Sandra Rodriguez Barron

This is an amazing intersection between the literary world and the world of skiing! John Irvings’s grandson and granddaughter are competing in the Winter Olympics in the freeski halfpipe. It’s been nearly five decades since “The World According to Garp” gave rise to a career of global literary influence, one with an oeuvre including the likes of “The Cider House Rules” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany”. Irving, now 83, once dreamt of being a world-class athlete, one good enough to wrestle at the Olympic level. Article: “It’s hard to imagine what it must feel like. Seeing your living legacy is one thing. Seeing that legacy in the Olympics is something else entirely.”
(Sorry, I’m out of gift articles this month.)

What’s it like to have two grandchildren in the Winter Olympics? Let John Irving tell you Birk and Svea Irving, grandchildren of the great American author John Irving, are competing in Milan Cortina this week.

This literary whodunnit takes us inside the dark triad personality cluster—narcissism, machiavelism, and psychopathy. The reader will slowly solve the riddle of who Francis Fox is: he’s the pe*****le Humbert Humbert of Lo**ta, the masterful liar-manipulator Tom Ripley, vain and the handsome as Patrick Bateman of American Psycho— all rolled into one. Put him in a community given to keeping secrets and its hunting season on twelve-year-olds at a private school in New Jersey. Joyce Carol Oates incorporates a delightfully complicated, interwoven cast of divided families that create opportunity for misunderstanding and misdirection, exploring the insidiousness of child abuse and how it affects the community of a small town. The selfish blindness of adults is one of Oates’s key themes, and the gaping absence of community responsibility is profound.
Don’t read this book if you’re easily shocked. With the intention of being realistic, it contains notes of erotica, which can sometimes feel like it’s inadvertedly normalizing pe******ia, particularly in the melodramatic musings about love and obsession from the victims themselves. I agree with another reviewer who said, “Some things only cops, psychologists, and courts of law should see.” That said, I thought this novel was riveting and it is Joyce Carol Oates after all, which means that the prose is gorgeous.
My heaviest criticism is for the editor, who missed the opportunity to streamline the manuscript into a five-star knockout of a novel. At 671 pages, it was far too long and sometimes repetitive. For example, the meaning of the Edgar Allan Poe statue was told to us no less than three times. The “kitten” stuff, the reason behind the pastries as bait, was explained multiple times. I get it! Then there's the technique of providing backstory of virtually every characters as a tool of misdirection. We waste our attention and time learning about characters who didn’t ultimately drive the narrative, and the middle pages dragged as a result. To the reader who wants to forge ahead, I suggest propping your attention span by supplementing your reading with audio. You'll be rewarded with an absolutely excellent ending. The only reason the reader can bear the grooming scenes is because Fox has gotten his comeuppance on page one, we just don’t know who did it, or why, especially since there are so many characters who want him dead. Fox is a book with deep relevance to what’s going on today. I’m glad I read it.

Flashlight begins with a little mystery and now I’m deep in the Korean War. I’m discovering how little I knew about US involvement in that war, and the quiet role of Japan. I heard Susan Choi speak at the Boston Book Festival and was intrigued. Hit me up if you’re reading it too! I love the cover art. It’s turned sideways.

“Books work as museums; they preserve something about a country when it is drastically changing.”-Kiran Desai