By Joshua Cohen
Stanley Elkin was not an autobiographical novelist. He never franchised fast-food restaurants (“The Franchiser”), wrestled professionally (“Boswell”), ferried terminally ill children to Disney World (“The Magic Kingdom”) or had sex with a bear (“The Making of Ashenden”).
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By Joshua Cohen
Literary criticism is literature that discusses other literature, situating whatever book or poem historically, while at the same time, relating the literary work to the extraliterary: to the other arts, or to the world in general. Book reviewing is much the same as criticism except shorter, and the function it serves is often as much literary as one of consumer guidance: I give Kerouac three stars, or four, or three-and-a-half; William Burroughs’s new novel about nude dining gets two thumbs up, “a must-read.”
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By Joshua Cohen
Jean-François Revel, who died three years ago this past spring, was America’s most intellectual supporter in France. He was a philosopher and writer, a Resistance fighter during the war (born Ricard, Revel was his nom de guerre), a conflicted socialist before 1968, later a converted “liberal” (in French,
libérale means “conservative”) and a member of the Académie Française. A bald, plump gourmand — Revel was also the author of books on gastronomy and poetry — he was often invited on French radio and television, where he was as witty and quotable as Bernard-Henri Lévy or any other
nouveau philosophe of the 1970s (André Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut), though unlike them, he was a practicing journalist and not Jewish.
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By Joshua Cohen
The buses waited in the synagogue lot. There was already an argument. One mother said the buses shouldn’t idle, it was bad for breathing. For Joseph, her Joey’s asthma. Another father said it was okay. Don’t make them turn off the buses then turn them back on. We were waiting for two more families. The drivers were asleep.
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By Joshua Cohen
‘Chronic City” initially seemed an important and pleasurable novel to review, just as it must have initially seemed, to Jonathan Lethem, an important and pleasurable novel to write. The ideal reviewer, as if a character in science fiction, relives the writer’s experience word by word, sentence by sentence. The reviewer becomes, in a sense, the author’s projection or double, questioning choices of plot, wording and punctuation, and revising paragraphs and pages, until what results is an alternate book: Like it or not, you’re reading my own version of “Chronic City” now. (This is apropos of nothing much. But it seemed important and pleasurable enough at the beginning.)
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