Draft no 4 – 3/5 Stars I don’t know much about John McPhee. I didn’t grow up reading the New Yorker or being around or knowledgeable about public intellectuals and they’re not much discussed in academic classes. What I was hoping this was is a book cataloging good writing and revision rules and advice the way books by like William Zinsser are. Instead it’s more like a writing memoir from a widely known and documented public career. There’s some advice here and there, but it’s […]
Do you know what broccoli is like to your body? It is like a hundred-dollar bill. When you eat it, you are paying yourself with health. Do you know what a cookie is like? It is Monopoly money! You’re giving your body fraudulent currency.
So here’s a weird thing. This book involves a man who’s only sexually attracted to dolphins and an old man who asks his daughter for rent money in order to buy a second sex doll. And yet, this novel was actually enjoyable compared to her other one, Tampa. Don’t get me wrong, I thought Tampa was actually pretty good, and better than it had any right to be, but it was not fun to read. This one is snappy, and funny, and oddly a sci fi book […]
There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?
There’s not much comfort offered in reading this novel. It’s a clear articulation of a teacher’s sexual exploitation of a middle school boy. The encounters are described in pretty stark terms, so there’s not a lot of room for interpretation or nuance. Oh, but it’s written as a sexually liberating affair novel. So there’s that. The obvious parallels for this novel are Notes on a Scandal in which a teacher sort of “finds” herself involved in a sexual relationship with boy at her school and […]
Not for the faint of heart. (Understatement.)
Emotionally, my impulse is to give this novel three or three and a half stars, but it was so well written and interesting to think about on a more intellectual level that I just have to up it to four stars. Tampa is definitely not a book for the faint of heart, nor is it for literature Puritans who insist on sanitizing away the nastier bits of human existence from the written word, as if that will make them stop existing. Nor is it for […]