A couple of reviews in the New York Times yesterday caught my attention. James Poniewozik reviewed Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and found it “perceptive and and darkly entertaining.”
And Walter Kirn reviewed William Vollman’s newest book, Poor People. Kirn makes an interesting point that Vollman’s own motives in all of his adventurous project would be worth discussing. “For decades, and at great personal risk, Vollmann has made a calling and a career of mixing with people whom most of us avoid and of listening, at length, to the unheard, whom he typically, and appropriately, pays to speak to him,” Kirn writes. “It’s an endeavor that seems to stem from deeply held but rather obscure convictions that, in this case, could use some explication. If Vollmann is going to question Agee’s motives in writing about the dispossessed, shouldn’t he open up about his own?”