Once you’ve published your own review of a book, it’s always a bit vertiginous to read the same book reviewed elsewhere.  Surely almost every critic writing on deadline wonders if he’s missed something important, emphasized something trivial, or just plain judged a book wrong. When the ‘elsewhere’ in question is the mighty TLS, one of the few remaining genuine heavyweights in the literary journalism world, the anxiety is just that much more tingly.

So we turned with added attention to the 30 October issue of the TLS to take in their response to Pete Dexter’s latest novel Spooner, which is reviewed at length in our November issue by Sam Sacks. As great as the TLS is, their fiction reviews can sometimes be, shall we say, idiosyncratic, and when it comes to American fiction, their writers often seem to be working through anger therapy rather than examining a writer’s work.

Fortunately (for all concerned, really), the reviewer this time is T. O. Treadwell, as steady and first-rate a critic as ever sidled up to a typewriter, and Dexter’s book gets an entirely fair assessment, complete with quotable lines. About Calmer Ottoson, for instance, the true-blue  father-figure to the novel’s protagonist, Treadwell writes, “To draw a virtuous character without sentiment is notoriously difficult, and Dexter’s success here is not the least of his novel’s achievements.”

Most of the critics who’ve looked at Spooner have dwelt at length on the novel’s autobiographical aspects (Sacks makes a rather pointed reference to “the canny deflections of the memoirist”), and Treadwell – whose review is not long – does likewise, at one point mentioning, “One of the attractions of the fictional memoir must be the opportunity it offers for settling old scores, and Spooner contains a splendid range of monsters, many of them brought to satisfyingly gruesome nemesis.”

Treadwell’s verdict is kind: “Pete Dexter has transmuted the vicissitudes of a turbulent life into an accomplished novel.” To learn a great deal more about Dexter’s writing career in general and Spooner in specific – and to see what final verdict Sacks himself hands down on the final product, click on over to our November issue. And then tell us what you think, of course.

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By Ron Carlson
Viking, 2009

What I liked most about The Signal, Ron Carlson’s svelte and powerful new novel, is the way the Wind River Mountains are given the dimensions, even the breath, of a living presence. If you’ve traveled in high elevations you’ve felt how the thin air and capricious weather hone your senses and lend an enhanced feeling of peril and elation to ordinary doings. Carlson describes, in one of many instances, how the mountains impose upon his main characters Mack and Vonnie:

The shadows had thickened even as they stood and talked. The angle of light grew fragile; it made him want to hurry. It had always called to him, and now it hurt. You always felt time as a tangible heartbeat in the mountains. The days were short.

Mack and Vonnie are camping together in a last sad hurrah after a decade of marriage that ended with Mack, desperate for money to keep his family ranch, became a meth runner and eventually a convicted criminal. Now, out of prison, he gets a final trip with Vonnie before she returns to her new husband, a weekend he scurrilously (and self-loathingly) complicates in trying to locate an illegally manufactured war plane that has crashed somewhere in the mountains.

But all this makes the plot of The Signal sound more involved than it actually is. The weapons contraband, as well as a violent run-in with Mack’s former partners in meth-trafficking, are primarily catalysts of change in the real soul of The Signal, the relationships between Mack and Vonnie and between the two and the Wyoming mountains.

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Carlson is wonderfully alive to the parallels of those two bonds. Just as Mack knows he will never be so intimate with Vonnie again, he also knows that his age, his insolvency, and commercial development are conspiring to spoil the purity of the wilderness. There is a sore beauty in a simple afternoon of fishing that is connected to the knowledge that such an activity may never happen again:

Mack saw something and it was the fish’s shadow in the water and then the trout near the surface. “He’s too close.” Vonnie snugged the line and the fish responded, leaping and in that second seeing the world, the two people in the white snow, it twisted with every ounce of itself, and the fish swam away, the fine broken leader trailing from its mouth. They could see him race down, diving through the bladed sunlight of the lake water, and then stall and settle again as if nothing had happened.

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Vonnie looked at Mack, her face blank and then she saw the old smile emerge.

“Fish,” she said.

They were at the wild rough top of the world.

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Not everything in The Signal feels adequately wrapped-up by the conclusion – the subplot with the title’s homing signal seems especially unresolved. But in gorgeous flowing prose (Carlson has mastered the seamless run-on sentence, all chain-linked with ‘ands’) we get a poignant excavation of a broken marriage and the possibilities of rehabilitation. The persistent feelings of love and loss are sharpened by the mountain air, and Carlson endows each with a sense of wonder:

Mack had looked at [his father], sleeves rolled, lifting a cast out onto the blue-brown mystery of the lake surface, and that line marked the known world from the unknown, and Mack wondered how he understood the depth of this little bay, how he knew where the fish were, how he knew everything he knew. The wondering seemed to hurt Mack’s heart which he understood simply as love, the aching desire to measure up, to master the mathematics.

–Sam Sacks Love Takes Wing hd

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An Expensive Education

By Nick McDonell
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009

Near the beginning of Nick McDonell’s third novel An Expensive Education, an Adonis-like Harvard-groomed intelligence operative named Michael Teak shares his strategy for getting through sticky situations:

13 Hours in a Warehouse film Teak had developed a trick in college for speaking with authority. When he decided to talk in class, he would often begin by saying something like “there are really three important points.” Even if he didn’t know what the points were, he’d come up with them. He believed that breaking his argument into numbers forced people to pay attention. How you said something could be more important than what you said.

The thoughts are meant to be revealing and ironic, because Teak is outwardly a bionic figure who singlehandedly exposes top-level conspiracy in the Horn of Africa, but they have dispiriting resonations for the reader. In this chic, disingenuous novel, McDonell spends a great amount of his energy impressively pretending to know what he’s talking about.

The biggest part of the put-on is the plot, which is triggered by an airstrike in a remote spot of Somalia against an anti-government militia leader named Hatashil. This Hatashil had previously enjoyed the tacit support of the United States, but now, for reasons only at first guessed, American sentiment has turned against him, and the attack is spun in the news as a massacre of innocents perpetrated by Hatashil himself. Embroiled in the change of allegiances are a number of people affiliated with Harvard, the focal point of McDonell’s attention: Susan Lowell is a Pulitzer Prize winning professor who wrote a book lionizing Hatashil as a freedom fighter; David Ayan is an ambitious underclassman who grew up in Hatashil’s corner of Africa; Jane Baker, as her deliciously WASPy name announces, is a Cybill Shepherd lookalike and crusading reporter for the Harvard Crimson; and Teak is a gifted alum who’s been selected from the campus talent pool to be a kind of black-op – and who happened to be present at the attack.

All of this is fun enough and would be inoffensively escapist, but as Teak goes on the safari of skullduggery so frequently trod by Ludlum and Le Carré, McDonell purports to reveal the geopolitical machinations engineered over drinks in Cambridge clubs and offices. On one hand, we get lots of silly spy-thriller boilerplate like this:

Alan Green had seen some evil in his life. He had seen murder, the quick departure of a man’s soul from his body (sweating, lashed to a splintered chair and beaten) before the ruined eyes of the man’s sister. He had never taken pleasure in being party to such departures, or the suffering that often preceded them, but he believed in their necessity.

But a page later, with po-faced Syriana solemnity, McDonell discloses how world events are really orchestrated by the best and the brightest of Harvard’s exclusive Porcellian club. The arch self-importance that overruns this books could only come from a Harvard graduate, and An Expensive Education

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is the sort of “exposé” that is actually meant to enhance the Harvard mystique.

But there won’t be much enhancing going on for McDonell’s reputation as a writer, as the prose here makes you yearn for the skillful hand of Robert Ludlum, to say nothing of John Le Carré. As An Expensive Education progresses it devolves into a flipbook of page-long scene breaks that bear an unholy resemblance to the fun-sized chapters in a James Patterson production, except without a trash novelist’s basic humility. And when McDonell feels sufficiently on a roll in his oh-so serious shtick to wax philosophical about death and grieving – “It may be that death is nothing, that it is merely another phase of disintegration, another pose for the ashes and dust on their return from two feet to space” – you want only to tell him, Jesus kid, time to grow up and quit the bullshitting.

–Sam Sacks

It can be frustrating, that blithe recommendation to “wait for the paperback” when a book comes out that you think you’d like to read. Publishers know the pulse of the public’s reading interest (or at least they know sales figures), and they’ll sit on putting out the paperback until the last embers of interest in the hardcover have expired. It can be a maddeningly long wait.

But it’s a wait that’s eventually rewarded, and a few new titles in softcover were first reviewed here. Richard Price’s Lush Life, for instance (which was also reviewed in every other literary organ in the western world), was given a thorough going-over by Sam Sacks in the February 2008 issue. Sacks looked back at Price’s important early works, but also took Price’s work in television as a frame of reference for interpreting Lush Life Return to House on Haunted Hill video :

Despite his considerable reputation as a novelist, it’s no good running away from the likelihood that Lush Life is going to be read as a kind of Director’s Cut supplement to The Wire: not only is there superficially a great deal in the book to justify the connection, there is also a sense that Price is explicitly attempting in Lush Life to achieve the layered sweep of atmosphere and character for which the TV show is revered. Writing for The Wire is not like doctoring Hollywood scripts, and the prudent wall of separation bricked up to protect his novels seems in this case to have been breached. Price has said of the show that “it’s as close to a novel as anything on TV,” and Lush Life has pretty clearly drawn inspiration from it.

Ever After In our June 2008 issue, Laura Tanenbaum reviewed Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us, and no doubt did a lot of listening to the songs of Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and Carole King, the three subjects of the biography. Tanenbaum was impressed not only by Weller’s treatment of the three singers, but by the keen evocation of a landmark era in the feminist movement:

From Weller’s account, we get the sense of period in which equality still felt radical, difficult and hard to reach, yet in which popular culture actively engaged. 1970, one year before each would have a seminal record (Mitchell’s Blue, King’s Tapestry, and Simon’s Anticipation

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), was a year in which Kate Millet could be on the cover of Time, having made her name with a book in which she took on literary and countercultural icons like Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. Even Ladies Home Journal dedicated a special feature to the feminist movement after a sit-in in their offices. While only a few years before, King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” was a daring statement of female sexuality, now Mitchell could sing matter-of-factly about the joys of unmarried cohabitation in “My Old Man.”

And for your beach bag, Emily Giffin’s Love the One You’re With is available in bright green wrappers on the front table of any nearby bookstore. In our September 2008 Bestseller issue (in which, Gore Vidal-style, we reviewed every book on the fiction bestseller list), Julie McGinley gave a frank appraisal

of what you can expect from Giffin’s book:

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Ask any woman unlikely to have read many books, and chances are she’s read one by Emily Giffin. I’ll be completely honest and admit that this is the third book I’ve read of hers: I read both Something Borrowed and Something Blue on airplanes. For me, Giffin’s books are usually the perfect travel companions; the straightforward prose and somewhat predictable sequence of events means distractions are not a hindrance, and the chick-flick storylines help pass the time.

Bend It Like Beckham movie download Here’s hoping this helps in your book shopping. And do explore more of Open Letters’ archives to learn if you’ll be repaid for your patience in waiting for other books to emerge in more affordable paperback form.

At least two names that cropped up in today’s Sunday New York Times for artistic examination will be familiar to attentive readers of Open Letters: in the Book Review, Kate Christensen reviews Arthur Phillips’ new novel The Song is You, and in the New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Mason turns in a profile of the American poet Frederick Seidel.

Christensen, author of several quite good novels, is surprisingly opaque regarding Phillips’ book – on the one hand, she says it’s tough to put down, but on the other, she compares its author to a dolphin. She opines: “The Song Is You shares with its predecessors Phillips’s smart, sly inquiries into the scope and possibilities of storytelling, but this novel is tenderer and more visceral than the first three,” and I’m not sure even the brightest member of the tursiops clan could explain (using clicks and whistles, naturally) what that all means. After all, making inquiries into the scope and possibilities of storytelling sounds suspiciously like a novelist’s basic job description, and “tenderer” isn’t the most bestest of adjectives.

Open Letters’  Fiction Editor Sam Sacks tackles The Song Is You in our current issue, avoiding all mention of sea mammals as he weighs in: “At the heart of The Song is You is a wise and clear-eyed exploration of the ways that the enchantments of youth turn stale – how gravity, in the mantle of heartbreak, imposes itself on even the most blessed of lives.” You can read the rest of his thoughts on the subject here

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and then make your own judgements about Phillips’ place in the natural kingdom.

In the Times Magazine, Mason, celebrated recent translator of Rimbaud, talks with Seidel in restaurants and in his gorgeous apartment

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, eliciting a string of anecdotes that share a common theme: the heroic poet quickly and assuredly outgrowing things (St. Louis, Judaism, Harvard, Ezra Pound, and Heaven knows what else). True, Seidel gets in some wonderful quips (when Mason, looking around the aforementioned gorgeous apartment, asks him, “So this is where you write?” he says, “My boy, this is where I live”), and true, Mason assembles some emphatic quotes from well-wishers who try to explain Seidel’s lack of wider renown (after a 50 year career, he only just made it into the Oxford Anthology of American Poetry, and he still isn’t in the Norton), but you can’t read the profile without wondering if there might not be a more basic reason why universal acclaim has thus far eluded Seidel.

Way back in August 2007, Open Letters Poetry Editor John Cotter reviewed one of Seidel’s more recent volumes, Ooga-Booga, and was generally underwhelmed with the poet. Underwhelmed and at times (in a rare turn for the normally-genial Cotter) quietly withering: “… as the pages turn the reader begins to suspect there is a bit too much pure jive and not enough substance to these poems. They seem not only uncategorizable but dispensable.”

Where to place your trust in all these conflicting and counter-crossing opinions, especially if you don’t have time to delve deeply into the works themselves? Despite her (Times-required?) occasional wandering ambiguity, and despite his (Times-expected?) occasional hagiography, both Christensen and Mason are worthy writers and passionate critics, not the usual phylum of Automaton Transfusion download

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specious dunderheads who

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sometimes come in for a much-deserved drubbing (all eyes tactfully avert from the most recent bloodied corpse…). Their agreements – and even more so their disagreements – with our own writers on the books and authors in question can’t help but be a good thing for everybody, I’m thinking.

-Steve Donoghue

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas dvdrip The prose of the perdurable New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani has long been the subject of jealous complaint, but how many have truly taken the time to closely examine—and learn from!—the paint-by-numbers style that she has tirelessly established. Over the next few months, I hope to illuminate that unmistakable style on this blog; when all is said and done, I believe that all of us will be able to compose book reviews with the easy formulaic efficiency of this leading critical voice.

Today we’ll focus on the introduction. It’s a testament to Kakutani’s striking technique that the following examples from the beginnings of her reviews will need no further explanation:

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Ma Jian’s new novel, “Beijing Coma,” reads like a curious amalgam of Jung Chang’s epic “Wild Swans” (about three generations of her Chinese family), Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (about the author’s life before and after a stroke left him almost completely paralyzed) and Kafka’s unfinished novel “The Castle” (about a man pitted against an obdurate and incomprehensible bureaucracy).

Combine the chilly Swedish backdrop and moody psychodrama of a Bergman movie with the grisly pyrotechnics of a serial-killer thriller, then add an angry punk heroine and a down-on-his-luck investigative journalist, and you have the ingredients of Stieg Larsson’s first novel, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

The nearly 1,000-page-long novel [“The Kindly Ones”] reads as if the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been rewritten by a bad imitator of Genet and de Sade, or by the warped narrator of Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” after repeated viewings of “The Night Porter” and “The Damned.”

Jayne Anne Phillips’s intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr’s war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original.

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True Colors Imagine a mash-up of the campy 1962 chiller “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and Arnold Bennett’s 1908 novel “The Old Wives’ Tale.” Then imagine the result rewritten as a Gothic novel by an amateur lepidopterist — not a Nabokov exactly, but a novelist with a scientific bent — and you have a pretty good idea of Poppy Adams’s first novel, “The Sister.”

These passages not only display an impressive range of synonyms for the word “combine,” but they also lend themselves to a great drinking game (”A reference to Evelyn Waugh and Warren Beatty! Chug!”).

This week Kakutani has reviewed Arthur Phillips’ novel The Song is You. I chapfallenly confess that I also reviewed the book in this month’s Open Letters, and I guess if you’ve got time to kill you could click over and read it. But the truth is that Kakutani has struck at the very heart of the novel in yet another masterfully Mad-Libbed review opener:

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Arthur Phillips’s new novel, “The Song Is You,” reads like a maladroit mash-up of the romantic comedy “Sleepless in Seattle,” in which the hero and heroine meet in real life only in the last reel, and one of those creepy, straight-to-video movies, in which a famous beauty is pursued around the world by an obsessive fan.

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“Mash-up” and Meg Ryan! Chug!

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–Sam Sacks

Cougar Club rip The Last Unicorn movie Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens movie John Wray’s Lowboy The Violent Kind psp has been garnering heaps of praise, and in this week’s New Yorker, James Wood piles on:

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John Wray is less interested in Lowboy’s picaresque circuits than in his mental circuits, whose damaged condition is brilliantly, compassionately evoked in the novel…Great tact is required to pull off this kind of thing in fiction, since hallucination can be as boring as someone recounting a very long dream at breakfast, or it can slide too easily, like any horror story, into a bloody and relentless vitality. Wray is never boring, largely because he has an uncanny talent for ventriloquism, and he seems to know, with unerring authority, how to select and make eloquent the details of Lowboy’s illness.

Open Letters Amongst Friends download ’ Steve Donoghue concurs:

Wray has a weakness for bagatelle plotting, but he takes a care with words that borders on the obsessive, and his imagery is surgically precise. He’s a slow, meticulous writer, and it shows in the work…Lowboy is told in a series of impressionistic flashes, most not more than a few paragraphs long, and it moves with extremely confident speed to its heart-wrenching conclusion. The book’s occasional tendencies toward predictable Hollywood formulae…are more than offset by the understated brilliance of its narrative.

For a look at Wood’s view of fiction and criticism in general, check out Daniel Green’s review of How Fiction Works, from our August 2008 issue. And in his review of Lark & Termite, from our February 2009 issue Dragonball: Evolution movie full , Sam Sacks tackles the difficulty of rendering a mentally damaged person’s mind in prose.

One D.O.A., One on the Way
By Mary Robison

Counterpoint, 2009

There’s just barely enough talent on display in Mary Robison’s short novel One D.O.A., One on the Way to make it an unhappy reading experience rather a merely indifferent one. Robison has a quirky knack for asyntactical rhythms of speech, and every so often she’ll hit on an original way of expressing the otherwise hackneyed theme of suburban disillusion: “I’m in attendance but feeling as if I were sketched into the scene, and maybe with an old pencil.”

These embers of wit only underscore what a pitifully complacent and distracted work Robison has chosen to publish. It’s the sort of book engaged novelists might scribble out while waiting at stop lights as a warm-up exercise for the book they actually cared about.

One D.O.A., One on the Way How to Steal a Million trailer is to a lesser extent about a woman named Eve and her befuddled existence in post-Katrina New Orleans. Eve is married to Adam (their names make for one of Robison’s sort-of jokes to which she forgets to provide a punchline), who is sick with hepatitis C. She’s also having an affair with Adam’s twin brother Saunders, estranging herself from the twins’ rich parents, and working aimlessly as a film location scout, despite the fact that Katrina has destroyed her business. But mostly this novel is an excuse to have Eve bumble about having mirthlessly off-kilter conversations, like the following with her intern Lucien:

“It does seem peculiar,” says Lucien, “that you have your TV turned fully on, but with no sound.”

I say, “There’s a special ability i developed, by way of staying awake too long. Even with the sound muted, I can hear Mariska Hargitay.”

“I’m O.K. with that,” he says. “But, however. Who you got on here now is Anderson Cooper.”

“God bless his sweet heart,” I say.

I say, “And he and Mariska aren’t incompatible.”

“I’m just worried,” Lucien says, “I’m afraid you could miss a critical thing he’s reporting.”

“That’s a good worry. The fact that you have it is a reason you work for me and not for Republicans.”

Lucien nods and accepts this and rolls away and goes back to what he was doing—lying flat on his stomach in the middle of the rug. I have no idea why.

The apologist will contend that the apathy pervading this humorless, inert, nonsensical vignette constitutes a strived-for style, but sometimes—hell, almost always—apathy is just apathy. If Robison hadn’t been distracted by last autumn’s primetime TV schedule when she wrote this book, she might have made her lying, adulterous heroine unrepentant in her lying and adultery, and then had a story with a little substance. Instead, we’re meant to supply the substance ourselves by way of sympathy for this maudlin, whiny, guilt-ridden lump of a main character. Eve’s displays of pallid neuroses are spliced with dytopian statistics about New Orleans—such as the fact that it has the highest incarceration rate of any major US city. But Robison doesn’t care about places or people so much as the complaining that places and people can inspire, and it takes the special self-absorption of the veteran fiction writer (call it Philip Roth Syndrome) to use the wasteland wrought by Katrina as a ready-made setting for tired, whiny dysfunction.

In another of their senseless conversations, Lucien says to Eve, “if you’re depressed, don’t cry about it. ‘Cause there never was a time when you weren’t depressed.” Since One D.O.A., One on the Way does literally nothing else over the span of its 176 pages, this is one final proof that, unlike us saps who once liked some of Mary Robison’s stories, Robison herself never bothered even to read this book.

–Sam Sacks

It’s certainly heartening that in spite of the many and varied lamentations about the decline of literacy and the alleged tyranny of Facebook and Zac Snyder movies, great classics from the Russian canon continue to appear in new translations and continue to receive the careful attention of critics.

Open Letters regular Karen Vanuska is one of those eagerly attentive critics, and she now has a tandem review in the current Quarterly Conversation of Marion Schwartz’s translations of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov and Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard. Of the latter, she writes:

War provides the dramatic arc of White Guard, so much so that the members of the Turbin family are frequently lost to long passages on troop movements, mortar fire, and street skirmishes. Battalion commanders and foot soldiers appear, scatter some dialogue and action into the plot, then move on. White Guard is not a family-during-war saga; rather, this slim novel is an ongoing indictment of war: the pointlessness of power skirmishes, the senselessness of deaths, the destruction of homes. Although Bulgakov will repeatedly return to the Turbin household, it is Kiev, and all it represents about hearth and home, that Bulgakov seems to truly mourn the loss of in White Guard.

In Open Letters in December 2007, Vanuska engaged her own experiences in the Soviet Union in a review of From Newbury with Love, about an epistolary correspondence between families of book lovers in England and Moscow.

Elsewhere, Dennis Drabelle of The Washington Post, having just received the paperback edition of Anthony Briggs’ translation of War and Peace, wonders whether we really need so many translations of the doorstopping masterpiece. (Our own Steve Donoghue dealt with that question in his review of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.) At Beatrice, Daniyal Mueenuddin rhapsodizes about Ivan Turgenev’s strange and memorable story “The Singers.” Finally (for the moment) here’s a review of Andrey Platonov’s Soul by Alex Wenger in Words Without Borders, and long look from Sam Sacks at the fiction and war journalism of the great Vasily Grossman.

Enjoy going back to the well that never runs dry—and feel free to share the links to any other Russian revisitings you’ve encountered lately!

There Will Be Blood download Interception buy Ghoulies II video Following the course earlier charted by Open Letters, the Book Review today ran a piece by Pico Iyer about Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants – at least, I think that’s what it was about: in an extreme rarity for Iyer, the prose of the article is so breathlessly hysterical and comically overreaching that it resists confident summary. Sometimes he seems to be talking about Li’s book, and other times he seems to be improvising on outtakes from “We Are the World”:

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Dave Eggers, most American of writers, helps a Sudanese “Lost Boy” tell his story — and bring it all the way to Atlanta — and suddenly the almost unthinkable miseries of an African refugee become part of our inheritance and expand our sense of obligation. Edwidge Danticat

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simply recounts the story of her father and his brother, trying to get from their native Haiti to America, and it becomes our business, and shame, and an immigrant tragedy that others, from Cuba and Vietnam, can no doubt relate to and second. Khaled Hosseini, Gary Shteyngart, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: the names might have been hard for our grandparents to pronounce, but their stories are as American as kiwi-and-cardamom pie.

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It’s difficult not to think of this widening circle as soon as one begins Yiyun Li’s grieving and unremitting first novel, “The Vagrants.”

As will be immediately obvious, most of this is sustained, up-tempo, brass-plated, sciatica-inducing hogwash, from the opening anointment of Dave Eggers as the “most American of writers” (a designation only possible if it’s referring exclusively to negative American traits, but since Iyer doesn’t seem to be wearing his ‘ironic’ hat here, it’s unlikely that’s what he meant) to the closing line about Li’s novel, which, being  a novel, cannot grieve – and which, after some 250 grim and grudging pages, does indeed remit.

Virtually every specific claim Iyer makes about Li’s book is either self-evidently fatuous, school-marmishly oblivious, or else just plain wrong. When he tells us that Li is “always meticulous in her details,” he quotes a line that’s tautologically awful and not the least bit meticulous: “In the period of indecision and uncertainty, old winter-weary snow began to melt.”

A review like this won’t help readers who want to evaluate Li before they start overpraising her.  Such readers are encouraged to turn to Open Letters Fiction Editor Sam Sacks, who reviews The Vagrants, which he calls “a prosecution as much as a novel,” in our current issue. In the book, Sacks says, “Significance isn’t achieved by emphasis or contrast but by pounding repetition. The wind of listless disillusion blows across everyone.” Click on over to his essay to learn more of his thoughts on The Vagrants and two other recent products of the latest Chinese literary diaspora, and as always, feel free to tell us what you think.

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– Steve Donoghue