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[...] Didion uses ironic, or what could be more accurately called skeptical, quotation marks fanatically and constantly. They highlight the fact that the journalist is not just telling a story, she is taking it apart; that the words we use are suspect, revelatory.

We have come to expect psychological lightning from the books we read on beaches and buses and trains. We want motives, symptoms, childhood traumas. We want years on the analyst's couch condensed into a single paragraph. We want the deep pleasure of what reviewers call "penetrating psychological in…

[...] There is no poetry, no glory, in this story, no secret communion, no mystical collaboration, no intangible collusion, between father and daughter, only pointless, run-of-the-mill human suffering. Instead of the subtle literary pas de deux between Joyce and his daughter, the truth is more pain…

[...] Wallace goes on to attack Updike and, in passing, Roth and Mailer for being narcissists. But does this mean that the new generation of novelists is not narcissistic? I would suspect, narcissism being about as common among male novelists as brown eyes in the general public, that it does not. I…

[...] Part of what seems threatening or unsettling about the single mother's household is precisely the sense that the mother may be glimpsed as more of a person, that these children are witnessing a struggle they should not be seeing, that their mother is very early on a regular, complicated perso…