« THURSDAY MARGINALIA (LITE) | Main | TEV GIVEAWAY: THE SIEGE »

January 22, 2009

REVIEW: OUT OF MY SKIN

The new Bookforum is now online, and the offerings include my review of John Haskell's Out Of My Skin.  Here's how it starts:

Recently on NPR, Philip Seymour Hoffman gave an interview that was surprising in its awkward, fumbling banality. For example, on the difference between theater and film actors, he offered, “I’m sitting here and [theater actors are] doing it in front of me, but the only difference is that they’re doing it and I’m watching, but ultimately we’re all people hanging out in the same building.” Yet the taut intelligence of Hoffman’s performances can scarcely be gainsaid; like the work of many post-Strasberg stars, his oeuvre is a testament to an instinctive, emotional intelligence, which is not, perhaps, so easily put into words. In his earnest new novel, Out of My Skin, John Haskell—who explored his fascination with celebrity in his debut story collection, I Am Not Jackson Pollock (2003)—delves into questions of reinvention and performance. He aims to examine the fundamental question of what it means to change, but his exegesis is marred by a propensity for mundane, ersatz profundity. Even so, one is forced to wonder whether, as in the case of Hoffman, this self-conscious tic is all part of the act.

You can read the review in its entirety here.

Posted at 10:14 PM in Reviews |

| | Pin It! | |

Comments

Michael Czobit

Good review.

I read Haskell's first novel, American Purgatorio, a couple of weeks ago. Some of the problems you described in his latest one were present in the first. American Purgatorio settled into the mundane after Haskell resolved the mystery.

Posted by: Michael Czobit | January 23, 2009 at 08:03 AM

J. Haskell

I'm sorry you didn't seem to like what I was trying to do in Out of My Skin. I have the sense that you didn't think I was being honest, or that I was pretending to be a character instead of being that character. Perhaps you've read my other books, but if you haven't, it might give you some idea of what I'm trying to do with character and with the mundane world that character inhabits. Of course there's always the possibility that you just don't like my writing, or that we have different tastes, but since we're both writers, and I imagine we're both interested in communication, I thought I'd send you a note.

All best,

Posted by: J. Haskell | February 11, 2009 at 05:12 PM

TEV

Thank you for the gracious note, Mr. Haskell. I'll reply at length privately but I certainly never doubted your honesty or the honest intentions of the work itself. I appreciate your comment here.

Posted by: TEV | February 11, 2009 at 07:32 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

Categories

Subscribe to this blog's feed