Reviews
Truth, Justice and the American Way: A Naked Singularity & Personae
The reviews of A Naked Singularity have compared it to a host of other long novels. Many agree that it is firmly in the tradition of those baggy works of late twentieth century postmodern masters, such as William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.
In the ruins of the future: Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
There is a certain similarity of reaction, so the story goes, to a new Thomas Pynchon novel. Each generates a sense of anticipation; we ask ourselves whether the new Pynchon will approximate the mind-shattering impact that Gravity’s Rainbow had on readers and critics alike.
Wave after wave: when they came / for you elegies / of resistance
Barnett’s language works in a kind of shorthand: the reader is left to fill in the blanks, provide conjunctions, make connections. Sense is not a product of grammatical syntax but of progressions and repetitions. Names, place names and languages other than English – there are lengthy quotations in French from sources as diverse as Derrida, Mao Tse Tung, Wittgenstein and the Bible – are given equal weight and poetic rephrasing.
High drama, low farce: Breaking News & Murdoch’s World
After an extraordinary series of events almost unparalleled in the modern history of the media, the Select Committee called before it one of the most powerful men in the world. There, in scenes of high drama and low farce, Rupert Murdoch, the emblematic media mogul of the late twentieth century, was asked by British lawmakers to account for the crimes of his minions.
A threat then, a threat now: Stephen Ward Was Innocent, OK
The death of Stephen Ward stands as an iconic moment in British history, when the establishment, confronted by a new liberalism, had its hypocrisy exposed by a heady cocktail of female sexuality (a threat then, a threat now), race and politics.