Black Lamb

June 2012 in Black Lamb

Volume 10, Number 6 — June 2012

June 1st, 2012

The Black Lamb Review of Books IX

In this issue of Black Lamb, our ninth annual Black Lamb Review of Books, Terry Ross looks at books by Jaimy Gordon, Elizabeth Taylor, and Alan Hollinghurst, and then plunges into the world of detective fiction in Shamuses, horses, & queers — oh my! Brad Bigelow reports on a spate of translations of Germany’s greatest novelist before Thomas Mann, Theodor Fontane.

John M. Daniel examines The disruptive world of Charles Baxter. In Knights errant, Ed Goldberg takes a close look at cops and detectives fighting burdens imposed upon them. Andi Diehn reports on how endless book reviewing killed her love of reading in Once I was a reader. In Apples & oranges, Toby Tompkins takes a look at T.C. Boyle and also at so-called genre fiction. M.A. Orthofer reviews Peter Ackroyd’s 1996 book Milton in America in What if …? Young Adult book writer Beren de Motier evaluates Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Book Issue, Books and Authors, Month summaries, The Black Lamb Review of Books | Link to this Entry

Shamuses, horses, & queers — oh, my!

June 1st, 2012

The Black Lamb Review of Books IX

BY TERRY ROSS

As editor, I have often taken advantage of our mid-year book issue to comment on my own reading since the previous Christmas, and this issue is no exception. Between that holiday and the New Year, I reread Jaimy Gordon’s She Drove Without Stopping (1990), a novel that had mightily impressed me when I read it shortly after its publication. Then I gobbled up her The Lord of Misrule, which won the National Book Award in 2010. Ms. Gordon can write: She Drove is rather a tour-de-force, demonstrating a lively narrative gift with a fresh use of language. Misrule is a brilliant, vivid evocation of the world of small-time racetrack claiming races: the characters, the horses, the barns. At the center is a female who doesn’t belong, Maggie, who spends a season or two experiencing the crookedness, violence, and fascination of the track. Gordon’s writing, garnished in a few places by “literary” quotations and often by bits of writing that say “See how much I’ve read?”, is nevertheless remarkable. Her use of slang and Negro dialect and low-class elocutions seems sometimes extremely authentic and sometimes superimposed. This is a very curious book but above all a genuine page-turner, centered on four races, four horses, and a very well delineated cast of characters.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Ross, The Black Lamb Review of Books | Link to this Entry