Real Characters
A review by Art Winslow
Tobias Wolff's short story "Bullet in the Brain" has remained lodged in mine for many years, not just because he kills a literary critic in it (with the puckish implication that what goes around comes around), but because it exhibits so cleanly what the best stories do: range outward from the confines of a tight literary space to evoke life with an illusion of capaciousness. Anders, "a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed," is shot in the midst of a bank heist after laughing at one of the robbers. Wolff cleverly relates what the victim did not think in the final instant, as well as what he did. So, we are told Anders "did not remember his dying mother saying of his father, 'I should have stabbed him in his sleep,' " or recall his own first love, Sherry, "or what he had most madly loved about her, before it came to irritate him," nor his wife, "whom he had also loved before she exhausted him with her...
|
 |
Previously Reviewed by Chicago Tribune
Sort: by date | by title | by author
Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon
 Wartime Sarajevo, Bosnia, early 1990s, as reported by a character in Aleksandar Hemon's novel The Lazarus Project: The electricity, out for months at a stretch, would return intermittently, bringing the lights and radios and televisions that had been left on suddenly to life. But the power grid...
Columbine by Dave Cullen
 When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, wearing black dusters and T-shirts emblazoned "NATURAL SELECTION" and "WRATH," went on the shooting and pipe-bomb rampage in 1999 that killed 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., it hardly should have been a surprise...
A Hidden Life: A Memoir of August 1969 by Johanna Reiss
 In the eyes of the world, there may only be one girl named Anne who spent her childhood in Holland hidden away from the Nazis. (Had a friend not given me a copy of Harry Mulisch's The Assault, the account of the seven days of Hitler's siege on the Netherlands, I probably would have continued to...
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
 In 1998, before the clarifying attacks of 2001 shocked the West into higher gear in its anti-terror efforts, Dexter Filkins was a reporter making trips into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Among the things he witnessed was a public execution at a Kabul soccer stadium, a sanctioned revenge killing...
Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante by Lily Tuck
 Italy's decay under the Mussolini dictatorship from the 1920s until the twilight of World War II is one of history's most poisoned chapters. The Fascist demagogue emulated Hitler's mass persecution of Jews, warping the society as wartime retrenchments spread poverty and fear. On Easter Sunday, 1941,...
The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Edward Dolnick
 [Ed. note: This review covers two books, The Forger's Spell and The Man Who Made Vermeers.]
Published within three months of each other, these two wildly contrasting books about Dutch forger Han van Meegeren strikingly demonstrate that attitude indelibly shapes content.
In The Forger's Spel...
Travel Writing by Peter Ferry
 Will the real Peter Ferry please stand up? Peter Ferry No. 1 lives in Evanston. He has been a textbook author, a travel writer, and a creative-writing teacher at Lake Forest High School. He has now written his first novel, Travel Writing, with a protagonist named Peter Ferry, a former textbook...
Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (Melville House Classic Journalism) by A. M. Rosenthal
 When a 78-year-old pedestrian was downed by a hit-and-run driver in Hartford, Conn., in June, street surveillance video showed multiple cars passing by without stopping and fellow pedestrians staring at the victim without any visible move to aid him. This provoked public outrage and claims of a...
The Garden of Last Days: A Novel by Andre Dubus III
 We know from The 9/11 Commission Report that 12 of the "muscle" hijackers that day (the non-pilots) came from Saudi Arabia and were 20 to 28 years old; most were unemployed, had little more than a high-school education and were unmarried. Five of the Saudis came from Asir province, in the south of...
A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Jo by Christopher Benfey
 Christopher Benfey, a scholar of Emily Dickinson and Gilded Age America, would not have his book A Summer of Hummingbirds had Dickinson not responded to a small floral painting sent to her in 1882 by writing an eight-line poem in return, which spoke of "A Route of Evanescence" in describing the...
Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories
by Tobias Wolff
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
by Susan Faludi
Three Decades of Quality Writing and Criticism
The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, is a non-profit organization consisting of more than 850 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns. To learn about how to join, click here.
| 
Don't Miss
