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Review by Alex Shephard Graduation is supposed to signify an end and a beginning, the transition between the ivory tower and the “real world.” But in The Marriage Plot, his first novel since Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize almost a decade ago, Jeffrey Eugenides follows three newly-minted graduates to question the idea of a clean break between these two periods. In the process, he renders familiar insecurities, frustrations, and transformations into the most convincing and authentic portrait of post-graduate life in recent memory. Like the thousands of students who are receiving their diplomas in June 1982, the trio of students […]

Review by Rachel Syme When The Year of Magical Thinking appeared in 2005, it established Joan Didion as the high priestess of anointed grief counselors — her meticulous and minimalist memoir of losing her husband to heart failure hit a cultural and emotional chord that continues to reverberate. In Blue Nights, Didion’s new memoir, she turns to motherhood with a similar clinical detachment — again a shock, but in this case, one that feels much more uncomfortable. Didion’s gimlet eye is always welcome; the conclusions that she draws from it, maybe less so. Two months before Magical Thinking‘s publication, Didion’s 39-year-old adopted daughter, Quintana […]