Review by Choice Review
Delbanco is the author of ten novels and one previous collection of short stories. In that first collection, About My Table (1983), each of the nine stories focused on one man. Here again are nine well-crafted, concise stories, this time, as the title indicates, about the writer's trade. The characters are different in each story, despite similarities and crisscrossing of sensibilities, passions, and themes. These fictional authors of fiction discuss contracts, grants, and reputations, and we get insight into their work methods and their relationships with editors, spouses, and lovers, plus considerations of fictional closure and careful revision. The stories progress up the ages; the hero of the first is a 22-year-old male novelist, already a "success." The last story shows an aging novelist--again, very successful. There is much about success--how individuals and the world measure it. The narration is mostly distanced, omniscient, allowing the author ambiguity toward his largest themes. And at times the voice of a story is close to the point of view of the main character. Everywhere, however, there is the sense of professional (and sometimes a little overly academic) control; occasionally, bits that seem to have been written to make the reader smile fail to provoke this response. A more positive quality is the book's definite sensuality, just when the reader least expects it. The final story begins and ends with sentences of extraordinary length, dexterity, and, ultimately, depth of feeling. Overall, a worthy collection. -B. Wallenstein, City College, CUNY
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
A series of witty, poignant, and often just a bit wicked looks at the writer's life and lot. Delbanco's stories capture writers at the beginning of promising careers; in midstream, with self-satisfied esteem prompted by a string of critical successes; and at the end, when everything including talent seems to be slipping away. The economic struggles of the young writer turn to emotional conflicts when success beckons, writer's block threatens a literary reputation's momentum, and elderly gods waddle and wobble on clay feet. Delbanco captures all of this as he follows his characters in the classroom, at a conference, in their studies, and at publishing soirees, catching in a very personal way the writer's art, craft, and mangled psyche. Delbanco is also the author of Running in Place: Scenes from the South of France [BKL Je 15 89]. --John Brosnahan
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Delbanco writes with sympathy, irony and parodistic glee about the absurdities and perils of being a writer in a largely uncaring world. Each of these nine incisive stories centers on writers: a tenure-seeking Skidmore prof (``His Masquerade''), a randy 77-year-old memoirist (``And with Advantages''), a young first novelist flushed with success and ego (``The Writer's Trade''), a puffed-up celebrity novelist (``Palinurus''). As these wordsmiths exchange shoptalk, their lives careen out of control, plagued by divorce, frustrating lack of recognition or the corrupting bait of success. Delbanco, himself a novelist ( The Sherbrookes Trilogy ) and author of a previous short story collection ( About My Table ), crams each tale with the minute particulars of the writer's life. These mundane details are the raw stuff his protagonists transmute into creative gold, as they devour the lives of their closest kith and kin in search of material. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Life is long and art is short in these nine stories about creativity. The writers' problems seem insuperable: his craft isolates and empties him. He exists more as an eye, a voice, or an ear than as a whole, resonant human. Some of Delbanco's writers gain fame early, some cumulatively, but all are trapped in a Beckett-like cosmic nightmare in which the dreamer (read writer ) cannot but must go on. Whether novelist, poet, or scholar, all slip below their aspirations, especially as lovers, husbands, and friends. The stories are neatly--almost transparently--structured, the settings (mostly Eastern, with a few islands to highlight isolation) sharply drawn, the dialog often almost stagily epigrammatic. The characters are distressingly alike in their discontent. Would that at least one had discovered some real joy in life or art.-- Arthur Waldhorn, City Coll., CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Delbanco, author of the Sherbrookes trilogy (Possession, Sherbrookes, Stillness), here offers a second collection of intelligent but surfacey stories (About My Table, 1983), all concerning writers (mostly male) who must accommodate their illusions to reality. Of the nine pieces, the best is ""The Day's Catch,"" a novella: David Levin, the protagonist, a writer who lives on Martha's Vineyard as companion to a blind boy, is concerned with voice--""the play of utterance--its registered timbre and range."" By story's end, Levin, middle-aged, and his wife attempt to recapture their marriage on a Caribbean island, but Levin ""had used up their story."" The effective title story describes the coming-of-age of callow Mark Fusco, ""enrolled in the school of real life""; after a publication party for his successful novel, a train accident spoils his literary illusions--but the analysis of those illusions becomes his subject. Of the rest: in ""You Can Use My Name,"" three Iowa Writers' Workshop grads keep in touch for years, until, finally, Adam sees famous Richard in dissipation, and former lover Marian as ""one chatty woman, spooning fruit."" Likewise, ""Palinurus"" concerns a famous novelist and his lesser patron, a ""writer who teaches"" and who becomes the novelist's literary executor, subordinating his own life to the needs of executorship. ""His Masquerade"" concerns a professor unexpectedly moved by a mediocre but sincere visiting poet; in ""The Brass Ring,"" a mid-life novelist of limited reputation sees a younger brother suffer through a bout with Guillain-Barr‚ syndrome; ""Everything"" is modified stream-of-consciousness about a writer near the end of his life as he waits to be photographed. The metaphor of the writer writing can wear thin, but, still, this is a solid--if specialized--collection about the disillusions and small epiphanies of the literary life. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
