Steven Wu's Book Reviews

Short Review: Connie Willis's Inside Job

Connie Willis's Hugo-winning short story "Inside Job" is not too different from her other shorter works. Like Remake and Bellwether, it showcases some astonishing research, packaged with a love story in which an appealing but oblivious narrator manages to snag a sensible but outrageously gorgeous girl. Here, though, the formula finally works, due to a nifty plot twist that, even niftierly, is shown to be no twist at all. "Inside Job" isn't joining my list of all-time great science-fiction shorts, but it's delightful while it lasts.

Period details

I love this New York Times article -- "You've Read the Novels (Now Read the Footnotes)," by William Grimes -- for a number of reasons. First, it begins with a discussion of furze, as that word was invoked in Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native, which turns out to be exactly the place where I first encountered that word. (My dictionary's memorable definition: "furze (n.) gorse." The Internet hasn't improved things.)

Second, the article raises a question that has always fascinated me: how a book survives its time. Referring to the annotations on a version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the article notes:

Any reader who sticks with the program and absorbs the wealth of material that Mr. Shapard offers will, insofar as such a thing as possible, read "Pride and Prejudice" as it was read and understood at the time of its publication, with all the period details in place and correctly interpreted. But the novel, in most respects, remains the same. The reader who does not know a farthing from a guinea, it's safe to say, will nonetheless grasp the great drama of attraction and repulsion that plays out between Darcy and Elizabeth. The cut and thrust of their conversation is timeless. Generations of young women who do not know the first thing about an entailed estate or a quadrille will recognize in Austen's heroine a kindred spirit, a contemporary, a valued ally in the eternal war between the sexes.

How can this be? Austen was a stickler for accuracy. Like most of the great 19th-century novelists, she reported on her surroundings with loving attention to detail, creating her world fact by closely observed fact. Yet with time, details lose their meaning. Who, a century from now, will understand what a yuppie was, or text-messaging, or the meaning of an Armani suit?

Unfortunately, the article doesn't actually discuss the issue in any depth. I wish somebody would.

New Review: Time Future

ADDED a review of Maxine McArthur's Time Future.

Black Swan Green has picked up a little bit: there was a very good chapter about parental strife, and then another decent one about the protagonist's initiation into a secret society. Overall, though, the book isn't doing it for me.

I'm not sure what I'll read next. A guy I used to work with in college, Uzo Iweala, wrote a novel called Beasts of No Nation that was, I kid you not, the best-reviewed book of 2005. I've been meaning to read his book ever since I heard about it, but every time I consider it I think, dude, I chatted with this guy eight hours a week, every week, for almost two years, and now he's a successful novelist and I'm a second-year associate. It's depressing.

New Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

ADDED a review of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

What an astonishing book. Of course, I'm late to this party: better reviews than mine have already effused, and properly so. Suffice it to say that I read this book while (rather uncharacteristically) on a cruise ship steaming through some gorgeous mountain ranges in Alaska, and I barely looked outside until I had read the last page.

I would also be remiss if I didn't point to and heartily recommend this wonderful essay by Clarke, which was posted, of all places, on Crooked Timber.

Writing this review reminded me of how powerful a spell a good book can cast upon the reader. Unfortunately, Black Swan Green, David Mitchell's latest, is pretty awful so far, and I have little hope that it'll pick up.

New Review: The Dress Lodger

ADDED a review of Sheri Holman's The Dress Lodger.

What a book. I'm less thrilled about the review -- I deliberately wrote it in a slightly more formal (some might say overwritten) style, just to see what tone I eventually want to use here. The lesson: not quite this one.

I'm about halfway through The Echo Maker right now. It's good, although the doctor's story is significantly more interesting than the sister's. I'm still not entirely sure what Powers intends to do with the story. Right now everybody appears to be treading water, but I sense vast forces aligning.

On my list after The Echo Maker -- assuming that I stay with fiction -- is David Mitchell's latest, Black Swan Green. If I go with nonfiction I might read Jan Crawford Greenburg's new expose on the Supreme Court, Supreme Conflict, although given my job I'm unlikely to write a review of that.