Ntuple Indemnity

This week’s selection: Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (2006) by Stanley Crouch.

In brief: Jazz critic Stanley Crouch has a reputation as an abrasive, stodgy curmudgeon of the emperor’s-new-clothes school, beholden to a restrictive aesthetic orthodoxy and unaccepting of experimentation. This anthology of essays from 1982 to 2004 reveals that Crouch’s reputation is well earned, but well defended. In collected form, his controversial views on race—easily misunderstood if read in the context of one piece alone—cohere into an appraisal of America that is at once complex and mature.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Considering Genius, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy.

In brief: Life after the end of the world is hardly new territory where literature is concerned, so McCarthy’s book—a simple story about a man’s efforts to keep his son alive as they trek across a charred and desolate America—lives and dies by its delivery. And my, what delivery: McCarthy chisels every sentence down to something material and terse. The novel’s instant canonization into American literary history is not without justification: the deceptive simplicity of plot and prose alike echo Hemingway, while its Southern Gothic undertones capably extend Faulkner’s study of how to make sense of a world in decay.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Road, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Red Mars (1992) by Kim Stanley Robinson.

In brief: Robinson’s exhaustive (and often exhausting) treatment of Martian colonization is one of those uncommon novels that is far more fascinating when people sit around arguing about issues than when they actually do anything to move the plot forward. The result is a tale that flaunts its intelligence and attention to scientific detail through and through, but bores as often as it stimulates. Read it for the gorgeous landscapes and its lucid presentation of the terraforming debate, but be warned that the characters never exhibit enough agency to be interesting.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Red Mars, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier.

In brief: Four words: Alfred Hitchcock’s Jane Eyre. Now, how could you possibly go wrong with that?

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Rebecca, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Moonraker (1955) by Ian Fleming.

In brief: Like Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Moonraker is an inquisitive piece of genre fiction hiding behind the legacy of a title that it shares with a film adaptation so outrageously removed as to be parodic at best. Having read Fleming before, what took me by surprise was not the cynical-realist, gadget-free James Bond who doesn’t always get what he wants, but the novel’s quotidian portrait of an off-duty Bond on home soil. Ironically, the novel is at its most dreary and predictable when it turns from character-building to the series’ better-known draw, the standard plot of the megalomaniacal master plan.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Moonraker, keep reading below.)

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