Forward.com

There’s Something in the AirHaving just finished “Atmospheric Disturbances,” Rivka Galchen’s first novel, I find myself strangely unable to stop thinking about “Bandits,” the last Elmore Leonard novel I read. This is not because the two novels are similar, but because they are so radically dissimilar. Reading Galchen made me want to go reread Leonard, not as a complement but as an antidote. Galchen’s literary, cerebral book is about love, estrangement, emotional health and all sorts of important things, and it made me long for Leonard’s up-tempo, plot-driven pulp fiction about an ex-con trying to screw an ex-nun.…Read more

Brownsville BoyOf Alfred Kazin’s serried and august friends and enemies, people still know a lot: Irving Howe and Richard Hofstadter, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt — they all wrote grand books that will long outlive them, or they edited journals still extant, or they lived with such bombast that the dirt will hardly keep the coffin shut. But Kazin slips between the definitional cracks. He was never a communist, so he never became a turncoat; a mild socialist, he rejected Stalin early and had little to atone for. In the 1960s, as his friends were becoming unhinged by the rhetoric of the New Left, he maintained a bemused respect for the kids. He lacked Norman Mailer’s urge to brawl, yet also lacked Trilling’s social ease and charm. He was proud of Israel but had misgivings about Zionism. He loved being Jewish but had little time for Judaism. In the guild of book critics, he actually loved books. He always preferred an empty room, no disturbances and some large volumes waiting to be cracked. In fact, for decades he kept a small apartment downtown from his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; it was his office and his getaway.…Read more

Scrapbook InquiryGiven her belief in the instability of knowledge, Janet Malcolm is, on principle, always at a loss for clear answers. Instead, she has mastered the finely honed question. In “The Silent Woman,” what interested Malcolm — and the happily implicated reader — was whether Sylvia Plath had been treated fairly by her biographers. In “The Journalist and the Murderer,” Malcolm untangled an ethical dilemma: When has a reporter abused his subject’s trust? (Always, it turns out.) These books are little case studies in how to think about tough questions. Narrow the focus, read closely, consult some smart people, consider their prejudices, accept the limits of what’s knowable.…Read more

Susan Sontag: Juggler of the Moral and the AestheticIn his foreword to “At the Same Time,” the new collection of essays and speeches by his mother, the late Susan Sontag, David Rieff writes: “It is sometimes said of my mother’s work that she was torn between aestheticism and moralism, beauty and ethics. Any intelligent reader of hers will see the force of this, but I think a shrewder account would emphasize their inseparability in her work.”…Read more

Channeling Kafka in Buenos AiresNathan Englander’s new novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases,” begins on a dark night in a dangerous time……Read more