titles / B
a novel by Jonathan Baumbach
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April 23, 2003 -- Syracuse New Times:
"Jonathan Baumbach has never written typical novels so it figures
that he favors a less-than-ordinary approach to writing. 'I try to
rely on intuition,' he said from his home in Brooklyn. 'If I plot
it out in my head in advance, it doesn't work as well. It's better
not knowing where things come from. I keep myself ignorant as it goes
along and work with a very individual process.'" [Read
the entire review online here.]
January 13, 2003 -- Publishers Weekly:
"There are shades of Bellow and Roth in the themes and metafictional
conceit of this sly, diverting read." [Read
the entire review online here.]
December 17 - 24, 2002 -- The Village Voice:
"Jonathan Baumbach's 10th novel, B, is the book to read if you're
sick of other books, something to beat the worst case of reader's
block. In this fiction, the eponymous aging novelist tries to cure
his writer's block by writing his life story. Every sentence thus
works against itself, resulting in stories torn beautifully at the
seams..." [Read
the entire review online here.]
October 15, 2002 -- Kirkus Reviews:
“I’m angry at you because
you don’t know why I’m angry at you, she said. I’m
not really angry, I’m disappointed…invisible flames emanated
from her on all sides.”
Few American writers have captured the
ambiguities of modern woman as richly as Baum Bach (Seven Wives, 1998,
etc.), who here attempts a fictional memoir about his sexual ties--in
his most distilled version of the babble of the sexes. All women in
B’s tale share the same impossible, totally unstable, but absolutely
assured character. Is theirs a response to B’s fear of intimacy?
B is a writer whose first wife (a child bride) left him after nine
months. After seven years, he and wife 2 (“who had small tolerance
for imperfection”) had thoroughly trashed all intimacy. “Wife
3, before we were married, at least, tended to see me in the most
generous light, which gave me renewed sense of pleasure in myself…I
was in love with Wife 3, who aside from being a little crazy, seemed
almost perfect to me…You see, I had to go through the disappointment
and grief of two marriages that didn’t count to get to the one
I was meant to have.” But after 16 years, she dumps him for
someone else. He can understand that in the abstract (“Hadn’t
I left Wife 2 because I also preferred someone else?”). Poetic
justice, fair enough. But he’s heartbroken for two years and
attends Heartbreak Anonymous meetings, leading him into more affairs.
When he speaks of all this during a talk at the Femmes Club, in the
book’s funniest scene, he’s pelted with invective, fruit,
and vegetables. When women spend hours chewing B to rags, dismissing
him utterly, then press their bodies to his to get him to stay overnight,
is he an imbecile to stay?
Amusing but short of hilarity: too
few pages, though immensely detailed, build and release. -- Copyright
©2002, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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