The Omnivore

Cressida Connolly in the Spectator enjoyed the dangerous liaisons of JACK HOLMES AND HIS FRIEND:

Homosexual writers seem to be much better than straight ones at combining high literary style with vastly enjoyable descriptions of really filthy sex. Edmund White is a master of both. This novel is like one from the French 18th century, where passages of intricate social comedy alternate with carnal episodes of Baroque detail … All of this is tremendous fun. It is impossible not to like Jack and to be amused by the exploits brought about by his enormous penis, almost a character in itself, a sort of penile Candide.

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Like all good pretenders to the title of Great American Novelist, Chad Harbach manages to mix the mundane, the esoteric and a handful of Schiller quotations. Adam Mars-Jones in his entertaining review in the Observer skilfully unpicked the verbal tangles:

There are so many references to high culture that college baseball comes to resemble some sort of offshoot of Mensa. Mike Schwartz quotes Schiller in a pre-game pep talk. Owen reads Kierkegaard in the dugout. Introduced to Pella, Schwartz correctly identifies her name as that of a city sacked by the Romans in 168BC. Even Henry’s point of view dwells on Homer rather than Homer Simpson. All of this would be laughable if it was done with less conviction.

On the book’s first page there’s an elementary slip in the point of view, with a reference to Mike Schwartz letting “his huge aching back” relax against a chain-link fence. Any creative-writing instructor would point out that Mike may feel the ache but hardly the hugeness, which is information aimed squarely at the reader. Perhaps Harbach has let it stand with the affectionate confidence of a driver who decides, after passing his test, not to respray the scratch in the coachwork that happened the first time he took the wheel.

Read all the reviews for THE ART OF FIELDING.

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Though Bolaño may have died almost a decade ago, thanks to Macmillan, translations of his works are still hitting our shore at quite a rate.

Latest to arrive is THE THIRD REICH, which is, according to Michael Wood in The New York Times, an interesting early addition to his canon:

But knowledge of the later work almost certainly improves the latest Bolaño novel to appear in English: The Third Reich, written in 1989, which against every tenet of the New Criticism offers a richer reading experience once you have seen the signature. Indeed, I kept responding to it like a person living in two times. Mainly I was reading the novel now, and finding it thoroughly, weirdly absorbing. Partly I was reading as if I were an unfortunate editor in around 1990, wondering how I was going to tell Bolaño that this wasn’t quite a finished book yet, that his plot led nowhere, that his characters kept trailing off into incoherence. That earlier reader would have been wrong even then, but without hindsight it’s easy to be wrong.

In case it all seems like hard work and his masterpiece, 2666, at nine hundred pages is a bit of a stretch (its most famous section is an inventory of hundreds of the corpses of murdered women), Giles Harvey in The New Yorker prepared a users’ guide to Bolaño. This is what he had to say about THE THIRD REICH:

A moody and uneven novel … should join that shelf marked “For Completists Only,” on which also sit Antwerp, Monsieur Pain, The Romantic Dogs, Between Parentheses, and The Skating Rink. Although The Third Reich, which seems to represent Bolaño’s first attempt at novel-writing, is not without certain characteristic charms—black comedy, idiomatic vigor, a looming and ineffable sense of doom—its power is only intermittent and its prose is often as flat as old seltzer water.

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Want to know what the critics made of the latest book, film or play? The Omnivore rounds up newspaper reviews, bringing you a cross section of critical opinion. Sign up to our newsletter.