Nancy Dalva

The Widows of Eastwick
By John Updike
Alfred A. Knopf, 308 pages, $24.95

By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes. —Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? The return of The Witches of Eastwick?

If only. John Updike’s weird sisters, returned now as widows, aren’t so much wicked as weary, and wearying.

And yet Updike adepts will find much to admire in this late novel. If you’re happy to ignore certain elements (plot, for instance), you’ll find yourself in descriptive prose heaven. But if you prefer to fall blessedly into a book the way Alice fell down the rabbit hole—that is, if you still read naïvely—you’ll hate The Widows of Eastwick.  read more »

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES
By David Sedaris
Little, Brown and Company, 323 pages, $25

IF YOU GO about your daily rounds in New York carrying a copy of David Sedaris’ new book, you will be popular—besieged, even.

"Where did you get that? I pre-ordered it and I don’t have it yet!"

Along the way—having promised to lend the book to everyone at the hair salon, and then spilling coffee on it and dog-earing the pages so frequently that it looks like a small accordion—you’ll meet the fans of Amy Sedaris, who joins her brother on the recordings of his books. These have their own cult following. (Yes, When You Are Engulfed in Flames is out in audio, too.)  read more »

Autobiography of a Wardrobe
By Elizabeth Kendall
Pantheon Books, 223 pages, $20

Elizabeth Kendall has written a memoir in the voice and guise of her own wardrobe. Individual garments, or outfits, star in each of her 47 short chapters, and then come an epilogue, an appendix—where to shop!—and a bibliography.  read more »

I WAS TOLD THERE'D BE CAKE
By Sloane Crosley
Riverhead Books, 228 pages, $14

Okay, I confess. I Facebook-stalked Sloane Crosley, and she has some very cool friends, including Leon Neyfakh, who profiled her for The Observer (“The Most Popular Publicist in New York”—Nov. 27, 2007). So believe me, I was totally psyched not to like her book of personal essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake. I’ve never had this problem of instantly wanting to hate Nora Ephron (my goddess), or David Sedaris, or even Cynthia Heimel or Fran Lebowitz, and I’m basically too in awe of Adam Gopnik’s organizational skills to begin to check him out on the Web. But this is different. Just for starters, I can’t decide whether to identify with the author or with her parents. I might even have been Sloane Crosley, if I’d had a better work ethic, straighter hair and a different life.  read more »

HIS ILLEGAL SELF
By Peter Carey
Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pages, $24.95

Peter Carey is an expat Australian who has lived in New York City for almost 20 years, and it would seem that he’s homesick. Not just for his country, but for what he was when he lived there: a boy, and then a member of that pride of boomers who came of age in the 70’s. And so he’s concocted an unlikely tale whose true arc is to get out of the range of Bloomingdales and into the wilds of Queensland, which he portrays as a ramshackle redoubt for the most disenfranchised of the pot-addled, dropout generation. Here, far from the chic haunts of what used to be called “Bergdorf Goodman hippies,” he elaborates a lengthy double kidnapping.

First our feckless heroine, nicknamed “Dial” (short for dialectic), inadvertently abducts our hero. He’s 7-year-old Che (a child of SDS lefties), and theirs is an Oedipal folie à deux. Dial intends to take him for a visit with his mother, Susan, only to discover that Susan has been (rather conveniently) blown up in some radicalism-gone-wrong in Philadelphia. (Mr. Carey mines actualities of the day for ballast, and for leverage.)  read more »

THE INVENTION OF EVERYTHING ELSE
By Samantha Hunt
Houghton Mifflin, 257 pages, $24

In her second novel—the first was the very well-received The Seas (2005)—Samantha Hunt has used her quite singular voice to animate a crowd of characters. The Seas was more or less a work of magic realism, a very grim fairy tale, with a feeling like (though none of the particulars of) the movie Edward Scissorhands. Creepy, disturbing, poetical. There was one main character, a young woman.  read more »

SHAKESPEARE: THE WORLD AS STAGE
By Bill Bryson  read more »

BORN STANDING UP: A COMIC'S LIFE
By Steve Martin
Scribner, 207 pages, $25

… Enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. —Steve Martin

Being funny isn’t fun. At the height of his great success as a stand-up comedian (crowds of 45,000), Steve Martin suffered from depression, exhaustion and the loneliness of the road. In 1981, at the top of the roller coaster, he walked away, into the movies. And into writing for them, and for The New Yorker, among other things. He’s very good at it; he’s a pleasure to read. But this memoir, one suspects, is something of a magic act. As if Steve Martin had reached into his magician’s top hat and instead of a rabbit, pulled out “Steve Martin.”  read more »

In this, the third installment of John Richardson’s epic biography of Picasso, we find that the artist, age 36, having been spurned by two mistresses to whom he’d proposed marriage, has fled wartime Paris for Rome and fallen in with the Ballets Russes.  read more »

I have a dance colleague who complains that there’s too much about sex in Julie Kavanagh’s Nureyev: The Life, and another who says that there isn’t enough.  read more »

Louis Auchincloss’ fans will be happy to celebrate his 90th birthday later this month with The Headmaster’s Dilemma, a novel that puts his grand total at more than 60 books of assorted fiction and nonfiction.  read more »

Rupert Thomson’s serenely eerie, trans-genre eighth novel is a head trip. It takes place in a straightforwardly narrative 12-hour span, yet zooms all over in time, as thought does, and space, as dreams do.  read more »

In October 1960, Lincoln Kirstein “was able to confide to a few people that the state would be spending $17,500,000 to erect a dance theater. It would be designed by Philip Johnson and seat twenty-six hundred people.” This building would become the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.  read more »