Maureen Corrigan on the new novel Americanahby Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

Ifemelu does make it over to America on a student visa and, ultimately, she becomes a very successful blogger. Ifemelu’s blog is called: Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. The name of her blog should give you a sense of the subjects as well as the tart smarts of her posts, many of which are included in this novel. But, before Ifemelu strikes the blogger bonanza, she must endure the new immigrant initiation rite of looking for work. Ifemelu answers ads for home health aides in apartments that stink of urine and she works as “the nanny” in the Philadelphia suburbs. At one point, desperate for rent money, Ifemelu accepts a sexual job offer.

“Flag” by Brent Godfrey via Artdoxa

Over at The New Republic, our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a truly wonderful defense of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as “America’s greatest novel about class.” Because of the new Baz Luhrmann film (which David Edelstein reviews on today’s show), Gatsby has been getting another moment in the media spotlight lately and part of that has included some Gatsby backlash (“I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent.”). Maureen thinks these contrarians are missing some of the finer points that make the novel so complex:

Simultaneous with Fitzgerald’s delight in fine commodities, however, there’s always a vigorous resentment of those who don’t have to work hard to acquire them. Throughout his writing, Fitzgerald betrays the scorn of the poor relation, the self-made man, railing against—and envying—those trust fund babies who take their privilege for granted. Nick cautions readers against identifying with this smugness on the very first page of the novel, telling us that his father always reminded him of the obligations of the rich to the less fortunate. Fitzgerald may not have been overtly political in his life or writing the way that contemporaries like Hemingway, Dos Passos, or Edmund Wilson were—he quietly voted for Roosevelt and privately recommended Das Kapital as extracurricular reading to his college-aged daughter, Scottie—but his class-consciousness was intense and enduring.

Image of Fitzgerald and Scottie via Lists of Note

Maureen Corrigan on Gail Godwin’s new novel, Flora:

“Children are like bombs that will one day go off.” That’s a line that Gail Godwin says also served as inspiration for her novel, Flora. Godwin wrote the line in one of her journals, which she started keeping at the age of 12. Godwin is still writing in her journals and drawing upon them to explore the more out-of-the-way reaches of women’s interior lives.

When I read that line about children as unexploded bombs, this iconic Sally Mann (my favorite photographer) popped immediately to mind, so I couldn’t not post it here.

Maureen Corrigan on Gail Godwin’s new novel Flora:

The profound wisdom that animates Godwin’s novel is that simple-hearted people can sometimes be incredibly annoying. Helen, who’s budding into a disdainful personality, finds herself increasingly vexed by Flora’s cheerfully intrusive presence, without exactly understanding why. Flora’s habit of doing housework in bare feet, for instance, drives Helen crazy. She comments: “[Flora’s toenails] turned up like they were making too much effort to be friendly.”

Image by Markus Hartel

Maureen Corrigan on the plot of the new Ken Kalfus novel, Equilateral:

The real-life premise is this: In the late 19^th century, astronomers spotted what they thought were canals on Mars. Many of those astronomers theorized that, therefore, there must be life on the red planet. Kalfus’s fictional astronomer, Sanford Thayer, is an Englishman who’s obsessed with the dream of contacting the Martians. Thayer has launched an internationally funded project to carve out an enormous equilateral triangle—300 miles to each side—in the Western deserts of Egypt. Once it’s dug out, the triangle will be filled with petroleum.

Image of Mars through a telescope via Flickr

Maureen Corrigan on the new Ken Kalfus novel Equilateral:

[T]hose workers are under strict command not to deviate one inch in their digging lest the Martians mistakenly think that a geometrically imprecise triangle is a natural, rather than a man-made, phenomenon.  That’s why, when the workers stumble upon the tip of a buried pyramid as they’re digging a 40-foot trench on one side of the Equilateral, Thayer orders them to bury the pyramid again and pour the pitch over it. At this point, we readers begin to catch on that Thayer, in the fine literary tradition of Englishmen abroad, has stayed out in the mid-day sun too long.

Image of the Egyptian desert via panaramio

Over at New York Magazine, there’s an interesting piece by Boris Kachka on novelist Claire Messud and her husband, the New Yorker’s fiction critic, James Wood. The subhed dubs them “the First Couple of American Fiction” which contrasts — perhaps — with how at least Messud sees herself:

As they get ready to announce the Pulitzers, over at The Atlantic Wire our beloved book critic Maureen Corrigan reflects on the upheaval over last year’s awards. Along with the novelist Michael Cunningham and editor Susan Larson, Maureen was one of the jurors for the 2012 fiction prize. They passed on their recommendations to the Pulitzer board (which has final say) and were as shocked as the rest of us to learn there would be no prize awarded that year for fiction.

“We Need A Fiction Pulitzer In 2013”:

Corrigan told me, “It was a terrible day last year. I think my fellow judges and I are cautiously optimistic that the board will complete its job this year; otherwise we probably all wish the Pulitzer anniversary speeds by as quickly and painlessly as possible. It’s so crucial that extraordinary writing be recognized and brought to the attention of a wider audience and prizes like the Pulitzer can do that.” 

There were a couple of high points to hang onto, though. As much as she still feels disappointed about the failure to choose a winner, the reading experience itself was wonderful, Corrigan explained, the sort of thing she’d yearned for in grad school, “like being in the most intense and tiniest book club,” she said. “We did clash and argue, but God, we took it seriously. That’s the part that really made me angry: We heard when everyone else did that there would be no prize, and that there would be no explanation. I think if you don’t give out the prize, you have to give a reason.”

UPDATE: Full list of Pulitzer winners here.

Maureen Corrigan on the role of Elsa Schiaparelli in writer Patricia Volk’s new memoir Shocked:

Volk’s own memoir zig-zags between the two titanic female figures — her mother and Schiaparelli — who impressed their ideas of beauty and womanhood on her. Schiaparelli was one of those “ugly-beautiful” women who make their mark through the force of personality and imagination. An intimate of Surrealist artists like Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali, Schiaparelli blurred the lines between art and fashion. Inspired by Dali’s loony recreation of the Venus de Milo with drawers, “Schap” as she was called, designed a women’s skirt suit with drawers and hardware for pockets.

Elsa Schiaparelli by Andre Durst, 1936

Maureen Corrigan reviews “The Burgess Boys,” the new novel by the Pulitzer Prize- winning author of “Olive Kitteridge,” Elizabeth Strout —

“The Burgess Boys is not only a novel — it’s a big, floppy, shambling jumble sale of a novel. I mostly loved it because it feels like life: Color it chaotic.The Burgess boys grew up in Strout’s trademark territory of rural Maine — this dying hometown burg is called Shirley Falls — but as adults they’ve escaped to New York. Jim is a famous corporate lawyer who has always belittled his younger brother, Bob, also a lawyer but a less prosperous one for Legal Aid.”

Image courtesy of Leonardo Cendamo/Random House

Maureen Corrigan on Jonathan Dee’s new novel, A Thousand Pardons:

Jonathan Dee likes to write about rich, good-looking people falling apart—and who among the 99% of us can’t enjoy that plot?  In The Privileges, the dad of the family was a Wall Street trader, tempted by existential boredom into larceny; in A Thousand Pardons, the dad of the family is a partner in a New York law firm, tempted by existential boredom into a disastrous workplace affair.  The women in Dee’s recent fiction tend to be decorative stay-at-home moms; that is, until the spontaneous combustion of hubby’s career expels them out of their silken domestic cocoons.  There’s nowhere to go but down for Dee’s characters and we groundlings clap as they plummet: losing bank accounts, houses, furniture and good school systems on their descent into the economic maelstrom.

Image via Etsy

Maureen Corrigan on Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In:

But, but, but, … there are still some compelling reasons why, echoing some of Sandberg’s supporters, I’d optimistically slide Lean In into my teenage daughter’s bookshelf. First of all, the final two chapters of the book are more hard-hitting, riskier, less worried about alienating those readers, like stay-at-home moms, who may not share Sandberg’s vision. Sandberg kicks off her final chapter by saying:

“For decades, we have focused on giving women the choice to work inside or outside the home. … But we have to ask ourselves if we have become so focused on supporting personal choices that we’re failing to encourage women to aspire to leadership.”

In her famous 2010 TED Talk on the dearth of female leadership, Sandberg sounds more like that: opinionated and challenging.

Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel from Rebecca Miller, Jacob’s Folly:

Miller’s main character is a pest with a past. Jacob Cerf began life more than two centuries ago, as a young Jewish peddler who makes a living (barely) by lugging his heavy box full of knives, hammers and snuffboxes around the streets of Paris. When we readers first meet him, he’s twitching himself awake into his new existence as a fly in 21st-century Long Island, N.Y., and environs. Jacob speculates that this reduced reincarnation into an ugly bug with “convex eyes … the color of persimmons” a “hairy tongue” and “fragile, threadlike legs” might be divine retribution for his former life, which eventually widened out of the Jewish quarters of 18th-century Paris, to include service as a valet to a count who made the Marquis de Sade seem squeamish.

Once, 15 years ago, I was hiking up a mountain in Vermont as these two were hiking down. In those couple minutes — as I was walking towards them and they towards me alone on that path — Rebecca Miller and Daniel Day Lewis seemed as great as they appear in this picture.

Maureen Corrigan is reviewing Rebecca Miller’s new novel, Jacob’s Folly, today on the show. Spoiler alert: Maureen likes it. Rebecca Miller is a smart and talented lady.

Here’s a 2005 Fresh Air interview with her.

Maureen Corrigan reviews Marisa Silver’s novel Mary Coin which is inspired by the relationship between photographer Dorothea Lange and the subject of Lange’s iconic “Migrant Mother” photograph:

Silver is an evocative, precise writer, and her story — really interlocking tales — takes readers deep into the callous realities of life during the Dirty ’30s. To acknowledge the imaginative leeway that she does take — indeed, that all artists, even documentary photographers, take — Silver renames her famous subjects here: Dorothea Lange becomes photographer Vera Dare, and Florence Owens Thompson is the title character, Mary Coin. Both women, as they were in real life, are mothers; but Silver doesn’t strain to make them sisters under the skin.

Painting of Dorothea Lange via Americans Who Tell The Whole Truth