In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019, announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Lori Feathers offers her appreciation of fiction finalist Anna Burns’ Milkman (Graywolf Press).

Reading Anna Burns’ Milkman is a singular experience. The novel is a statement work: as original in its presentation as it is profound in its exposition of the familiar and not so familiar terrors that daily assail its young hero, a woman who faces persistent, insidious predation, both sexual and politically motivated.

The unnamed narrator, a resident and native of Belfast, is coming of age in the early 1970s during “the Troubles,” that long period of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland that pit nationalists against loyalists and Catholics against Protestants, with each side inflicting an ever-growing number of civilian deaths upon the other. These hostilities distort everyday existence and human interactions. Here ordinary objects become signifiers of personal allegiance, being surveilled is commonplace, and innocent comments are weighted with hidden meaning.

The narrator evades assimilating this coded and dangerous world by immersing herself in nineteenth-century novels as she ambles among the bombed-out buildings, shadowy parks, and colorless streets of her district. This steady routine of “reading-while-walking,” she maintains, is her way of being vigilantly non-vigilant about her surroundings. The community considers her behavior strange, “beyond-the-pale,” and, in short, unacceptable.

One of the few who refuse to judge the narrator for reading-while-walking is “maybe-boyfriend,” a sensitive, local car mechanic with whom she is romantically involved. The shared reluctance to put their “maybe” relationship on solid footing is a symptom of the unrelenting volatility of the times. Their relationship is further strained by the narrator’s desire to keep maybe-boyfriend a secret from her mother, who is excessively impatient to marry off her eighteen-year-old daughter.

While the threat of political violence permeates Burns' narrative, it is the menacing, inchoate sexual aggression against the narrator and her helplessness in the face of it that is the most compelling thread of the novel. The narrator is stalked by the so-called Milkman, a married forty-year-old who is a powerful and feared vigilante. Confronted with the Milkman’s invasion of her personal space, misogynistic insinuations, and veiled threats to harm maybe-boyfriend, the narrator is left inert, believing that without witnesses or physical manifestations of the Milkman’s malicious intentions the threat that he poses to her is less real, somehow almost excusable. The narrator’s observations about her silent victim-hood and her felt lack of agency as regards the Milkman’s predatory behavior are described in a way that is true and timeless.    

Yet for all of its weighty themes there is a lightness to Milkman that defies the gravity of its subject and setting. The novel is funny and full of warmth. Burns’ characters are engaging and wonderfully original in their idiosyncrasies; their quirky habits and turns-of-phrase demonstrate the author’s extraordinary imagination. Burns’ writing is rich, full and constantly surprises and delights. In this big, sprawling and brilliant novel Anna Burns brings us into a world hostage to misunderstanding and fear but where the human spirit and one young woman’s resilience, shine through.

Lori Feathers is a freelance book critic who lives in Dallas, Texas. She authors the essay series “In Context” for Literary Hub as well as the Words Without Borders‘ regular feature, “Best of the B-Sides.” Her work appears in various online and print publications. She co-owns Interabang Books in Dallas, where she works as the store’s book buyer.

Reviews

Slate

The Wall Street Journal

NPR

The Washington Post

The New Yorker

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019, announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Mary Ann Gwinn offers her appreciation of biography finalist Mark Lamster’s The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century (Little, Brown).

Philip Johnson used his inherited fortune to pursue his passions – fine food, high society, art, architecture, and for a time, radical right wing politics.  A colleague and contemporary of the Rockefeller family, founding curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s architecture department,  Johnson was also a Nazi sympathizer in the runup to World War II, advocating for Third Reich principles in the U.S. and meeting up with Nazi officials on his European tours. A consummate socialite and Harvard graduate, he supported populist Louisiana governor Huey Long and anti-Semitic radio commentator Father Charles Coughlin.

Just as his political beliefs shifted (he would spend the rest of his life downplaying his right-wing sympathies), so did his professional career. Though he was considered a pioneer of 20th century modernist architecture, his styles and influences shifted and morphed. “Johnson was a historicist who championed the new, an elitist who was a populist, a genius without originality, a gossip who was an intellectual, an opportunist who was a utopian, a man of endless generosity who could be casually, crushingly cruel,”  writes architecture critic Mark Lamster in his new book The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century (Little, Brown). By the end of his long life, Johnson was still, in many ways, unknowable.

Lamster captures a brilliant, restless, conniving, ambitious man. Improbably gifted, richly supported by family money, Johnson mounted landmark architecture and design exhibits at MOMA and donated thousands of artworks to the museum. He mentored young architects and created his own architecture firm.  By the second half of the 20th century his influence had turned him into  “the godfather of American architecture,” wrote architecture critic Paul Goldberger in a New York Times review of Lamster’s book.  He designed some landmark buildings, including his own residence, the “glass house” in New Canaan, Connecticut, Pennzoil Place in Houston, the original Four Seasons Restaurant in New York and Manhattan’s AT&T tower.

But many other Johnson designs were pedestrian, jarring or forgettable. His architectural allegiances shifted over time; originally a Mies van der Rohe acolyte, Johnson embraced postmodernism, and by the end of his career, many of his buildings, built for corporations in the boom years of the Reagan era, were mashups of clashing influences and his clients’ practical demands. “I do not believe in principles, in case you haven’t noticed,” Johnson once told fellow architect César Pelli. 

It is this shapeshifting quality that makes Johnson hard to grasp, and he was never much for self-disclosure. How could a man who supported the Nazis, who watched Polish villages burn from the sideline as the Nazis invaded them, later design synogogues and an Israeli nuclear research reactor? How could a tastemaker who followed and preached modernism become a convert to the baubles and trimmings of post modernism? Lamster does not try to fully explain, extoll or damn Johnson; he presents him in all his contradictions, and views the inner workings of American architecture with an unblinking gaze.  His book is an acute profile of both a man and his profession: in The Nation, Kate Wagner wrote that The Man in the Glass House “reveals in great detail how Johnson, in collaboration with a small number of powerful cultural institutions (and the billionaires that funded them), determined who would become the next generation’s architectural stars. Little by little in Lamster’s book, the hoary narrative—still bafflingly predominant in today’s architecture world—of the scrappy young draftsman pulling himself up by his bootstraps to become a great architect through hard work and talent is relentlessly dismantled.”

Mary Ann Gwinn writes about books and authors for the Seattle Times, Newsday and other publications. She won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for coverage of the Exxon Valdez disaster, and has chaired both the nonfiction and biography committees for the NBCC. She’s on Twitter at @gwinnma.

Reviews

New York Times Book Review  

The Nation

Curbed

In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019, announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC president Kate Tuttle offers her appreciation of autobiography finalist Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (Scribner).

Both of Nora Krug’s parents were born in 1946 into a Germany still reeling from war; little wonder that they rarely spoke of it when Krug herself was growing up. Casting the Nazi years into a distant and disdained past was a typical German coping mechanism, so thoroughly ingrained that when Krug begins to wonder what role her own ancestors played in the regime, she’s brought up short to realize just how recent the history really is.

Krug and her classmates were trained to understand the Holocaust, to interrogate the evils of Hitlerism. For a generation steeped in self-examination, there was an awful lot, it turned out, they didn’t look at. “We prepared questions for the old women who travled from America to tell us about the camps,” she writes, “but we never thought to ask about one another’s grandparents.”

In Belonging, Krug blends text and images into a kind of roadmap taking her back to a homeland that both comforts and confuses her. The visual components of the book range from drawings to cartoons to archival letters and photographs; married to Krug’s words, they create a stunningly effective, often moving portrait of Krug’s memories and her exploration of the people who came before her. There’s her father’s older brother, whose name her father inherited after the brother’s death in Italy as a teenaged soldier in Hitler’s army. There are fractured families and hard stories on both sides. Most affectingly, Krug’s investigation into her ancestors leads her to cousins, contemporaries, with whom she can begin to repair the old rifts.

Always lurking is the question: were my ancestors evil? Were they complicit? Were they merely surviving? Were they, perhaps, even heroic? One is rumored to have helped local Jewish families, another reputedly spoke out against the Nazis. As Krug circles closer and closer to the central facts, she’s forced to face the likelihood that these comforting stories are yet another way of deflecting a reality to painful to live with.

Throughout, Krug wrestles with the German idea of “Heimat,” a loose and perhaps untranslatable term for the landscape from which a person springs. What if your heimat is a site of collective guilt? What if you also, after moving away and marrying an American Jewish man, miss it terribly? Sprinkled throughout the book are “things German,” lovingly sketched “from the notebook of a homesick émigré” – a particular brand of bandage, a red rubber hot-water bottle – and it is in holding up these homely items that “Belonging” feels most tender of all. A place, and a people, can contain multitudes, from the most evil to the most beloved.

Kate Tuttle is president of the National Book Critics Circle. Her reviews, as well as profiles of literary figures ranging from Salman Rushdie to Leslie Jamison, have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Newsday.She writes a weekly column about books and authors for the Boston Globe. Her essays on childhood, race, and politics have appeared in DAME, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. 

Reviews

Parul Seghal in the New York Times

Heller McAlpin for NPR

Kate Tuttle is president of the National Book Critics Circle. Her reviews, as well as profiles of literary figures ranging from Salman Rushdie to Leslie Jamison, have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Newsday.She writes a weekly column about books and authors for the Boston Globe. Her essays on childhood, race, and politics have appeared in DAME, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019, announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member John McWhorter offers his appreciation of biography finalist Chris Bonanos’ Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous (Henry Holt & Company).

Christopher Bonanos' Flash: the Making of Weegee the Famous offers all of the pleasures and benefits that a solid biography should. It is, for one, the first biography of a figure recognized by a great many more from passing mentions than detailed coverage. We are surprised that the job hadn't been done before, and gratified that it now has been, by Bonanos, City Editor at New York and thus a kind of culture vulture about town well-placed to picture and recreate New York in the way that Weegee would have perceived it.

Moreover, this book gets us behind the eyes of a person who only left so many documents of their inner thoughts to posterity and would largely rather we kept apart from them. In this, Bonanos peels away layers of mythology and reveals the truths underneath, often as intriguing as the longstanding distortions. Along the way, it serves as a primer about the emergence of an art form, journalistic photography, while in the bargain giving us a richer sense of Weegee's art than the usual smattering of grisly little pics we often encounter in meeting him on the fly.

Finally, Weegee's life turns out to have been a great tale in its way, beginning in immigrant poverty he seems to have largely pretended never existed, cresting in a certain renown amidst the general public and fervent respect from fellow and aspiring photographers and artists, and a slow decline in which Weegee never found a viable third act Beethovenian "late stage" and declined into mannerism. At the prime of his life, he resided in near-flophouse conditions voluntarily, spending his nights on calls chasing down opportunities for saleable photos. Predictably, settled romantic relationships and even true friendships were elusive, but this meant little to him amidst his artist's obsession with his trade.

However, a special pleasure of the book is watching Weegee help pave the way to journalistic photos of the vivid sort we now consider normal, in contrast to the stilted or barely readable ones typical of the press before the 1930s. Far from being a mere archive of the gangland casualty shots that get around most, Weegee's oeuvre gives us living persons at work and play in his era with a relatability that makes all but a few media photos before him look like daguerreotypes.

At the end of the day, a biography must be readable, whatever the importance of its subject. Bonanos has written a page-turner about, of all people, a grubby loner scrambling around Manhattan taking pictures of usually humble and often dirtyish goings-on, usually after dark, and with a focus bordering on the compulsive. Some would have trouble getting a magazine article out of such a man, but Bonanos neatly makes Weegee's life more viscerally interesting than any full-length portrayals of Ulysses S. Grant or even Franklin Roosevelt. One takes up Flash grateful that someone finally got to Weegee and, almost surprised, feeling even more grateful when the book is over.

John McWhorter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, teaching linguistics, Western Civilization and music history. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, The New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and elsewhere, and is a Contributing Editor for The Atlantic. He is the author of The Power of Babel, Doing Our Own Thing, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Language Hoax, Words on the Move, Talking Back, Talking Black, Losing the Race, and twelve other books, including three academic monographs and two academic article anthologies. The Teaching Company has released five of his audiovisual courses. He spoke at the TED conference in 2013 and 2016, hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast at Slate, and has appeared regularly on Bloggingheads.TV since 2006.

NBCC News

SAVE THE DATE: This year's annual National Book Critics Circle membership meeting will be on Thursday, March 14, from 10 a.m. to noon at The New School. That's the day of the awards ceremony. All members are welcome. Membership meeting at 10 a.m., with coffee and bagels provided. At 11, we'll have a panel titled  "The Stephen King Solution; Could It Work Elsewhere?" moderated by Carlin Romano. The membership meeting ends at noon, and the board begins awards consideration and voting at 12:30.

Join us also for the Finalists' reading on Wednesday, March 13, also at the New School, the awards ceremony on March 14, and the gala awards after-party, celebrating books and our finalists. Tickets $50 for members in advance.

The 31 Books in 30 Days series begins week 3 today.

SAVE THE DATE: The National Book Critics Circle is an AWP literary partner. Come see our featured reading at AWP2019 in Portland on Thursday, March 28, at 4:30 p.m., with NBCC (and Booker) Fiction Award winner Paul Beatty and NBCC (and PEN/Faulkner) Fiction Award winner Joan Silber, conversation with NBCC president Kate Tuttle. And come see us at Bookfair Booth #4010.

Reviews and Interviews

Andrew Ervin reviewed Same Same by Peter Mendelsund for the NYTBR.

Heller McAlpin reviewed Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive and Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway for NPR.

Gayle Feldman profiled Penguin Random House US CEO Madeline McIntosh in The Bookseller.

Yvonne Garrett reviewed Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure for The Brooklyn Rail and Veronica Chambers' (Editor) Queen Bey: A Celebration of the Power & Creativity of  Beyoncé Knowles-Carter for Publishers Weekly.

Diane Scharper reviewed three books for the National Catholic Reporter: Mary Gordon's On Thomas Merton, Barbara Brown Taylor's Holy Envy, and Jean McNeil's Ice Diaries. 

Hamilton Cain reviewed Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway in O, the Oprah Magazine and Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox for the Barnes & Noble Review. 

Lanie Tankard reviewed Finders by Melissa Scott in The Woven Tale Press.

Gregory Couch reviewed Diane Huckelbridge's No Beast So Fierce for the WSJ. 

Michael Bobelian wrote a review of Jill Abramson's Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts for the LA Times.

NBCC Treasurer Marion Winik reviewed Bowlaway, by Elizabeth McCracken, and Parkland, by Dave Cullen, for Newsday.

For her weekly Lit Hub/Book Marks column, NBCC VP/Online Jane Ciabattari interviewed Devi S. Laskar about five books about being "other" in America, including Claudia Rankine's "Citizen," an NBCC award winner.

Kathleen Rooney reviewed Chris Cander's The Weight of a Piano for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Joseph Scapellato's latest here.  Rooney also was in conversation with James Charlesworth here.

Julia M. Klein reviewed Jill Abramson's Merchants of Truth for the Forward. 

Tobias Carroll has a piece here: New Watchlist column at Words Without Borders and here.

Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed Elizabeth McCracken's novel Bowlaway for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Sheila McClear reviewed late Japanese author Yuko Tsushima's novel Territory of Light for New York Magazine's Vulture.

Ellen Prentiss Campbell reviewed The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff for the Fiction Writers Review.

Katharine Coldiron reviewed The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang for LARB and Tonic and Balm by Stephanie Allen for the Masters Review.  Another piece titled, "Reading in The Horse Latitudes" was published here.

Victoria Chang’s new book of poems, OBIT, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Barbie Chang, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017. The Boss (McSweeney's, 2013) won a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Other books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. She has a forthcoming middle grade novel as well. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is Core Faculty within Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program. She also co-coordinates the Idyllwild Writers Week.

In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019, announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC president Kate Tuttle offers her appreciation of nonfiction finalist Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations: How American Business Won Their Civil Rights (Liveright).

When the Supreme Court issued its 2010 Citizens United ruling, many were stunned at the wide array of political and speech rights being granted to corporate entities. Then-President Barack Obama expressed his disagreement with the majority opinion, even going so far as to offer a public rebuke at the State of the Union address. On the political left, Citizens United was seen as setting a dangerous precedent, allowing for an unacceptable level of corporate incursion into our electoral process. The backlash extended into that year’s Occupy Wall Street movement, where protest signs could be seen that read, “Revoke Corporate Personhood.”

These arguments might have seemed bizarre to most of us – how could a corporation be, legally or in any other way, considered a person? – but for Adam Winkler they constitute a long-running, if relatively unknown, narrative in American jurisprudence. In We the Corporations, Winkler, a professor of law at UCLA, traces this history back to the nation’s founding. Looking at the earliest European settlements in Virginia, for instance, he concludes that “in the beginning, America was a corporation.” Not only were the first colonists typically employees of capitalist ventures undertaken to enrich investors, the language of corporate charters found its way into our original founding documents, including the U.S. Constitution.

Still, the notion that American corporations deserve unfettered power – either in terms of property rights or civil rights – is hardly uncontested. Nor do the arguments tend to fit neatly into partisan schematics. Over the years, Winkler writes, “what has often united justices across the left/right spectrum is a tendency to side with business.”

In fact, Winkler argues, there are corporations (mostly nonprofit, such as the NACCP) that “have been among the unsung heroes of civil rights.” Winkler knows that readers might receive that last sentence skeptically, but as he chronicles a series of court battles, he begins to make his case. It helps that he writes with verve and humor. “Ronald McDonald and the Pillsbury Doughboy never marched on Washington or down Main Street demanding equal rights for corporations,” he quips. Nevertheless, over the past several centuries, for better or worse, they have often prevailed – aided, of course, by their human representatives, including fascinating characters from Daniel Webster to Roscoe Conkling – and they have often also lost. Many of the cases associated in the popular mind with corporate overreach, such as 2014’s Hobby Lobby ruling, actually rested on the court’s argument about the rights of a corporation’s human members, not on corporate rights per se.

A tour de force of legal history, deftly told, We the Corporations encourages readers to see things from different angles, and provides a kind of road map to help understand some of the big questions likely to face the courts in coming years.

Kate Tuttle is president of the National Book Critics Circle. Her reviews, as well as profiles of literary figures ranging from Salman Rushdie to Leslie Jamison, have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Newsday.She writes a weekly column about books and authors for the Boston Globe. Her essays on childhood, race, and politics have appeared in DAME, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. 

Reviews

Washington Post 

Wall Street Journal 

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019, announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC Board Members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Mark Athitakis offers an appreciation of criticism finalist Robert Christgau’s Is It Still Good to Ya?  (Duke University Press).

For decades now, Robert Christgau has been known as the Dean of American Rock Critics. He gave himself the title, but it’s one that perhaps hasn’t served him well, or at least mischaracterizes his value as a critic. That “dean” business suggests that Christgau serves as rock and pop’s lead tastemaker, and that all other critics are simply following his lead. It suggests an overly persnickety manner. Lastly, it suggests somebody who’s no fun---did you aspire to hang with your college dean?---in a genre that’s all but defined by joy and pleasure, licit and otherwise.

To be sure, Christgau has handed out a lot of letter grades over the years, and he’s been dinged for his fussiness and presumed authority of his assertions. “I dunno why / You wanna impress Christgau,” Sonic Youth ranted on its song “Kill Yr Idols.” (“I wasn’t flattered to hear my name pronounced right,” Christgau coolly retorted.) But if that “dean” title gets it right, it’s because of this: He does the work, the rigorous yet open-minded work of understanding an artist as deeply as possible, and understanding as much music around the world as possible. Is It Still Good to Ya?, a career-spanning collection of his longform reviews, is a testament to vigorous, big-eared listening. You might have thought he’s been stingy about handing out A-pluses to records in his capsule reviews, but the book makes clear he’s trying to earn one himself.

The book’s subtitle---Fifty Years of Rock Criticism 1967-2017---is somewhat misleading. Most of the book’s essays were written after 2002. At a time when most critics of his generation are either retired or failing to keep up, comfortable with covering warhorses, Christgau has remained an intrepid writer---his appreciations of Lil Wayne, Brad Paisley, M.I.A., and Eminem, are rooted in genuine enthusiasm while skeptical of how the winds of publicity, fandom, and critical consensus have moved perceptions of those artists. And yet, Christgau is also a consistently inviting and generous critic. (“It’s fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green,” he writes.) Across the pages of this book, you can see him being open to different perspectives on musicians, wrestling with his understanding of Thelonious Monk and coming to terms with Sonic Youth, who he once dismissed as “impotent bohos” but now “loves to pieces.”

But while the book speaks to the breadth of Christgau’s journalism, there is also a thematic specificity to the book: Practically every piece is rooted in the notion that music is a prism through which we can better understand race, society, and politics, especially in America. For Christgau, artists old (Billie Holiday, Woody Guthrie, Frank Sinatra, Chuck Berry) and new (Gogol Bordello, Lady Gaga, Jay-Z) evoke a vision of American life that’s been embraced or attacked over time, and will continue to shift. “It was Chuck Berry who had the stones and the cultural ambition to sing as if the color of his skin wasn’t a thing,” he writes, not to deny Berry’s race but to comprehend the cross-cultural fusion he pushed pop music toward. Rock, however you define it, continues to speak to a political ideal we’re still working toward.

This is complicated work, but for a dean it’s plenty fun, and joy to dip into or explore in depth, both for full appreciations and single lines. Offering some tips for “growing better ears” on the book’s first page, he suggests you “spend a week listening to James Brown’s Star Time.” The ensuing pages will keep you listening and thinking for many, many more weeks besides.

Mark Athitakis' reviews and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, LA Times, Humanities, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other publications. He is the author of The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt. He lives in Arizona and tweets at @mathitak.

Reviews

Times Literary Supplement

No Depression

Library Journal