Heller McAlpin

Food For Thought In Shriver's 'Big Brother'

Heller McAlpin — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 11:03:00 +0000

Lionel Shriver tackles a whopper of an issue in her new novel, Big Brother: obesity and the emotional connection between weight, consumption, guilt and control. She comes at this huge subject through a sister torn between saving her morbidly obese older brother, who has "buried himself in himself," and an unsympathetic, belligerently fit husband — a situation that raises questions about divided loyalties and whether blood is thicker than water.

Farm Team Saga 'Class A' Hits It Out Of The Park

Heller McAlpin — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:03:00 +0000

Is there room for another book about America's favorite pastime? Lucas Mann's Class A earns a position in a lineup that already includes Bang the Drum Slowly, The Natural, The Boys of Summer, Moneyball and The Art of Fielding because, remarkably, it offers a fresh, unexpected angle on this well-trodden game.

Chances are you'll be hearing lots of cheers proclaiming Mann's genre-bending book a Grand slam!

A 'Bargain Basement Molly Bloom' Looks Back On Eight Decades

Heller McAlpin — Wed, 01 May 2013 11:03:00 +0000
Back in the early 1950s, as a lonely, pregnant young wife already ruing her rash elopement, Edna O'Brien sobbed through the ending of Flaubert's Madame Bovary and wondered, "Why could life not be lived at that same pitch?

Owls, Yes, But Also Kookaburras And Dentists In Sedaris' Latest

Heller McAlpin — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:09:00 +0000
Plenty of personal essayists, including really good ones like Nora Ephron, Anna Quindlen and E.B. White, burn out or switch to fiction after a few books. Even Michel de Montaigne, the 16th century French writer often acknowledged as the father of the genre that combines intelligent reflection with anecdotes and autobiography, produced only one volume — albeit a massive one.

Minks, Perfume And Beastly Beauty In 'Shocked'

Heller McAlpin — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:03:00 +0000
Beauty can be a beast. That's one message from Shocked, Patricia Volk's smart, fascinating book about her complex relationship with her beautiful, elegantly attired, hypercritical mother.
Volk's delightful first memoir, Stuffed, which focused on her eccentric family of New York restaurateurs, was published just a year after the death, in 2000, of her 80-year-old father, Cecil Sussman Volk, longtime proprietor of Morgen's West Restaurant but also a sculptor, inventor and motorcycle enthusiast.

Learning 'Life' Lessons With McCorkle's Seniors

Heller McAlpin — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:03:00 +0000
Amid a literary landscape increasingly rife with metafictional and postmodern high jinks, Jill McCorkle's sixth novel, Life After Life, is as resolutely down to earth and unpretentious as the hot-dog franchise owned by one of her characters. For her first novel in 17 years, McCorkle has dared to write a heartwarmer that takes place largely in a retirement home and stresses the importance of good old-fashioned kindness.
(Oddly, McCorkle and Kate Atkinson both have novels called Life After Life coming out this spring, which is bound to cause some confusion.

Can This Hypercomplex 'Leopard' Change Its Spots?

Heller McAlpin — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:03:00 +0000
What's a reader to believe, especially when confronted with an unreliable narrator? Which of the many versions spun by the self-confessed liar and aspiring writer in Kristopher Jansma's far-flung, deliberately far-fetched, hyper-inventive first novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, should we buy?

A New Focus On An Old Image In 'Mary Coin'

Heller McAlpin — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:03:00 +0000
Do you remember those school assignments where you were asked to make up a story based on a picture? With Mary Coin, Marisa Silver looks long and hard at an image that has been seared into our nation's consciousness — Dorothea Lange's iconic Depression-era photograph "Migrant Mother" — and compassionately imagines the lives behind it. The result is a fresh angle on the Great Depression and a lesson in learning how to really look and see.
Silver anchors her novel with research into Lange and her migrant subject, Florence Owens Thompson.

Secrets, Lies And The Allure Of The Illicit

Heller McAlpin — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:03:00 +0000
By the time Wendy Plump learned from a friend that her husband had a longtime mistress and an 8-month-old son living just a mile away, their union was already pockmarked with the scars of adultery — both his and hers. She divulges all this and more in Vow, her at times jaw-droppingly frank but ultimately instructive post-mortem on their 18-year marriage.
You may well wonder why someone would go public with such intimate, painful details of her personal life.

Writing Well Is The Wronged Wife's Revenge In 'See Now Then'

Heller McAlpin — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:03:00 +0000
On one level, See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid's first novel in a decade, is a lyrical, interior meditation on time and memory by a devoted but no longer cherished wife and mother going about the daily business of taking care of her home and family in a small New England town. But it is also one of the most damning retaliations by a jilted wife since Nora Ephron's Heartburn. See Now Then reads as if Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf had collaborated on a heartbroken housewife's lament that reveals an impossible familiarity with Heartburn and Evan S.

Finder's Keepers: 2012's Stories To Hang On To

Heller McAlpin — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 12:03:00 +0000
Part of a book critic's challenge is to sift through piles of new publications, panning for literary gold. In a way that makes us what one of my favorite children's book heroines, Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking, called a "turnupstuffer" — "Somebody who finds the stuff that turns up if only you look." Or like Dickens' optimistic Mr.

Famous Father Had Highest 'Expectations'

Heller McAlpin — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:03:00 +0000
You would think, wouldn't you, that the man who created such heartrendingly sympathetic children as Oliver Twist, Pip, Tiny Tim and poor Little Nell would be a stupendous father. Well, the Charles Dickens who emerges from Robert Gottlieb's Great Expectations, a compulsively readable if occasionally repetitive account of what happened to the great writer's brood of seven sons and three daughters, is not so wonderful.
Daddy Dearest welcomed each new addition to his family with bemused delight — if a tendency to blame the rapid proliferation on his wife Catherine.

Delicious Deceit Abounds In McEwan's 'Sweet Tooth'

Heller McAlpin — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 12:03:00 +0000
Ian McEwan's 15th book of fiction, Sweet Tooth, is a Tootsie Roll Pop of a literary confection — hard-boiled candy enrobing a chewy surprise at its core.

'Flight Behavior' Weds Issues To A Butterfly Narrative

Heller McAlpin — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 12:03:00 +0000
Barbara Kingsolver's commitment to literature promoting social justice runs so deep that in 1998 she established the Bellwether Prize (now the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction) to encourage it.
In the wrong hands, fiction written to convey urgent social messages is as tedious as a political harangue. But done well, it can be both eye-opening and moving: think Charles Dickens on children and poverty in Oliver Twist; Upton Sinclair on the meat-processing industry in The Jungle; Toni Morrison on the tolls of slavery in Beloved; E.L.

'All Gone' Offers Disappointing Take On Hot Topic

Heller McAlpin — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 11:03:00 +0000
The best memoirs transcend the strictly personal.