Is speculative fiction poised to break into the literary canon?

Interesting blog piece about the relationship between the Booker and genre, by Damien G Walter online at the Guardian yesterday: 'The Booker prize judges have yet to acknowledge the flowering of British SF and fantasy. Will 2011 be a breakthrough year?' Have a read and see what you think. (The comments thread, though long, is pretty interesting too).

Caryl Churchill's 'Seven Jewish Children'

Towards the end of The Finkler Question, Hephzibah, Treslove and Finkler go to see a play called Sons of Abraham, 'a piece of agitprop, that people were writing angry or enthusiastic letters to the papers about' [249]. You remember it:

The final scene was a well-staged tableau of destruction, all smoke and rattling metal sheets, and Wagnerian music, to which the Chosen People danced like slow-motion devils, baying and halooing, bathing their hands and feet in the blood that oozed like ketchup from the corpses of their victims, a fair number of whom were children. [250]

This is Jacobson's fictional version of a very famous contemporary play by Caryl Churchill called Seven Jewish Children (2009). Follow that link to a Wikipedia entry on the play; read the sections on 'praise' and 'criticism'.

Jacobson has been one of the play's most outspoken critics. Here, for instance, is an article he wrote for the Independent [18 Feb 2009] denouncing it.

And here is (prominent Jewish academic and thinker) Jacqueline Rose's angry response to Jacobson in the Guardian.

Jacobson wasn't pleased by Rose's column. Nor is Rose pleased by his reply.

How much of this material makes it into the novel, do you think? And to what extent is it modified or fictionalised?

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (2010)

WEEK 14; JACOBSON, THE FINKLER QUESTION

'The Finkler Question should not be seen as something that was "relentlessly middle-brow, or easy-peasy" because it was comic. It is much cleverer and more complicated and about much more difficult things than it immediately lets you know. Several people have used the word wise, and that's a good word.' [Andrew Motion, chair of judges]

Judges
Chair: Andrew Motion
Rosie Blau
Deborah Bull
Tom Sutcliffe
Frances Wilson

Shortlist

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)
Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)
Emma Donoghue Room (Picador)
Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books)
Andrea Levy The Long Song (Hachette)
Tom McCarthy C (Jonathan Cape)

[Note: There are links to my reviews of all these titles, over on the sidebar to the right and at the top. AR]

Topics:

• The comic novel.
• Englishness.
• The figure of the Jew.


Reviews

Ron Charles, 'The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson' Wednesday, Washington Post October 13, 2010

Edward Docx, 'The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson' The Observer, Sunday 15 August 2010

Gerard Jacobs, 'The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson', Daily Telegraph 28 July 2010

Anthony Julius, 'The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson', The Jewish Chronicle July 28, 2010

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009)

WEEK 13; MANTEL, WOLF HALL

'It is no coincidence that this brutal, sophisticated era has attracted the attentions of Hilary Mantel, whose over-arching theme has always been the battle between the weak and the strong' [Olivia Laing]

Judges
Chair: James Naughtie
Lucasta Miller
John Mullan
Sue Perkins
Michael Prodger

Shortlist

Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate)
A. S. Byatt The Children's Book (Chatto and Windus)
J. M. Coetzee Summertime (Harvill Secker)
Adam Foulds The Quickening Maze (Jonathan Cape)
Simon Mawer The Glass Room Little (Brown)
Sarah Waters The Little Stranger (Virago)

Topics:

• Power and powerlessness.
• History.
• The English Reformation.


Reviews

Complete Review has an overview. Some signficiant reviews include:

Vanora Bennett, 'Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel', The Times April 25, 2009

Claudia FitzHerbert, 'Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall' Telegraph 25 Apr 2009

Andrew Holgate, 'Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel', The Sunday Times May 3, 2009

Olivia Laing, 'The Tudors' finest portraitist yet', Observer Sunday 26 April 2009

Christopher Tayler 'Henry's Fighting Dog', The Guardian, Saturday 2 May 2009

Additional Adiga

Here are a couple of further links (in addition to yesterday's post) that may be useful.

Here is Adiga's Wikipedia page. And here is an interview with him published in Rediff India Abroad, 16 Oct 2008: 'At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal.injustices of society ... the criticism by writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens of in the 19th century helped England and France become better societies. That's what I'm trying to do -- it's not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination.'

Here's a slightly longer interview, at Book Browse.

The influences on The White Tiger are three black American writers of the post-World War II era (in order), Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright. The odd thing is that I haven't read any of them for years and years -- I read Ellison's Invisible Man in 1995 or 1996, and have never returned to it -- but now that the book is done, I can see how deeply it's indebted to them.

The prominent blogger Amardeep Singh didn't like The White Tiger; read and find out why.

Finally, some context for the 2008 Prize more generally from your course leader. That year I decided (I can't remember why) to read the entire Booker Longlist. I blogged my impressions on The Valve, first on the longlist here; and then when the shortlist was announced I revisited the titles. As you can see from that, I speed-read a library copy of Adiga's novel when I went through the longlist, and couldn't get hold of it again when the shortlist was announced. This has the ironic consequence that I say a great deal about all the novels selected by the Booker judges in 2008 except the one that actually won. (I've since re-read it much more carefully, of course). But there's some stuff there that might be of interest.

Adiga's White Tiger

[Here is the coursebook page for this title with links enabled]

Week 1. Introduction: Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)

‘It won’t win any prizes for subtlety. But it hasn’t been nominated for one of those’ – Peter Robins

Aravind Adiga was born in Chennai in 1974. He has worked as a journalist for the Financial Times and Time magazine. The White Tiger is his first novel.

Editions:

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger, (London: Atlantic, 2008; London: Atlantic, 2008).

2008 Judges:
Michael Portillo (chair), Alex Clark, Louise Doughty, James Heneage, Hardeep Singh Kohli

2008 Shortlist:

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs
Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency
Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

Topics:

· Introduction to Literary Prizes and Prize Culture.
· Media Hype and the Book Trade.
· The ‘Man’ Booker Prize: New Dawn or Hot Air?

Reviews:

Adam Lively, ‘The White Tiger’, The Sunday Times, (6 April 2008).
Sameer Rahim, ‘The Man on the Poster’, Times Literary Supplement, 5480 (11 April 2008).
David Mattin, ‘The White Tiger’, The Independent on Sunday, (11 May 2008).
Peter Robins, ‘Review: The White Tiger’, The Daily Telegraph, (9 August 2008).
Kevin Rushby, ‘Review: The White Tiger’, The Guardian, (15 October 2008).
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, (6 November 2008).

A fuller round-up of reviews can be found here.

In the lecture I mention Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's celebrated essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) A version of this difficult but much-cited piece (abbreviated by the author) is available on Google Books.

First class of Term 2

Today's lecture will crunch the numbers on the Booker. You can find the list of all the winners (from 1969 to 2010) here; and a list of all the shortlisted novels including the winner here. I've gone through and analysed these results in terms of the nationality, gender and genre of winners. A couple of interesting conclusions emerge.

Enright Essay

I've finished off the essay we began, collectively, writing in the session on Tuesday 7th December. It's posted to the EN3314 Moodle site under week 10, as a word file (I'd post it to this blog too, but Blogger don't allow me to). I used the resources we found online, and a few things from the lecture PPT, but didn't put in a great deal of extra research or work. I also continued the line of the argument that we were starting to flesh out, and carried it through to a conclusion.

You don't have to write another non-assessed essay for this course; the assessed essay questions will be handed out next term, in week 5. If you want to write another essay, either covering some area and novel that interests you, or else taken from last year's assessed essay questions (also on the Moodle site, at the top) then I'd be happy to take a look at what you produce. But it's not required.

Happy Christmas, everyone!

Enright on Winning the Prize

You should read the article at the other end of this link, in which Anne Enright talks about the experience of winning the prize, and especially the subsequent book-tour and publicity.

Do you think winning the prize, and staying in a succession of posh hotels whilst on tour made her happy? Hmm. 'It is a melancholy thing, to pass hundreds of thousands of people on the road and remember so few.'

Anne Enright, The Gathering

WEEK 10. ANNE ENRIGHT, THE GATHERING (2007)

‘[A] genuine attempt to stare down both love and death’ – A.L. Kennedy

‘There are some quite good set-piece scenes . . . but, God, it’s wearing’ – Hugo Barnacle
Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962. After working for RTÉ for some years, she became a full-time writer in 1993. The Gathering was her fourth novel and the first to be shortlisted for the Booker.

Editions:

Anne Enright, The Gathering, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007; London: Vintage, 2008).

2007 Judges:

Howard Davies (chair), Wendy Cope, Giles Foden, Ruth Scurr, Imogen Stubbs

2007 Shortlist:

Nicola Barker, Darkmans
Anne Enright, The Gathering
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
Indra Sinha, Animal’s People

Topics:

• Memory and the Past.
• Narrative and Unease.
• Reviewers and Sales Figures.

Reviews:

A.L. Kennedy, ‘The Din Within’, The Guardian, (28 April 2007)
Adam Mars-Jones, ‘Intimate Relations’, The Observer, (6 May 2007)
Tom Adair, ‘Every Last Piece of the Jigsaw’, The Scotsman (19 May 2007)
Hugo Barnacle, ‘The Gathering’, The Sunday Times, (27 May 2007)
Patricia Craig, ‘The Gathering’, Independent, (7 June 2007)
Eleanor Birne, ‘What Family Does to You’, London Review of Books (18 October 2007)

Desai on Guardian Book Club 2009

Last year John Mullan (a former Booker judge himself, and a Professor of the University of London to boot) ran one of the Guardian's 'book club' sessions on Desai's novel. Check out what he said:

Week 1: Divisions. "A novel of shifting points of view, The Inheritance of Loss flits from one character to another, from one emotion or sense impression to the next, its narrative form acting out the sense of dislocation that is its theme. "

Week 2: the Importance of Food. "Food focuses cultural unease. Eating makes you feel you belong, and makes you know when you do not."

Week 3: Kiran Desai on writing The Inheritance of Loss. "As I wrote [the novel], I began the process of considering that one's place in the world might be merely incidental, just a matter of perspective. Perhaps the centre was not firm at all? And as I wrote I became aware of the rich novelistic moments that come from many stories overlapping, from this moral ambiguity, and from the utter uselessness of the flag. Even the past – home of sorts to all of us – wasn't fixed. History is only someone's story. I felt as if I were writing to displace myself, and to know that my story wasn't the only one – that there would always be other books on the shelf."

Week 4: Readers' reponses. "One reader wanted to know about the book's title. How late in the day had this come? Only at the very end, Desai replied, had she decided on "The Inheritance of Loss" – despite being counselled strongly against it. Had other titles had been rejected? Yes, but she was coy about these. Her father had told her to call it "The Loss of Inheritance": "at least everyone would understand what that means". But after eight years working on the book, she was entirely stubborn."

Inheritance of Loss

WEEK 9. KIRAN DESAI, THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS (2006)

‘What Desai gives the Booker panel is Incredible India as Beautiful Writing. The stories are of loss and humiliation, displacement and dispossession — the rich music of victimhood is never not heard. But that makes it all the more poignant and beautiful, testing every skill that she may have honed at her creative writing course at Columbia University. . . . And hence, this Beautiful Writing should not only tell the right Stories, but should also foreground the right Issues’ – Aveek Sen

Kiran Desai was born in New Delhi in 1971. Currently living in the United States, she is the daughter of Anita Desai, shortlisted for the Booker Prize on three occasions. The Inheritance of Loss is her second novel.

Editions:

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006; London: Penguin, 2007).

2006 Judges:

Hermione Lee (chair), Simon Armitage, Candia McWilliam, Anthony Quinn, Fiona Shaw

2006 Shortlist:

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
Kate Grenville, The Secret River
M.J. Hyland, Carry Me Down
Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men
Edward St Aubyn, Mother’s Milk
Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

Topics:

• Indian Writing and the Booker.
• Globalisation and Internationalism.
• Promise and Accomplishment.

Reviews:

Aamer Hussein, ‘Maps of the Heart’, Independent, (8 September 2006)
Natasha Walter, ‘Mutt and the Maths Tutor’, The Guardian, (26 August 2006)
Pankaj Mishra, ‘Wounded by the West’, New York Times, (12 February 2006)
Sarah Hughes, ‘Uncle Potty and Other Guides to the Truth’, The Observer, (3 September 2006)
Aveek Sen, ‘Voices of the Same Poverty, The Telegraph (Calcutta), (12 October 2006)

Banville and Irish Literature

I don't have much to say in today's lecture about Banville as a specifically Irish writer; but if you're interested in his place in the tradition of Irish writing you might want to look at this article: Kersti Tarien Powell, '"Not a son but a survivor": Beckett... Joyce... Banville', The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 35, Irish Writing since 1950 (2005), 199-211. Here's the abstract:

John Banville's fiction represents a sustained effort to investigate the mechanics of the creative act, where the author's own search for means of representation are paralleled by his characters' search for knowledge, understanding, and unproblematic utterance. Intertextual references nuance and reflect this quest, which will be traced from Banville's earliest, unpublished literary manifesto to his later fiction. Examining Banville's complex literary allegiances to Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, this article analyses the representation of the creative act in Banville's fiction.

Banville's Sea

Week 8. John Banville, The Sea (2005)

‘It is a literary work of art’ – Rick Gekoski

‘Yesterday the Man Booker judges made possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest’ – Boyd Tonkin

John Banville was born in Wexford in 1945. One of the most widely-admired Irish novelists of his generation, he had been shortlisted for the Booker only once before, for The Book of Evidence in 1989, losing out to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.

Editions:

John Banville, The Sea, (London: Picador, 2005; London: Picador, 2006).

2005 Shortlist:

John Banville, The Sea
Julian Barnes, Arthur & George
Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Ali Smith, The Accidental
Zadie Smith, On Beauty

2005 Judges:
John Sutherland (chair), Lindsay Duguid, Rick Gekoski, Josephine Hart, David Sexton

Topics:

· Literature and Passion.
· Irish Writing and Modernist Tradition.
· ‘High Art’ vs. the Beachbound Pageturner?

Reviews:

Allan Massie, ‘Point of No Return’, The Scotsman, (28 May 2005)
Peter Conradi, ‘Homeward Bound’, The Independent, (3 June 2005)
Tibor Fischer, ‘Wave after Wave of Vocabulary’, The Daily Telegraph, (7 June 2005)
David Grylls, ‘Fiction: The Sea by John Banville’, The Sunday Times, (12 June 2005)
Finn Fordham (our very own), ‘High Tidings’, The Guardian, (25 June 2005)
Michiko Kakutani, ‘A Wordy Widower with a Past’, New York Times, (1 November 2005)

Costa Prize 2010

Some interesting things in the recent Costa Prize shortlist (not least RHUL English Department member Jo Shapcott getting nominated in the poetry section for her brilliant collection Of Mutability). But the novel shortlist has surprised some people. Check out the Independent's report, and judge Jonathan Ruppin's comments:

Jonathan Ruppin, web editor at Foyles bookshop, who was one of three judges for the novel award, said the four books on the list were "fantastic stories that really gripped you and with characters that really engaged the reader". But he added that he felt it had not been a particularly strong year for fiction. "We were not spoiled for choice in terms of books that were serious contenders," he said.

Reflecting on the omission of Howard Jacobson's Man Booker prize-winner The Finkler Question and Mitchell's work, he said they had both certainly been contenders, but their work was too cerebral to recommend to the masses. The prize has veered towards more commercial reads in recent times.

In the website comments, 'Tim Footman' adds this: '“...too cerebral to recommend to the masses.” Oh just give the prize to Katie Price and be done with it, for Christ's sake.' He doesn't sound pleased.

Hollinghurst and Henry

Henry James, that is. I wonder if it's possible properly to appreciate The Line of Beauty without some sense of James's novels.

Have a look at this very interesting review essay from The New England Quarterly [78:4 (Dec., 2005), pp. 631-642], Michael Moon's 'Burn Me at the Stake Always', which covers the odd little rash of contemporary novels 'dealing' in some sense with Henry James that appeared in 2004. Moon covers The Master by Colm Toíbín (a beautifully written novel, that; and also Booker shortlisted); Author, Author by David Lodge; The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and a couple of non-ficton titles (Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James's Letters to Younger Men edited by Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe; and Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899-1915 by Henry James, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi).

The real question: why did everybody suddenly think that writing about Henry James was the thing to do? What was it about 2004 that made it so Jamesian a year for fiction?

Amazon reviews

Like many, and perhaps most, writers I have a problematic relationship with amazon, and especially with amazon reader reviews, in which fans, as many idiots as clever people preserve their considered, or unconsidered, reactions to the books they have just read. I thought I'd take a look at the page for The Line of Beauty.

There are ninety customer reviews listed, with a preponderance very impressed with the novel and with Hollinghurst's style in particular: 'this is the finest prose since Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited". Elegant and evocative English, shimmering phrases' according to Septimus; 'this book is superbly written and impressive' (Phil Shanklin). In fact, many reviewers go over similar ground to the mainstream newspaper reviews (the links to whom are in the main post on the novel): the shallowness of the characters, the effectiveness or otherwise of the satire, the treatment of AIDS.

The negative reviews are in the minority, but are in some ways more interesting. Several toot the 'boredom' horn (Mr Crow: 'it just d-r-a-g-g-e-d along...'; Ventura Angelo: 'Yawn ... absolutely boring'), which is a pretty lazy critical response -- and one banned on this course, incidentally. But some make the point that beautiful writing about (morally) ugly people can be as wearing to read as ugly writing about beautiful people.

'Pen ultmate' gives the book one-star, attacking it in terms that (I'd guess) would actually bring a blush of pleasure of Hollinghurst's brow. This, despite its hostile intention, is actually a pretty good account of the Henry James aesthetic that Line of Beauty follows:

This story reads as if it was written by someone with no personality of their own, just a lot of unexpressed mundane thoughts about the world which he's now using the excuse of a novel to finally dribble out, unfortunately. There are endless descriptions of how a character thinks he might react to something that's just been said, but decides not to, and why he decides not to, and how his non-reaction might affect the speaker differently to how he'd be affected if he had actually said what he nearly said but didn't.

It's exactly James's ability to explore that aspect of human interaction, delicately and subtly but with great penetration, that makes so many people fall in love with him as a novelist. Of course, you need to believe that what people feel but don't or can't say is a major part of human life. Similarly, some of these readers come over as, er, foolish. Here's A Customer's one-star review:

When I read the first page I thought i was reading a typical Jeffrey Archer. i have never been so dissapointed in a book.

On the upside, none of the amazon reviewers appeared phased by the detailed depictions of homosexuality as such, which perhaps suggests that homophobia is less a feature of culture today than it was in the 80s: which would be heartening if true. And some of the reports (check out this, different 'A Customer' for instance) are pretty insightful.

Hollinghurst's Beautiful Lines

WEEK 7. ALAN HOLLINGHURST, THE LINE OF BEAUTY (2004)

‘A winning novel that is exciting, brilliantly written and gets deep under the skin of the Thatcherite Eighties’ – Chris Smith, chair of the judges, 19th October 2004

‘Booker Won by Gay Sex’ – Daily Express headline, 20th October 2004

Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud and spent thirteen years on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement. He had previously been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. Andrew Davies’s adaptation of The Line of Beauty was broadcast by the BBC in 2006.

Editions:

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, (London: Picador, 2004).

2004 Shortlist:

Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit
Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Colm Tóibín, The Master
Gerard Woodward, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon

2004 Judges:

Chris Smith MP (chair), Tibor Fischer, Robert Macfarlane, Rowan Pelling, Fiammetta Rocco

Topics:

• Sexuality and the Modern Novel.
• Tapping in to the Past: Henry James and the 1980s.
• The Luxury of Style and the Lowest Common Denominator.

Reviews:

Geoff Dyer, ‘The Last Summer’, The Sunday Telegraph, (28 March 2004).
Andrew Crumey, ‘Marque of the Master Craftsman’, Scotland on Sunday, (4 April 2004)
Alfred Hickling, ‘Between the Lines’, The Guardian, (10 April 2004)
Peter Conradi, ‘Art and the Cruelty that Goes with It’, The Independent on Sunday, (11 April 2004)
Gregory Woods, ‘Love, Loss and the Tory Story’, The Independent, (16 April 2004)
Thomas Jones, ‘Welly-Whanging’, London Review of Books, (6 May 2004)

Criticism:

There's little of this, especially for Hollinghurst's later books. Take a look at this brief entry by Nick Rennison in the Routledge Contemporary British Novelists volume for instance.

DBC Pierre

Some links on Vernon God Little, for those interested in writing about this novel.

First, as the lecture stresses, this book is so thoroughly a 21st-century remix of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951) that you'll need to read that novel -- if you haven't already done so (and if you haven't already done so then ... why on earth not?)

One angle I'd like to discuss has to do with narrative voice, and the notion of character as performance. And talking of that, by way of overcoming my natural hesitation at straying from proper lit-crit into biography, to what extent do you think the novel's success had to do with Pierre's creation of a media-friendly authorial 'persona' or 'character'? Have a look at this for instance; and this, and see what you think.

On the subject of making comedy out of the Columbine School Massacre: do you think this is funny? How does it compare to Pierre's approach?

Vernon God Little

WEEK 5. D.B.C. PIERRE, VERNON GOD LITTLE (2003)

‘The winner was the Mexican-Australian first-time novelist Peter Finlay: a man who, we learned at the weekend, enjoyed a past life as gambling-addicted junkie con-artist who sold his best friend’s house and fled with the cash. (This is a charge levelled insufficiently often, for my tastes, against Anita Brookner)’ – Sam Leith
D.B.C. Pierre (a.k.a. Peter Finlay) was born in Australia to English parents, has lived in Mexico and the United States and was resident in Ireland when he won the Booker. Vernon God Little was his first novel. His second, Ludmila’s Broken English, was published in 2006.

Editions:

D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little, (London: Faber and Faber, 2003).

2003 Shortlist:

Monica Ali, Brick Lane
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor
Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal
Clare Morrall, Astonishing Splashes of Colour
D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little

2003 Judges:

John Carey (chair), D.J. Taylor, Rebecca Stephens, Francine Stock, A.C. Grayling

Topics:

• A Taste for Scandal.
• Ventriloquy and Originality.
• The Non-American American Novel.

Reviews:

Carrie O’Grady, ‘Lone Star’, The Guardian, (18 January 2003).
Jonathan Heawood, ‘Growing Up With Jesus’, The Observer, (19 January 2003).
Sam Leith, ‘Springer’s America’, The Daily Telegraph, (25 January 2003).
Marianne Brace, ‘A Huckleberry Finn for the Eminem Generation’, Independent, (3 February 2003).
David Robson, ‘Who Dies? You Decide’, The Sunday Telegraph, (23 February 2003).
M. Kakutani, ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas (Via Australia)’, New York Times, (5 November 2003).
Sam Sifton, ‘Holden Caulfield on Ritalin’, New York Times Book Review, (9 November 2003).
James Wood, ‘The Lie-World’, London Review of Books, (20 November 2003).
Chris Lehmann, ‘Dumb and Dumber’, Washington Post, (2 December 2003).
Theodore Dalrymple, 'Escape from Barbarity' The Spectator (3 Jan 2004).

Note: there are some interesting things in several of these reviews, but the meatiest and most useful is the James Wood LRB piece, linked above.