Michael Alec Rose

FictionSatire

I Am God

Review by Michael Alec Rose

What if you were God, going about your godly business—arbitrarily bestowing blessings and havoc upon humanity’s billions and enjoying the glorious handiwork of your cosmos—when, quite literally out of the blue, you started paying closer attention to a lanky geneticist named Daphne who works in a provincial Italian city? Well, of course you would have to write about it. Unfortunately, no language can ever adequately express God’s quandary of having fallen head-over-incorporeal-heels in love with a human. Therefore, the whole literary enterprise is a bust from the get-go. It’s a delightful, strikingly current, infectiously readable bust.

The irrational pull of erotic love has never had a funnier incarnation than the one in I Am God, the latest novel by satirical Italian author Giacomo Sartori. The deity’s infatuation with Daphne drives him crazier and crazier, until he must—no, I won’t spoil it for you. Besides, it’s just too embarrassing for poor ol’ God, as it never was for that serial sexual predator Zeus.

In composing Sono Dio (the original title sounds so much better), Sartori pulls out all the stops in a long tradition of first-person confessions by the Creator, beginning with the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. In the radical spirit of those biblical pronouncements, the words coming out of this God’s invisible mouth are altogether unnerving and explicitly reproachful to any belief system, whether orthodox or atheistic. Transcending mere blasphemy, Sartori refuses to take the Lord’s name in vain. Every little chapter of I Am God forces the reader to decide whether laughter or outrage is the proper response.

There’s a grand tradition of Italian artists (Dante, Michelangelo, Verdi) who shock us with their new and unsettling images of God. In his modest and profound way, Sartori belongs in this terrific company.

The irrational pull of erotic love has never had a funnier incarnation than the one in I Am God, the latest novel by satirical Italian author Giacomo Sartori.

FictionSpeculative Fiction

The Dreamers

Review by Michael Alec Rose

For genre geeks such as myself, one of the most exciting developments in 21st-century fiction is the embrace of sci-fi, fantasy and horror by so-called “literary” authors. Karen Thompson Walker epitomized this elevating trend in her first genre-bending debut novel, The Age of Miracles (2012). Walker takes on the horror genre with The Dreamers, the tale of an inexplicable sleeping sickness that consumes an entire college town, beginning with a freshman dorm.

Soon after the first student is stricken, several of her classmates also fall prey to the plague, including a young woman whose social awkwardness takes on fatal significance, and another who has just had sex for the first time and is now pregnant. The development of new life in her womb becomes a crucial theme throughout the novel, an affirmation of vitality in stark contrast to the mother’s dreadful slumber.

As the disease spreads beyond campus, panic rises. The panorama of these afflictions exposes a range of memorable characters. There are no heroes. In fact, the foolishness of “heroism” is diagnosed with devastating impact. There are many different ways that Walker’s victims succumb to the mysterious sleep, while others attempt to cope with their loved ones’ collapse. Worst of all, some sleepers come out of their uncanny dream state permanently unhinged. In every case, a basic principle of human nature unfolds: A person realizes their truest self when confronted with a crisis of mortality.

The Dreamers does more than satisfy both the horror geek and the literary nerd. With clinical precision and psychological depth, Walker delivers a vivid embodiment of our ongoing national anxiety.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

For genre geeks such as myself, one of the most exciting developments in 21st-century fiction is the embrace of sci-fi, fantasy and horror by so-called “literary” authors. Karen Thompson Walker epitomized this elevating trend in her first genre-bending debut novel, The Age of Miracles (2012). Walker takes on the horror genre with The Dreamers, the tale of an inexplicable sleeping sickness that consumes an entire college town, beginning with a freshman dorm.

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

Paternal love in the second novel from a literary critic

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Almost 20 years ago I was smitten by The Broken Estate, an early collection of literary criticism by James Wood that memorably attuned and complicated my reading. So I was ready to be nothing if not critical when I picked up his second novel, Upstate. Fiction sharks can’t help smelling blood in the water when a distinguished critic writes a novel. Indeed, the Times Literary Supplement’s recent review of Upstate promises to judge the book “by its author’s own formidable standards.”

Wood’s critical writing stands upon the godforsaken ground of Romantic spiritual anxiety. What do we human beings do when religious certitudes get emptied out, leaving us with the stress of making our own way and constructing our own idiosyncratic belief systems? The predicament is always vivid and sometimes painful for Wood’s fictional characters. His first novel bears the militant title The Book Against God.

But in Upstate, existential anguish is modulated by loving relation. Englishman Alan Querry and his two daughters, Vanessa and Helen, give the story both a grain of tragedy and a leaven of transatlantic comedy. Alan and Helen rush over from England to upstate New York to “rescue” Vanessa from her relapse into clinical depression. Vanessa’s boyfriend, Josh, alerts her father and sister to the seriousness of the episode. Vanessa’s well-being precariously hinges on Josh’s actions, but the flourishing of both daughters ultimately depends on Alan. It’s the father on whom the moral gravity of this ingenious novel ultimately rests.

I can think of no other 21st-century novel that so unabashedly celebrates paternal love as the complex mainstay of its female characters. Without irony, the story certifies the power of old-fashioned, flawed, patriarchal authority as a redemptive principle. Boy, is James Wood in for it. Read this critically important novel, and have your literary scorecard ready.

Almost 20 years ago I was smitten by The Broken Estate, an early collection of literary criticism by James Wood that memorably attuned and complicated my reading. So I was ready to be nothing if not critical when I picked up his second novel, Upstate. Fiction sharks can’t help smelling blood in the water when a distinguished critic writes a novel.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Listen to the trees

Review by Michael Alec Rose

“Listen. There’s something you need to hear.” This early line from National Book Award winner Richard Powers’ vast, magnificent and disturbing new novel could be its epigraph. These words are spoken in the voice of the trees, who are the real protagonists of the story. The beauty of the trees, their antiquity, their shocking imperilment at our hands, their desire to communicate to us the imminent threats to our mutual survival—all these truths join in one song of celebration and lament.

The first half of the book presents a set of individual stories—an array of human temperaments and predicaments as manifold as Charles Dickens’ or Leo Tolstoy’s. There’s a maverick botanist and a cynical sociologist, a billionaire video-game inventor and a wounded Vietnam veteran, an artist from Midwestern pioneer stock and a burned-out undergraduate. And more. The trees deliver to all nine characters an annunciation as epoch-making as any in the Bible: We bring you tidings of great joy, and also we are all totally fracked. Through this forest of interconnected human beings, Powers never loses the trees.

Each human character suffers a deadly ordeal of some kind. One literally dies for 70 seconds. Others come very close to dying or (no less terrible) bear witness to the violent death or near-death of a loved one. These dreadful brushes with mortality allow them to hear the trees’ difficult truths.

In the second half of The Overstory, the individual stories become intertwined and contrapuntally complicated. Laws and lives are both broken. There can be no happy ending. But to paraphrase Václav Havel, hope is not the same thing as optimism. The Overstory dramatizes this idea on the grandest scale. I have never read anything so pessimistic and yet so hopeful.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Powers for The Overstory.

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Listen. There’s something you need to hear.” This early line from National Book Award winner Richard Powers’ vast, magnificent and disturbing new novel could be its epigraph. These words are spoken in the voice of the trees, who are the real protagonists of the story. The beauty of the trees, their antiquity, their shocking imperilment at our hands, their desire to communicate to us the imminent threats to our mutual survival—all these truths join in one song of celebration and lament.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Thanks for nothing

Review by Michael Alec Rose

When it comes to hitting rock bottom, Joshua Max Feldman is a deft recording angel. Both in his first novel, The Book of Jonah, and now again in Start Without Me, Feldman shines a loving and unsparing light on ordinary persons at the worst moments of their lives.

Adam turned to the bottle after his career as a rock musician spiraled, after his beloved partner Johanna in the band lost her mind, after he realized he’d been chasing the wrong dream. A recovering alcoholic is still an alcoholic, and Adam can barely endure the pressure of a Thanksgiving family reunion. This is where the novel opens, zooming in on Adam in the middle of the nightmare, camped out on a bed in the basement of his childhood home, barely able to face the “music” of his family’s crushing pity, and their even more crushing hope for him.

Marissa slept with an old flame she met on a flight she was working. Being a flight attendant wasn’t something she’d planned on, any more than being unfaithful to her husband, any more than the terrible weight of feeling constantly inadequate as a wife, a daughter-in-law, a human being. Now she’s pregnant with the other man’s child. Now she’s on her guilty way to her in-laws’ house for Thanksgiving, barely able to face the “music” of his family’s crushing contempt, and their even more crushing kindness towards her.

This is the day Marissa and Adam, total strangers, meet at the restaurant of a hotel lobby near the airport. They have nothing in common except for their despair and their inability to confront their own enormous predicaments. Beware! These two lost souls do not redeem each other. In Feldman’s hands, life is too true and too weird for such a happy ending.

With consummate compassion, Feldman takes note of every awkward movement of their unlikely, painful, comical and consequentially graceful Thanksgiving together.

When it comes to hitting rock bottom, Joshua Max Feldman is a deft recording angel. Both in his first novel, The Book of Jonah, and now again in Start Without Me, Feldman shines a loving and unsparing light on ordinary persons at the worst moments of their lives.

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionScience Fiction

The second war of the worlds

Review by Michael Alec Rose

When H.G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1897, the story of a Martian invasion lodged in the cultural imagination as a possible chronicle of catastrophic things to come. Sci-fi master Stephen Baxter faces a formidable challenge in writing an authorized sequel: How might he turn the original readership’s plausible belief in a war between sister planets into a necessary suspension of disbelief for 2017 readers?

As author of collaborative multinovel epics with Terry Pratchett and Arthur C. Clarke, Baxter has the credentials for the task. The thrill of reading The Massacre of Mankind arises from the monumental scope and wild literary conceit of Baxter’s continuation of the story. I would blasphemously suggest an analogy between Scripture (Wells) and Talmud (Baxter): For every scene, every character, every theme in Wells’ account, Baxter provides copious commentary, filling in Wells’ narrative gaps, inventing an entire alternative history for Europe and the world at large, proposing what must have happened after the trauma of a first interplanetary invasion and during the onslaught of a second. (Spoiler alert! In Baxter’s sequel, there’s no World War I, but there remains an uncanny shadow effect of that indelible disaster.) It’s a family affair, too: The ingenious narrator is the sister-in-law of Wells’ original narrator, Walter Jenkins. The feminist edge is delightful and profound. Julie Elphinstone not only tells a broader tale than the hapless and unreliable Jenkins; she actually helps save the world.

There was another reason why Wells’ original story hit a nerve. The tale of a superior technological power (Mars) overwhelming a more primitive civilization (Earth) was a barely disguised allegory for the depredations of the British Empire. The essential truth of The War of the Worlds is that it is not only a possible history; it is the inevitable, tragic fate of all civilizations. Baxter hits the same nerve, and then some.

When H.G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1897, the story of a Martian invasion lodged in the cultural imagination as a possible chronicle of catastrophic things to come. Sci-fi master Stephen Baxter faces a formidable challenge in writing an authorized sequel: How might he turn the original readership’s plausible belief in a war between sister planets into a necessary suspension of disbelief for 2017 readers?

FictionGraphic Novels & Comics

Humorous, heartbreaking encounters

Review by Michael Alec Rose

When my 10-year-old son saw the irresistible drawing on the cover of this book, he grabbed it out of my hands. Page after hilarious and heartbreaking page, my boy’s laughter got louder and more complex. At points, he just stopped and stared at the two-page spread, bewildered by the ingeniously awkward words and images. Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too by artist and comedy writer Jomny Sun is not a children’s book. But when an author’s first novel has prepublication raves from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Joss Whedon, you can be sure it’s going to bust across traditional genres and age categories.

Little Jomny is an aliebn left on earbth by his fellow alienbs to find out about humabns. What Jomny doesn’t realize is that everyone he meets is everything but human. He makes friends with a bear, snail, owl and egg, plus an artistic porcupine, all of whom he kindly helps with their various identity crises. Jomny befriends a swarm of philosophical bees, a metamorphosing frog, an otter who fancies himself an auteur (say it twice) and NOTHING. That’s right, NOTHING. Because NOTHING matters. Best of all is Jomny’s best friend, a tree who winds up giving a devastating critique of Shel Silverstein’s famous book, A Giraffe and a Half.

When I got through Jomny’s zanily illustrated adventures for the third time (it’s impossible to stop), I knew that I was happier and emotionally richer for understanding so much less about my life than I had before. That’s the beautiful essence of philosophy. It took my son only 20 minutes to finish Aliebn, but he keeps grabbing it every time he sees it. It’s a gripping story and so much fun.

When my 10-year-old son saw the irresistible drawing on the cover of this book, he grabbed it out of my hands. Page after hilarious and heartbreaking page, my boy’s laughter got louder and more complex. At points, he just stopped and stared at the two-page spread, bewildered by the ingeniously awkward words and images. Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too by artist and comedy writer Jomny Sun is not a children’s book. But when an author’s first novel has prepublication raves from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Joss Whedon, you can be sure it’s going to bust across traditional genres and age categories.

FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Ferris’ fateful tales

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Joshua Ferris has published three brilliant novels, each focusing on the difficulty and dark comedy of our interactions with each other in the 21st century. In The Dinner Party, he has gathered his short stories from the past decade into a single volume.

Throughout these 11 stories, the range of settings and characters makes for a recurring sense of surprise: There is a New York City reimagined as a multiverse of sliding subway doors; the geriatric purgatory of Florida redeemed by fatal kindness; a Prague scarier than the one Kafka imagined; and a trailer parked somewhere in the Wal-Mart kingdom of the South, the site of a country song sung in reverse (you get your girl back, or your truck, or your life).

One of the best stories, “The Pilot” (first published in The New Yorker), diagnoses the decline and fall of a hopeful television writer in Los Angeles, who thinks he “needs a new pair of eyes” for the script of his pilot. What Leonard really needs is the sanity that eludes him and his entire generation of would-be auteurs. Readers may find themselves returning to the final three paragraphs over and over again, to revisit their beauty, tragedy and humor.

Reading a collection of short stories by an emerging master of the form is one of the great literary pleasures, especially when the writer treats them as a set of variations on a powerful theme. A steady ground bass pulses through all of Ferris’ narratives: the fatefulness of our lives, the uncanny and often hilarious (and even sometimes cruel, devastatingly so in the title story) ways in which our fragile hearts and massive egos determine our destinies. If this theme goes back to Sophocles, it also goes fast forward, right into our perplexed, all-too-modern souls.

Joshua Ferris has published three brilliant novels, each focusing on the difficulty and dark comedy of our interactions with each other in the 21st century. In The Dinner Party, he has gathered his short stories from the past decade into a single volume.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Drowning in Lovecraftian horror

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Paul La Farge has always drawn the thinnest and most permeable line between biographical fact and historical fiction. Both in his previous novels and in a set of poetic dreams he “translated” from a non-existent French poet of the 19th century, La Farge illuminates over and over again the superior strangeness of “real life” over anything he brilliantly devises as a writer of boundless imagination.

Now the author has surpassed himself. The Night Ocean is the ultimate crossing of the hazy boundary between reality and fantasy. It unflinchingly and comically diagnoses the emotional wonder and chaos unleashed by any troubled writer who fabricates an evil reality all his own. H.P. Lovecraft was such a person, and this novel is a mighty boon to horror geeks like me who misspent a good portion of our youths reading the pulp fiction of Lovecraft and his unholy minions, and surrendering to the cult of “fandom” that grew up around his bizarre personality and cosmically evil inventions. But La Farge’s novel goes further than celebrating the legacy of this especially deranged and popular storyteller. It is told by a psychotherapist, whose husband’s career and sanity have been destroyed by Lovecraft & Co. For this devastated couple, there are dark boxes within Lovecraft’s dark boxes, forcing a delightfully unsteady movement of the novel toward two associated characters: Lovecraft’s friend (and possible lover) Robert Barlow, who is a richly historical figure, and L.C. Spinks, an entirely unreal figure who becomes diabolically “real” to us, as the novel unfolds layer upon layer of Spinks’ truths and untruths, heartbreaking facts and wild fabrications.

Best of all is the way The Night Ocean addresses the real horror of H.P. Lovecraft’s vile hatefulness against African-Americans, Jews and other minorities. As in Matt Ruff’s recent novel Lovecraft Country (which I also recommend), Lovecraft’s demons are nothing more or less than us.

Paul La Farge has always drawn the thinnest and most permeable line between biographical fact and historical fiction. Both in his previous novels and in a set of poetic dreams he “translated” from a non-existent French poet of the 19th century, La Farge illuminates over and over again the superior strangeness of “real life” over anything he brilliantly devises as a writer of boundless imagination.

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionScience FictionHorror

Shakespeare meets zombies

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Isaac Marion is building his first zombie novel Warm Bodies (2010, adapted into a 2013 film) into a bona fide epic. He has surrounded it with both a prequel (the novella The New Hunger, 2013) and this superb sequel, and there’s more to come.

Marion’s original Shakespearean twist is just good enough to be true. In a zombie apocalypse, it makes so much sense for “Romeo and Juliet” to get reduced to “R. and Julie,” and for a petty family feud to get enlarged into a global battle between living humans (Julie’s beleaguered tribe) and the Undead (R.’s hapless, brain-eating kind).

In the first novel, R. and a few of his zombie friends begin to feel human warmth coursing through their dead veins. All hell breaks loose between survivors of the zombies’ hunger too afraid to believe in this “resurrection,” and those who believe it but don’t know what to do about it, let alone what it means. In The Burning World, this conflict grows into a comprehensive political nightmare, a brilliant satire on current events.

R. and Julie are the only ones who keep their heads. That’s because they love each other. In the sequel, their love is tested to the breaking point, barely held together by the friendly presence of another zombie-human couple, characters we recognize with a wink from the prequel.

R.’s slow return to humanity brings with it unbearable memories of his first life, before he died and turned Undead. This tripartite identity—pre-zombie, zombie, post-zombie—is Marion’s master stroke. When a former zombie realizes he was worse as a human being, the spiritual toll is shattering. From time to time in the new novel, an uncanny chorus called “WE” addresses the reader with an omniscience and detachment that can only be called sublime. Who are “WE”? Well, we’ll have to wait and see. I can hardly.

Marion’s original Shakespearean twist is just good enough to be true. In a zombie apocalypse, it makes so much sense for “Romeo and Juliet” to get reduced to “R. and Julie,” and for a petty family feud to get enlarged into a global battle between living humans (Julie’s beleaguered tribe) and the Undead (R.’s hapless, brain-eating kind).

Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

A suspenseful summer away in the mountains

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Matthew is out of a job, down on his luck in Brooklyn and still grieving over his father’s disgraceful disappearance years ago. He feels sincere gratitude to his cousin and childhood friend, Charlie, for an invitation to spend the summer with him and his wife, Chloe, at their beautiful house in the mountains of New York State. There, he can try to get his life back in shape.

Sounds placid enough, doesn’t it? How can this seemingly innocuous scenario go so quickly and inexorably to hell in James Lasdun’s new psychological thriller, The Fall Guy? 

One reason, I think, is because the author is a poet first. Much like his peers James Dickey and Stephen Dobyns, Lasdun’s poetic talent has veered toward the genre of criminal suspense. All three poet-novelists have the natural capacity to wield words with uncanny and disorienting power, exposing the shocking capacity of ordinary human beings to act out their darkest fears and desires. Nicely complicating Lasdun’s case is the fact that he’s a Brit, but longtime resident of the United States, and therefore able to chart the complicated axis of two cultures separated by the same language. 

At the heart of this hypnotic narrative lies Matthew’s barely concealed passion for Chloe. What begins in Matthew’s mind as a strong feeling of connection with his cousin’s wife undergoes a monstrous transformation, in which all three individuals—the two cousins and the beloved woman between them—play a guilty role. Long-buried sins from their shared history now rise up with an inexorable vengeance. There is no moral lesson at work in the novel, only a ruthless unfolding of events, in which love is undone by selfishness.

The Fall Guy has the quality of a dream that follows its own terrible logic, impossible to break free from, never to be forgotten after you wake up.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Matthew is out of a job, down on his luck in Brooklyn and still grieving over his father’s disgraceful disappearance years ago. He feels sincere gratitude to his cousin and childhood friend, Charlie, for an invitation to spend the summer with him and his wife, Chloe, at their beautiful house in the mountains of New York State. There, he can try to get his life back in shape.
Fiction

A gritty, reimagined tale of the creation of Israel

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Imagine a people beleaguered by enemies throughout the ages, and at last murdered by the millions, in the heart of the civilized world. Imagine that this catastrophe leads directly to a political solution for the survivors: a sovereign state, an ingathering of the displaced remnant, in a land full of historical resonance for this wandering people. Imagine that this new Jewish state is founded on a combination of the visionary socialist idealism of its founders and the opportunistic cynicism of the world’s superpowers. Finally, imagine that its founding is possible only through the displacement of the region’s non-Jewish population, with tragic and ongoing consequences. 

Sound familiar? It had better! It is the universally known and endlessly argued story of Judenstaat, the wonder of the postwar era, the Jewish state founded in 1948 on lands formerly known as Saxony, bordering Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia . . . or did I mean to say Israel, founded on lands formerly known as Palestine? 

The glory of Simone Zelitch’s page-turning alternate history is the uncanny precision with which she has deftly transformed the threads of actual events into the stunning new fabric of her novel. The verisimilitude of the tale grows in the telling: It is a Jewish historian who is our heroine, her self-appointed task to uncover the troubling facts of Judenstaat’s founding. Her mission is fueled by the murder of her husband, a Saxon who knew too much, adding a mystery element to this compelling story. From the very beginning—Abraham, Jacob, David—it has always been the leaders with uneasy consciences who have kept the flame of Jewish ethics alive. Despite its status as fiction, Judenstaat is now an indispensable text in that history.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Imagine a people beleaguered by enemies throughout the ages, and at last murdered by the millions, in the heart of the civilized world. Imagine that this catastrophe leads directly to a political solution for the survivors: a sovereign state, an ingathering of the displaced remnant, in a land full of historical resonance for this wandering people. Imagine that this new Jewish state is founded on a combination of the visionary socialist idealism of its founders and the opportunistic cynicism of the world’s superpowers. Finally, imagine that its founding is possible only through the displacement of the region’s non-Jewish population, with tragic and ongoing consequences.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Into the life of the starving artist

Review by Michael Alec Rose

If you’re thinking the Romantic myth of the suffering artist is dead and gone—well, think again. English novelist Benjamin Wood embraces the bluesy old song with gleeful gusto and uninhibited nostalgia in his second novel, The Ecliptic. His artist-heroine is as suffering as they come. Born into postwar, working-class Glasgow, Elspeth “Ellie” Conroy has to achieve her vocation as a painter against considerable odds, not least of which is her striking beauty.

Ellie tells her own tale, expressing at least two or three times on every page the terms of her self-doubt or self-loathing. As an ambitious woman in the patriarchal London art world of the early 1960s, she must define herself in the shadow of mentors, dealers, critics, lovers and psychiatrists. Sometimes these roles coalesce into a single figure. No matter if these fellows are good or bad; the point is that they make her suffer, driving her to extremes of self-injury and psychological ruin, paralyzing her even as she is on the verge of a breakthrough (the “ecliptic” of the title serves as the elusive image of this goal).

All of this sounds archetypal enough; but Wood has an ace up his narrative sleeve that pushes the novel into uncanny territory—namely, an island off the coast of Turkey, where suffering artists (a whole colony of them!) are sent by their sponsors in order to recapture their wayward muse. Portmantle is the name of the colony, a dream haven, a sort of purgatory where world-famous writers, painters, architects—and, crucially, a 17-year-old graphic novel genius—can burn off the sins of their aesthetic excesses or failures of artistic nerve. Here, Ellie seems to be on the path to reclamation. But it’s just one more detour into the inevitable inferno of being an artist. The enchanted reader of Wood’s novel cannot help feeling that if Elspeth Conroy had only put as much painstaking artfulness into her painting as she has given to writing her own life, she could have been another Picasso.

 

Michael Alec Rose is a professor of music at Vanderbilt University.

If you’re thinking the Romantic myth of the suffering artist is dead and gone—well, think again. English novelist Benjamin Wood embraces the bluesy old song with gleeful gusto and uninhibited nostalgia in his second novel, The Ecliptic.

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