I wish I liked this novel more than I did. There is no story—unless it was Rwanda; unless, here, it is the stolen generation—worth knowing and caring about more than the one this book tells: the slaughter of Sudanese villagers wedged between vicious idealists (the Sudanese army helped by Murahaleen militias, on the one hand, and desperate SPLA rebels, on the other). The problem in Eggers’ book is not the story; it’s the novel. And I wish it didn’t matter,…

If you wanted to read your way through the Norman Mailer oeuvre—thirty-six works to date—you wouldn’t start at The Castle in the Forest, his new novel, because that would be as far as you’d get.

Mailer is a titan of the modern novel, and his feet are made of clay. Obsessed with sex and evil and truth, determined to go again and again to the hell at the bottom of the American ego, possessed of a prodigious gift…

Robert Gray and the shepherding of antipodean being

PROLOGUE

Pastoral: (Latin) pertaining to shepherds
—J.A. Cuddon, Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory

Since modern Australia rode to prosperity and nationhood on the sheep’s back, as it is said; and since the feet of millions of sheep—like four times as many roving jackhammers—have done unspeakable damage to soils never in their long history acquainted with hard hoofs, it behooves us…

What I disliked at first about this little brown book, Brenda Niall’s memoir of a life spent writing other people’s lives, I came in the end to admire.

For half its length Life Class reads like another Australian work of nonfiction speaking itself tunelessly forth as though literature were the work of novelists alone. Despite its wisdom and circumspection, Life Class is a piece of life writing without much life in its writing.

Niall, an accidental…

I wept at the end of The Road as I’ve never wept over a book, as though I had come the whole hopeless way with a man and his boy, death at every corner and no birds singing, and knew with them that the whole world was over and would never be put right.

Then I went outside and was shocked to find the living world still living on out there, and I wept some more at the…