Every Man, According to Philip Roth (Adobe .pdf 170 KB)

Philip Roth's Epistemology (July 2016)

Roth and Proust? I would not have considered any particular connection until I discovered one when rereading Roth's novels from the 1990s, including The Human Stain, Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral. The question is the knowability of others and ourselves. So much in early-twentieth-century literature, and certainly Proust, casts doubt on the accessibility of reality. I read the entirety of Remembrance of Things Past thirty years ago as a graduate student studying the text with famous instructors. I returned to it for this piece. The long passage from the novel that opens the essay is taken from the Kilmartin translation.

Read Philip Roth's Epistemology (Adobe .pdf 201 KB)

Hirohito at Disneyland (March 2016)

In 2001, Professor Herbert P. Bix received the Pulitzer Prize for his volume Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. Several English-language biographies of the Emperor have been published, but Bix's seems the most through. Certainly it overthrows any suggestion that Hirohito was a reluctant bystander at the top of Imperial Japan, a benign, paternal figure who played no active role in that vast Asian war. The point needs to be emphasized. Americans for decades assumed the opposite. For reasons that my essay makes clear, after finishing the Bix biography, I discerned an unexpected link between the study and E.L. Doctorow's novel The Book of Daniel.

Read Hirohito at Disneyland (Adobe .pdf 168 KB)

The War Ends: Unconditional Surrender and the A-Bomb (October 2015)

I have never found the deployment of nuclear weapons in Japan morally problematic, and I have often wondered why others do. There cannot really be any doubt that the bombs saved far more lives in Japan than they claimed. I have prepared the following essay on the seventieth anniversary of their use. Two books—Retribution, by Max Hastings, and Downfall, by Richard B. Frank—provide a powerful justification and settle the matter conclusively. For fourteen years—1931 to 1945--Japan was in the hands of fanatics and killers. The Imperial Army had, in effect, taken over the country. Even the use of the bomb failed to persuade the leadership to end the war. The immensity of the atrocities committed by a grossly derelict Japanese leadership presents a mirror image of Nazi criminality in Europe.

Read The War Ends: Unconditional Surrender and the A-Bomb (Adobe .pdf 212 KB)

Bellow's Characters: Reflections on Reality (July 2015)

Over the spring I finished Zachary Leader's biography of Saul Bellow, a useful addition to the biographical and memoir literature that has emerged over the last few decades. In 1980, Mark Harris published Drumlin Woodchuck, a brief memoir of his friendship with Bellow and his failed effort to produce the first biography. Publication of the book ended their relations. Ruth Miller, who had known Bellow since the 1930s, published Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination in 1991. Shown the manuscript in advance of publication, Bellow threatened a suit if certain private details were not removed. Bellow's one-time agent, Harriet Wasserman, wrote Handsome Is. . ., a memoir that Martin Amis has generously termed superfluous. James Atlas published in 2000 the first book-length biography of the author. The volume includes much useful information but is marred by a malicious tone that affects nearly every chapter in the book, above all the later ones. Zachary Leader has now produced a 650-page biography with over 100 pages of endnotes that in themselves repay careful attention. Thoroughly researched and balanced, the study covers the author's life up to 1964, when he turned 49 and published Herzog, his greatest artistic achievement.

In the pages that follow, I offer a few remarks on a small set of details Leader describes at much greater length—Bellow's use of characters from his life for his stories and novels. These comments modify and add to the essay I wrote some years ago on Ravelstein, Bellow's last novel.

Read Bellow's Characters: Reflections on Reality (Adobe .pdf 258 KB)

Some Brief Remarks on Berryman (December 2014)

The year that has nearly ended marks the centenary of the birth of John Berryman. Little notice has been given to this event, and it prompts me to offer some brief remarks.

Read Brief Remarks on Berryman (Adobe .pdf 192 KB)

Philip Roth's Suspicions (October 2014)

Over the summer, I read I Married a Communist, the second novel of Philip Roth's American trilogy from the 1990s, which includes American Pastoral and The Human Stain. An unsuccessful novel, Communist is nevertheless important for those who take an interest in Roth's career. In an interview with a Swedish newspaper from the spring of 2014 (republished in The New York Times), the author asserts that many of the attacks on his work and character are political and aesthetically irrelevant. "The imposition of a cause's idea of reality can only mistakenly be called `reading'," he says. He goes on to compare the campaign for political correctness to the anti-Communist wars that Joe McCarthy waged in the 1950s.

Read Philip Roth's Suspicions (Adobe .pdf 198 KB)

Daniel: The Movie (July 2014)

I offer to readers this brief review of Sidney Lumet's film Daniel. The screenplay was penned by E.L. Doctorow, and though the story is little more than an artful piece of agit-prog, those who have read the novel will find the film of some interest. Of his four novels that have become film entertainments—Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Billy Bathgate—Doctorow wrote the screenplay for Daniel only.

Read Daniel: The Movie (Adobe .pdf 165 KB)

E. L. Doctorow Looks at the Rosenbergs (May 2014)

Long intending to remedy my ignorance of Doctorow's work, I read his most recent novel, Andrew's Brain, over the Christmas holidays. Then I spent several months reading a number of earlier works, including The Book of Daniel (1971), his rendering of the 1950 trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. "That case," he said, "is an iconic portrait of the United States in the 1950s as a self-portrait of a time of total national psychosis..." He continues: "That's what my book is about...the unconscionable, I feel, thing that parents can do to the lives of their children based on their ideological fantasies." This was Doctorow's remark to the historian Allen Weinstein in an interview that was conducted in 2008. I do not think, however, that Doctorow was quite so hard on the Rosenbergs before, either in his novel itself or in interviews published in the decade following the book's appearance.

Read E.L. Doctorow Looks at the Rosenbergs (Adobe .pdf 294 KB)

Greg Bellow's Anger (June 2013)

The most recent addition to the pool of Bellow studies is a father-son memoir by Greg Bellow, a psychotherapist practicing in the Bay Area. It joins other texts by James Atlas, Harriet Wasserman, Ruth Miller, and Mark Harris. The melodramatic, unpromising title--Saul Bellow's Heart--hints at a disappointing book that does little more than expose the rage of the author's first-born child. I use this volume as a means of reviewing some of the literature on Bellow that has been published in recent years and to correct the all-too-numerous errors that are strewn throughout this new book

Read Greg Bellow's Anger (Adobe .pdf 115 KB)

Bellow, Barfield, and Boredom (May 2013)

This discussion of Bellow and boredom is a companion piece to my essay "Bellow and Anthroposophy," and is best read in the light of the earlier one. The author boldly declares himself in Humboldt's Gift a student of Rudolf Steiner and a careful reader of his texts and the texts of his disciples. At the time that Humboldt was published, Bellow began corresponding with Owen Barfield, a leading anthroposophist in the English-speaking world whom he later met a number of times in the U.K. Their contact came to an end when Barfield published a number of reviews critical of Bellow's work. Still, the impact of anthroposophy outlasted his relations with Barfield, and calls for continued reflection.

Read Bellow, Barfield, and Boredom (Adobe .pdf 206 KB)

Pollock (April 2013)

The entertainment world is voracious in its demand for lurid material; the lives of the "action painters" of the post-war era can supply it. Pollock famously went off a country road at high speeds, killing himself and an occupant of his car. Franz Kline died in his early fifties of heart failure. Rothko was a suicide. Their premature deaths were somehow linked with the audacity of their work. But Barnett Newman lived into his sixties, and de Kooning reached his nineties. Clyfford Still was working into his seventies, and the immigrant Hans Hofmann died at 86. Many other less-well-known figures lived ample lives not cut short by accident or bad luck. Still, as Harold Rosenberg once remarked, "There was something extreme about the Abstract Expressionists," a "danger" he attributes to their "attempt to change something basic in their lives." The pioneering efforts of that generation of painters and critics acquire glamour and stimulate interest, and Janice Van Horne's recently published autobiography, A Complicated Marriage, captures a little of both. She was married to the art critic Clement Greenberg, who championed Jackson Pollock in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a decisive phase of his career. I have therefore used her book as a platform to discuss the movie that derives from Pollock's life. The story ends with his death, at the moment when his generation of painters was leaving behind the "heroic phase" of post-war abstraction and entering the world of celebrity and money.

Read Pollock (Adobe .pdf 109 KB)

Review of Margin Call (December 2012)

With few concessions to the audience, Margin Call captures a small but telling piece of our current economic malaise. The collapse of the stock and housing markets in 2008 had numerous origins--irresponsible lending by banks, the accumulation of debt by the public, and the packaging and sale of worthless bonds by investment firms. Margin Call depicts a night and day in the life of one such company, laboring to extricate itself from a disaster it helped to create. Old hands such as Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, and Demi Moore have been cast with lesser-known actors in a fine and carefully made movie.

Read Margin Call: Hollywood Looks at the Housing Calamity (Adobe .pdf 119 KB)

Cormac McCarthy's The Road (September 2012)

Only in the last dozen years has McCarthy attracted the attention he deserves. He deals with a subject--the American Southwest--that is remote for most readers, and he often rejects the promotional activities that writers exploit. Many readers were undoubtedly led to his books by their film productions, including All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men. With his remarkable descriptions of city life, Saul Bellow became a major figure after the publication of Augie March (1953). Philip Roth, John Cheever and John Updike treated sex and the suburbs of the Northeast, and could usually be counted on to sell well. Their subjects were close to their readers. On the other hand, it took Faulkner decades to gain his due recognition, which came long after Hemingway found his, even though their careers virtually overlap. Some of this is doubtless attributable to subject matter. The Spanish Civil War and American expatriates who survived the war in France were probably more interesting to the public in 1935 or 1940 than tales of rural Mississippi.

Read Cormac McCarthy's The Road (Adobe .pdf 171 KB)

Cormac McCarthy Looks at Modern America (April 2012)

It took a number of readings, but after the fourth, I think I began to understand the deeper currents active in Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men. The storytelling is so spare and unconventional that I chose not to write about the book until I thought I understood virtually every paragraph in it, a difficult matter: the book is very carefully written, and there is nothing superfluous in it. A further issue: No Country was my first contact with McCarthy, and though impressed, I was unable to place it in the larger context of his work. No Country is a very arresting novel, and I wanted to describe it in a way that might contribute to the public discussion.

Alfred Kazin and His Generation: Bellow, Trilling, and Others (November 2011)

In the past twelve months, Viking and Yale University Press have brought out volumes offering source material on the inner lives of important American literary figures in the second half of the twentieth century. I reviewed Saul Bellow's correspondence earlier this year, and I now post a discussion of Alfred Kazin's Journals, selected and edited by Richard M. Cook. Chair of the English Department at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, Cook published a biography of Kazin in 2007. In a sense, the Journals that Cook has edited are a kind of addition to his biography; readers without access to the entire collection have no way of knowing what has been omitted. His work as Kazin's editor is as professional and effective as Benjamin Taylor's, the editor of Bellow's selected letters, is the reverse. To the document he has assembled, Cook contributes a careful and scholarly apparatus. In both cases, the chief interest remains the documentary material itself, and I hope my appreciations lead you to both. I should add that all of the citations in italics in the Kazin essay are in the original.

Read Alfred Kazin and His Generation: Bellow, Trilling, and Others (Adobe .pdf 265 KB)

Saul Bellow and Anthroposophy (April 2011)

Part memoir, part analysis of Bellow's fiction and Letters, this essay considers the author's ties to Anthroposophy and his relations with Owen Barfield.The latter was a celebrated English lawyer-scholar and for decades a leading interpreter of Anthroposophy, the movement Rudolf Steiner founded in 1913. As I note in my piece, the letters Bellow and Barfield exchanged first appeared five years ago, when they were published in a biography of Barfield by Simon Blaxland-de Lange. Readers of Benjamin Taylor's edition of Bellow's correspondence will benefit from consulting de Lange's study, which offers rich biographical detail absent from the newer text.

Read Saul Bellow and Anthroposophy (Adobe .pdf 198.28 KB)

Saul Bellow's Correspondence--Parts I and II (December 2010)

This fall Viking published a 552-page collection of Saul Bellow's letters. The editor of the volume, Benjamin Taylor, describes the selection as representing no more than two-fifths of the known correspondence Bellow prepared over his long and productive life. As a former student of his at the University of Chicago, I found the letters keenly interesting but very unsatisfactory in their presentation. I describe the editorial problems in the first essay (Part I) that follows. Rather than review the book as a whole, however, I am preparing a series of pieces on this unusual collection; reading it through, I sometimes thought that it might be reviewed letter by letter. That is absurd, of course, but the first epistle in the collection was written in 1932 and the last in 2004, and I think I can do greater justice to the volume with a sequence of pieces instead of a general overview.

Read Saul Bellow's Correspondence--Part I (Adobe .pdf 98 KB)

Read Saul Bellow's Correspondence--Part II (Adobe .pdf 104 KB)

Valéry on Labor and Consumption (October 2010)

Paul Valéry is more contemporary than ever. Not only a poet, an aesthetician, and a leading literary figure of France's Third Republic, he also claims our attention as an analyst of consumption, labor and the product-centered world. In the age of Google and Facebook and industrial espionage spanning the continents, his essays and occasional pieces on "work" and technological change need to be studied more closely than ever. The pieces I look at below, along with a few snippets from Nietzsche, will especially resonate with those who question our technological wonderland.

Read Valéry on Labor and Consumption (Adobe .pdf 97.88 KB)

Pellegrini: An Obituary (July 2009)

Norman Pellegrini, the long-time music programmer for radio station WFMT, died this month at age 79 in a Chicago hospital; a newspaper indicated that the cause of death was cancer. Pellegrini had worked for WFMT for about forty years, the station long identified with classical music here in Chicago. His voice was inseparable from the broadcast of recordings, concerts, and opera, and I offer my own thoughts on this respected broadcaster.

Read A Dissent on Pellegrini (Adobe .pdf, 51.12 KB)

Remembering Rosenfeld (July 2009)

Earlier this year, in an Evanston, Illinois bookstore, I discovered a new and unexpected volume. Yale University Press had just released a slender book called Rosenfeld's Lives, by the Stanford University scholar Steven J. Zipperstein. A native of Chicago, Rosenfeld moved to New York in 1940 to attend graduate school and began publishing reviews, essays and stories. With surprising speed, he established himself as one of the most promising literary talents in America. He was also a very close friend of Saul Bellow. Sadly, and for reasons that are far from clear, his career went into abrupt decline by the end of the decade, and in July 1956, after returning to Chicago, he died of heart failure at the age of 38.

Today only specialists in post-war American writing recognize his name. He is not precisely a neglected talent, but only a well-stocked library would have his novel, stories and essays. Despite the recession, and the care I take with money, Rosenfeld's Lives proved irresistible, and so was writing a review of it.

Read Remembering Rosenfeld (Adobe .pdf, 103.66 KB)

Remarks on Sabbath's Theater (June 2009)

The essay I prepared on Sabbath's Theater proved unusually difficult to write. Part of the trouble was the length and extreme complexity of the novel. Ascertaining the dramatic center of the story was easy enough, but going beyond a direct and simple statement to a fuller description of the author's plan proved rather hard. I should also concede that I don't consider the novel entirely successful. A graphomaniac, Roth delights in his considerable powers of invention and provides readers with more information about his characters than they need--or can absorb. He wearies us in the same way that Proust and Joyce do. The novel is far longer than it need be, and Roth's control over his material is questionable.

Still, the story is written with enormous energy, and fascinated me from the moment I picked it up and began reading. Mastering the innumerable strands of the narrative and details of the main characters' lives was an irresistible challenge. Mickey Sabbath, the central figure of the story, is presented in encyclopedic detail and with brilliant wit; anyone who studies the novel with care will know him as well as any figure in contemporary fiction, know him as well as a personal friend (though he is unlikely to become one).

Sabbath's Theater is best understood in the context of the work Roth produced later in the decade, and I have added to my review references to The Human Stain and The Dying Animal. All three books were produced by the same mind and the same hand. It is a degraded world that Roth presents in these stories, and his isolated characters pursue the "consolations" of sex in a universe where there is little reason or justice. The ageing David Kepesh appeases his distress by practicing the classics on his piano; Mickey Sabbath is driven hither and yon, staggering under too many losses; and Coleman Silk, battered mercilessly by enemies at Athena College, secludes himself in his country home in an attempt to recover from the death of his wife and the destruction of his academic career. Faunia Farley brings him relief from acute moral suffering, but also contact with a deranged former husband and a deadly confrontation. Probably not intended as a formal "trilogy," each story can be read independently, without knowledge of the others, but my own understanding of Sabbath was enlarged by an awareness of the texts that followed.

Read Remarks on Sabbath's Theater (Adobe .pdf, 116.69 KB)

Notes on Ravelstein (August 2008)

I prepared this essay on Saul Bellow and the composition of Ravelstein in lieu of teaching a course on the subject. Since I didn't have any students to talk to, I decided to use my word-processor as a classroom instead (see essay for details). The debate over the origins of the novel has subsided, but the book, like all of Bellow's, is still in print, and the Library of America is now producing a uniform edition of this American master. It therefore seemed worthwhile to reconsider the use of private materials for artistic purposes, the argument Bellow stirred up with the publication of his last novel. It is a large and complex topic drawing on questions of identity, privacy, and artistic transformation, matters I no more than touch on in my essay. I contend that in publishing Ravelstein Bellow did no harm to his model, but my understanding of the question has certainly been modified by the rudimentary research I conducted into the topic.

Read Notes on Ravelstein (Adobe .pdf, 77.04 KB).

Read All About It! (June 2008)

I penned this parody at the end of the spring, 2008. It was provoked by an AP story with a San Luis Obispo dateline, according to which "an Indian company would be assigned copy editing" projects by the Orange County Register, a well-known daily in Southern California. The Indian firm would also assume "page layout for a community newspaper" published by the Register. It brought to mind a newspaper I used to admire and for which many years ago I wanted to write--the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, published in my home town.

I should not, however, minimize the troubles besetting the news publishing business--they are extremely severe and appear to be worsening by the month. I am not sure the solution turned up by the Register is the right one, however.

Read Read All About It! (Adobe .pdf, 10.29 KB).

Essay on Tocqueville (June 2008)

My essay on Tocqueville was provoked by two publications--Arthur Goldhammer's fresh translation of Democracy in America; and Hugh Brogan's biography of Tocqueville. Brogan is the son of D.W. Brogan, an eminent English historian who was famous during his day and wrote extensively about the French. I had read Democracy twice before and began reading it a third time in the Goldhammer translation.  I was therefore intensely curious about Tocqueville's life. But Brogan's book proved a serious disappointment. I explain why in the essay I produced. The biography's limitations notwithstanding, it did encourage me to read Raymond Aron and Andre Jardin, two French scholars who write far more effectively about Tocqueville. Both are more reliable guides than Brogan to the life and thought of this brilliant thinker, whose study is still the best work of political sociology on the United States.

Read Essay on Tocqueville (Adobe .pdf, 106.9 KB).

Evanston Hillbillies (November 2007)

I scribbled this note after returning home on a cold, wet Sunday night from Pick -Staiger Concert Hall, the facility where Northwestern University schedules classical events. It is a lament about the boorishness of the audience for serious music today. Performing on a musical instrument before the ticket-buying public requires years of training and enormous effort, most of it solitary. I wonder if the musicians who do this get the audience they deserve. I wonder if we who sit in darkness deserve them. My complaint is hardly original, but it does seem to me that the problem is more severe than it was ten or twenty years ago.

Read Evanston Hillbillies (Adobe .pdf, 55.77 KB).

Review of Philip Roth's Exit Ghost (October 2007)

After the century turned eight years ago, I found myself reading Philip Roth more often than I had before. My interest before then had been limited to acquiring a volume if I found one second-hand. I had read a lot of Roth, but then he has written a lot, and one could read much of what he had written and yet miss much of his output. For some reason I could not readily explain, I now began to acquire volumes as they first appeared in bookstores. I read Everyman when it was published in 2006, but with no more than mild interest. It is a fine piece of work, but chiefly an exercise in craftsmanship. Exit Ghost was published just a year later, and finding it far superior to Everyman, I thought I might contribute to the reviews gathering around it.

Read Review of Philip Roth's Exit Ghost (Adobe .pdf, 108.89 KB).

Stagebill

Sister Carrie

To help explain a local theatrical production, Stagebill asked me to interview director Ina Marlowe and describe her version of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie.

Read Interview with Ina Marlowe (Adobe .pdf, 116 KB)

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The Secret Rapture

David Hare's play The Secret Rapture bombed in New York, but Stagebill instructed me to interview director Eric Simonson when he staged the play, rather bravely I thought, at Steppenwolf Theatre.

Read Interview with Eric Simonson (Adobe .pdf, 109 KB)

Chicago Reader

The Butchers of Buenos Aires (June 5, 1987)

My piece on Argentina is a review of two books deriving from the "dirty war" that ravaged the country between 1976 and 1983. It was governed then by a succession of Army generals who overthrew the bizarre regime of Estela Peron, the dictator's third and final wife. I was living in Buenos Aires at the time of the coup d'etat and reporting for Knight-Ridder, a wire-service that took a keen interest in the Argentine economy.

As for the books, Never Again was produced by the Sabato Commission, a group organized by President Raul Alfonsin to investigate the army's atrocities after the dictatorship fell. Prison Without a Name, Cell Without a Number is an extraordinary account prepared by the late Jacobo Timerman, an Argentine journalist and publisher who had extensive ties to the Peronist administration and the Argentine army. Timerman survived his terrifying ordeal; his book is a memorial to the 30,000 who did not.

Read The Butchers of Buenos Aires (June 5, 1987)

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Bellow's Book of the Dead (June 19, 1987)

In the mid-1980s, I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and faithfully attended the weekly seminars conducted by Allen Bloom and Saul Bellow.  We met on the fifth floor of Foster Hall, and ran through the classics from Shakespeare to Proust.  A grand experience, which contributed to my review of More Die of Heartbreak, the novel Bellow published in 1987.

Read Bellow's Book of the Dead (June 19, 1987)

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9 Years That Nudged the World (October 2, 1987)

Berkeley was a seedbed of student revolt in the 1960s, but I studied there far too late to be a participant. My chief recollection of politics there is of a candidate for the governorship who campaigned on Sproul Plaza from the basket of a hot-air balloon. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Jim Miller's history of the student movement, Democracy is in the Streets, and especially the pages devoted to Tom Hayden. How many know that Hayden began his career as a political radical by covering the campaign for Civil Rights in the south? As an undergraduate, he wrote for the University of Michigan student newspaper. He later married (and divorced) Jane Fonda, and became a conventional liberal California politician.

Read 9 Years That Nudged the World (October 2, 1987)

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Bohemia Lost, December 4, 1987

I reviewed Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals a few years before the great housing boom of the nineties swept away the bohemia that he claims fathered American literature after the Great War.  Eugene O'Neil, John Dos Passos, and H.L. Mencken, to mention just a few dissenting writers, had little in common with the "tenured radicals" who replaced them as shapers of avant-garde taste half a century later.  University life, Jacoby argues, has produced unreadable prose and restrictive conformity instead of dissent.

Read Bohemia Lost (December 4, 1987)

Questions about this Website can be directed to David H. Cohen.

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