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All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost
All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost
All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost
Audiobook6 hours

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost

Written by Lan Samantha Chang

Narrated by Ramon De Ocampo

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

At their renowned writing school, every student is simultaneously terrified of and attracted to the charismatic poet and professor Miranda Sturgis, whose high standards for art are both intimidating and inspiring. As two students, Roman and Bernard, strive to win her admiration, the lines between mentorship, friendship, and love are blurred. Roman's first book wins a prestigious prize. Meanwhile, Bernard labors for years over a single poem. Secrets of the past begin to surface, friendships are broken, and Miranda continues to cast a shadow over their lives. All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost is a brilliant evocation of the demands of ambition and vocation, personal loyalty and poetic truth.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 27, 2010
ISBN9781615735617
All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost

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Reviews for All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost

Rating: 3.7371134020618557 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A mournful story about a love affair between a renowned poetry professor, Miranda, and her aggressive grad student, Roman. This secret affair jump-starts Roman's career but plagues him with doubts for the rest of his life. Beautifully and precisely written.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a quiet throwback of a novel. Although it was published in 2010 and the story begins in 1986, it has the feel of something taking place a half century earlier. Although the main characters are very different, this reminded me of [Stoner], with its tight focus on one man's adulthood spent in academia. Roman attends a prestigious MFA writing program in the midwest, where he attends a seminar led by a prominent poet, Miranda Sturgis. He doesn't participate in class and only turns in work before the final meeting. He's critical of Sturgis and her air of detachment as well as her often cutting remarks about his fellow students' work. Nonetheless, he shows up at her house late one night demanding more and to his surprise, she invites him in. Later, his joy in winning a writing prize that leads to his getting a tenure-track teaching job is marred by discovering that she was on the selection committee. He marries, has a child, settles down to teach, but also to write, to produce something that will out-shine his one published collection in a way so decisive as to lay to rest his own insecurities, as well as taking him back into the limelight. He dug a trench into the process and stayed inside of it, waist-deep, sweating out the individual monologues, piecing them together. From inside the trench, there was no way to think of anything else: not marriage, not fatherhood. There was only the strength of voice, of words.This novel is a look at the life of a man whose insecurities and arrogance shaped his life. It looks at his marriage to a fellow MFA graduate, his long friendship with another member of that program and at his own blindness in seeing how his own behavior affects those around him. It's beautifully written, with a melancholic edge.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I enjoyed reading this book - there are no major plot twist or grand adventures, its just the story of a few poets and what their lives are actually like. I love a book that makes you think, and this one does - think about why people write, about what is poetry, about what makes a writer successful (being published? winning prizes? or being proud of the work they've done even if no one else sees it).
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    When the author of the novel you're about to pick up is the director of the famed Iowa Writer's Workshop, you expect great things.

    Fortunately, that's what you get with All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost.

    This short, almost novella-length book was one that I saw on my library's New Books shelf, and I was intrigued by the title and Ms. Chang's credentials. (I confess, I have often wondered what it would be like to be a student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Some people dream of fame and stardom. I dream of Iowa City.) Anyway, this was the rare book that I hadn't heard much buzz about among book bloggers or anyplace else, and I kind of liked the idea that I might discover a little gem to tell you about.

    I'll admit that the premise - as described on the jacket cover - didn't strike me as overly original, but the story started growing on me fairly quickly.

    At the renowned writing school in Bonneville, every student is simultaneously terrified of and attracted to the charismatic and mysterious poet and professor Miranda Sturgis, whose high standards for art are both intimidating and inspiring. As two students, Roman and Bernard, strive to win her admiration, the lines between mentorship, friendship, and love are blurred.

    Yeah, we can tell where this is going, can't we?

    Roman and Bernard are both students in Miranda's poetry seminar, as is Lucy. Over the next 30 years, all four of their lives will continue to intersect, even as their careers go in different directions, and their friendship and allegiances will be tested.

    One of my favorite quotes from All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost is this:

    "The people who matter the most to us in the end , who teach us the most, are the people who make their worst mistakes with us." (pg. 133)

    I think the opposite is true, too. I think we make our worst mistakes with the people who matter most to us. That's definitely the case with the characters in this novel.

    I'm really glad that I gave this one a chance. There are several moments of surprise, of slight twists that I wasn't expecting, and the last dozen pages or so are reminiscent of the Six Feet Under series finale. (If you are/were a fan of the show, you know what I mean.) The prose is tight and the pacing is such that the narrative just flows almost effortlessly, making it a quick read. (I read this over the course of one day, starting at lunchtime and then finished it up in the evening. This would be a perfect Read-a-thon book.)

    Overall, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost is a nicely-written character-driven book that makes one think about how much credit we owe those who have influenced our success and the intangible currency that we all use to pay the price.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Lan Samantha Chang writes so well that I was drawn in even though the subject matter of the book (grad students/aspiring poets) wasn't something I thought would interest me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book reads like it descended whole from the heavens and like every word and line were gone over with the finest-toothed comb dozens of times, all at once. Obviously it was the latter, but there is something about the language, the voice, the atmosphere, the characters, that at the end leads you to think "it had to be exactly like this, always." Smart and real. A pleasure to read. I will be picking up Chang's other novels.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book won me over. I didn't expect it to, frankly. Lan Samantha Chang is a beautiful writer, with a keen ear for lovely sentences. Her prose is at once economical and haunting, which is bloody hard to do. And yet... the characters -- two aspiring poets in a prestigious unnamed writing school somewhere in the Midwest (yes, think The Iowa Writers Workshop, where Chang is Director) are really quite dreadfully clichéd - so much so that one of them, the starving pure-hearted one, actually lives in a garret. I rather cringed at that bit. So, here we have Roman, ambitious , worldly and a bit callow, a bit self-centered; and Bernard, the aforementioned saintly poverty-stricken purist. They both fall under the spell of a prickly-yet-brilliant professor named Miranda Sturgis, who talks like she came out of Central Casting for Poets, and Roman ends up in her bed. Miranda 'bludgeons" her students. "Is this a poem?" she is famous for asking. More cringing.It's an old tale, and I had the feeling the author was trying to make it new by a little gender-switching. The professor who sleeps with the student is female this time, but that didn't make it feel any more original to me. I couldn't help wondering if Chang was slyly parodying exactly the sort of work which these writer workshop MFA tend to turn out. If I hadn't already known she was a product of the school, I swear I would have known it simply from the rhythm of the prose and the style of the work, including the big thunk of exposition with which the book opens. I'd like to think it was a bit of a parody. With these faults in mind, I was taken aback by how bits toward the end of the book moved me. As a writer, I found some truths here, and some piercing emotion. "For it is through humility, he knew, that holiness - and poetry - find entrance to the human soul." Yes, I thought. I actually do believe that. Bernard, our saintly attic-dwelling poet, "had been working on his poem for decades when he began to understand how fervently he was attached to his own vanity, envy, and desire. Although they separated him from faith, these sins were all he had. He could not give them up, not even for God. On the riverbank, he knew he would never be worthy. How might God, all-knowing, and limitless, be expected to bother with his misshapen and pathetic soul – a soul twisted by its moral end and beginning?” Well, my, ahem. That’s awfully good. Of course, as intended, I was far more attached in the end to saintly Roman than I was to Pulitzer-Prize-winning Bernard, even if I couldn’t quite believe in him, and let’s be clear, as much as I’d like to believe in him, as much as the writing is beautiful, I no more believed in Bernard than I did in the absurdly convenient letter from a publisher, found unopened after Bernard expires Camille-like from lung cancer (modern day consumption, I suppose) offering at last to publish the one poem on which he’d worked his whole life. So, please, tell me Ms. Chang had a twinkle in her eye as she wrote this book, and I will pop it up to four, perhaps even five stars.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost follows the writing career of poet Roman Morris. Beginning with his days as a Master of Fine Arts student in the late 1980s, the novel tracks Morris’s success, both as a professor and as an award-winning poet. All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost is primarily concerned with the dangers of unchecked ambition. Other important themes include the meaning and definition of success and the tension between natural talent and the ability to teach technique. All of this is examined from the context of the world of contemporary poetry.With concise and elegant prose, Chang creates a lush world filled with multi-dimensional characters, all while employing a remarkable economy of words. Indeed, Chang’s prose is perhaps the most rewarding aspect of this novel, more so than the somewhat hackneyed plot. Overall, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost is a treat for readers interested in a well-written account of the pressures and drama of a literary life.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This is a quick read, and nicely written, but it was also a huge disappointment. Why? Well, if you told someone to write a story spanning decades and take as its subject three students in a prominent writing program, along with one of their teachers....this is exactly what ANY one of those writers would end up with, assuming they didn't use much imagination, and relied on MFA-built stereotypes and suggestions. I'm afraid that's about all I can say. There's nothing wrong with it, but there's not a lot right either--what's done well is cliched in reality if not in fiction, or else perfectly predictable based on the scenario set forth. I read the book in one sitting, but out of boredom and ease while listening to football (and because this was an early reviewer book) as opposed to interest. It's an easy uncomplicated read that's easily relaxed into...but it's neither memorable nor recommendable when it comes right down to it.On a last note side note , as someone who's been seriously writing for more than a decade, and who seriously considered going the MFA path, the beginning of the book was familiarly imagined (and warned of) territory. In fact, I was particularly warned that Iowa (where the author works) sports the sort of academic setting explored in the first part, which makes me even more disappointed with the book. I think the book might be less of a disappointment to readers who don't write and haven't seriously considered writing programs. Otherwise, I suppose if nothing else it stands as a commentary on different versions of the "writing life", however unuseful or expected they might be.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost is a book that brings a lot of questions about the teaching of the writing craft to the forefront. Is writing even something that can be taught? If it is, what is the best method to do so? As Miranda rejects her class’s poems, skewers them in front of everyone, her students are inspired to work harder and to please her. But at what point will they give up and decide that she isn’t worth the effort? Is her teaching style helping or hindering her students?Chang’s writing is beautiful and elegant, telling the story of these four people. She writes them with such care, the reader can’t help but be interested in them. Some of the characters seem a little underdeveloped, but it is Roman, arguably the main character, who really leaps off the page. The reader can taste his bitterness, can sense his anger. He is the star of this novel as he struggles for recognition. Once he finds it, Roman realizes that it isn’t as fulfilling as he’d hoped.This is a slip of a novel, but there is a lot to think about within its pages. There are many themes to consider, including the query of what make a person accomplished. Is it writing books and books and winning awards, but not really feeling any kind of contentment and constantly needing to prove yourself, or is it writing just one masterpiece, one thing you are truly proud of but that no one will ever see? Chang doesn’t provide an easy answer for this question, but she does leave the reader thinking about its ramifications.All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost is an interesting novel that left me pondering long after I’d read the last page. Considering the subject matter, it’s a relatively easy read and flows incredibly well, thanks to the author’s wonderful prose. Chang is a talented writer, and I look forward to seeing what she does next.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost opens to a bludgeoning. The setting is a poetry workshop in a 1980s MFA program at a Midwestern college, and the bludgeon -- a style of manuscript critique filled with posturing, condescension and dismissal -- evokes the reputation of the real-life (University of) Iowa Writers’ Workshop (at least formerly, before author Chang became its director).The harshness introduces the novel’s first question: How should writing (poetry specifically, and art more generally) be taught? Does support inspire, or brutality dissuade, an artist? Chang then follows the lives of two poets after their workshop years -- one mostly successful, the other mostly starving -- to explore a more basic question: Can writing/art be taught or is it an innate talent? Does instruction make it possible, as one of the poets muses, "to write a better book, perhaps, but not to become a better poet"? And then the most fundamental question: Why do artists make art? For accolades? For connection?Of course, in a literary novel these questions are explored more obliquely than directly. But a story builds, and a passage that “longing matters in literature, more than love” resonates. By the last third of this novel, the longing becomes superb.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book took me by surprise...I did not expect to be captured by these characters. Some seemed too eccentric to be real, but as the story unfolded and we saw more of life on the inside of an academic writing community, I found the characters believable. Some were likable and warm; Roman was self-centered and selfish. But I loved the secrets revealed as the story unfolded about the convoluted relationships. The writing is lovely.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    All is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost is a quiet, thoughtful book that had me thinking about many of the current discussions in literary media about whether writing can be taught and the true value of the MFA program, despite the fact that such a question was not the sole point of the novel. Chang's work focuses on Roman, a young man studying poetry at an MFA program at a Michigan University, and his relationships with his students and his professor/mentor, a well-regarded poet and teacher by the name of Miranda. The book is divided into two sections, the first focusing on the end of Roman's tenure as a student, and the second jumping forward to a time when he is now the teacher, working at a university, supporting a family, and writing his poetry--or not, as the case may be.Roman struck me as an extremely self-centered individual, and since we see the world through his lens, it was difficult to get a firm grasp of some of the other key characters. His interpretations of the actions of others often seem a bit off, which just serves to increase the sense of him as the sort of person who rarely if ever gives thought to the other person's feelings or point of view, except in relation to himself. We learn about his childhood and the period between the two halves of the book through small flashbacks and his own musings, and these give motivation for his behavior, but I still found him a difficult character to like. Despite that, he was definitely interesting, and I ended up enjoying the book far more than I anticipated based on my reading of the opening 20-30 pages. This is the first of Chang's books that I've read, and I'd be interested in going back and reading her earlier work. Knowing that she heads up the Iowa Writers Workshop makes her doubly interesting to me, as she obviously has a definite insider's viewpoint regarding how such programs function.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I really enjoyed this smart novel of poets struggling with academia and personal relationships. I was impressed to see that the author is the director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, whose alumni include many of my favorite novelists. profound insights--recommended
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Going into this book, I thought that the main character would be Miranda, the elusive teacher whose attention is desired by all of her students. On the back of my copy of “All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost” – she is described as charismatic and mysterious. That and the fact that the book is about modern day poets intrigued me.Interestingly, though, I finished the book thinking nothing about Miranda and having experienced very little poetry.Roman, the main character, dominates the book, as well of most of the relationships in his life. His complicated relationship with his teacher, Miranda, his relationships with the other poetry students, his friendship with Bernard…all are overpoweringly focused on Roman. Even what remains of his family depends solely on him.“He understood now, viscerally, something he had only suspected as a child: that he was his family’s aftermath. The most urgent betrayals, the great conflagration that had destroyed his family: all of it had taken place before he could remember, and the last traces were now burning out in the lightning synapses of Emily’s winter dreams.”The problem with the book being so Roman focused is that he is a character that is so closed off – so inaccessible to the reader (at least this reader) that there is very little passion or fire to this book. I spent the first 1/8 of the book learning about the characters and then the remaining part of the book feeling as if the action taking place was all anti-climatic…with little idea what the climactic event might have been.The women characters tell Roman at various times in his life that his poetry is guarded in such a way…that “there’s something hidden about the poems. They draw attention and give nothing back.”It was also interesting that in a story about poets…there is very little poetry. Either actual poetry or poetic prose. There is some, which is lovely and whet the reader’s appetite for more: “For a moment, he stood sniffing the winter air, the mixture of burning firewood and cold, which had spoken to him since childhood of other people’s easy lives.”I did like the book…I suppose the problem is that I expected to love it. I expected to have words to savor and emotive ideas to try and wrap my head around. But most of that seemed trapped…somewhere. Actually, my feelings about the book are best summed up – by the main character of the book himself.“Something he had been waiting for, some powerful transcendence for which he had held his breath, would not take place.”
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost got off to a slow start. Having been through an English grad program in the 1980s and being quite familiar with the MFA/creative writer types, I was reminded of the more unpleasant aspects of the program, the students, and the professors: the competitiveness, the posturing, the cruelty, the affectations, the favoritism (call it "mentoring," if you will), the idolization of the instructor, and the penchant for creating a dramatic persona--supposedly an artistic mystique--that usually manifested itself in student/professor affairs and/or excessive drinking (in some cases, pot smoking). Frankly, it bored me then, and it bored me at the beginning of the book. But then something happened. Miranda's little circle broke up as everyone graduated and went out into the real world. Roman Morris, the novel's focal character, has become a successful, prize-winning poet and writing professor, married to one of his former workshop colleagues. Even so, he is filled with paralyzing self-doubts about his talent and his manuscript-in-progress. As the facade fades at last, we learn that Roman is haunted by Miranda's comment that has no soul and puts nothing of himself into his work. The extended visit of his former classmate Bernard, who has been working on the same narrative poem for years while barely scraping by, spurs Roman to reassess his own work, his life, and his perhaps-missing soul.Through Roman and Bernard, Chang explores the creative process and what defines a truly successful poet. Towards the end of the novel, Chang suggests a similar dichotomy between the main characters in Bernard's epic poem, the explorer Marquette and Father Joliet, both sent on missions by the King of France. I found myself thinking more and more about these comparisons (i.e., Roman being a renowned public figure like Marquette, Bernard not a failure but content in the knowledge that he has done good work, not needing the public accolades) and wishing that Chang had developed them further throughout the novel.Overall, I found All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost to be thought-provoking, original, and finely written, if a little flawed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost examines the way art-making and relationships intersect, as well as the space that art can encompassing within a single life. Chang asks her readers to contemplate what makes "true" art, and to what extent an artist must sacrifice in order to create pure work. A thought-provoking, sensitive, and nuanced novel.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Creative writers--or anyone who involved in the creative arts, for that matter--will find much to appreciate in this novel centered on three poets: Roman, outwardly successful, acutely aware that he has perhaps earned his honors too easily (and in fact he is not a very likable character); Bernard, his friend from the MFA in creative writing program, slogs away in poverty, working on a single epic poem; and Lucy, their fellow MFA student, who marries Roman and squashes her own talent in her role as wife and mother. I've made it sound depressing, and it is to some extent, but it's a sensitive exploration of art, friendship, and ambition. Recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A sensitive portrayal of the lives of two poets, one who is successful, wins awards, teaches at a university, and is married with a child, and one who works on a single poem all his life and lives a quiet, minimal life. This is literary fiction, concerned with the characters relationships to poetry, each other, and their friends and family. It’s well written, insightful, and probing.It begins slowly, however. A BAM! POW! opening is not to be expected from a novel of this type, and things do pick up and become interesting as the novel progresses, but the opening is particularly bland – it could do with an interesting sentence or a unique situation to draw the reader in. I’m afraid many readers who pick the novel up and read the opening may put it down again and miss out on a good read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Yes, Chang's prose is elegant, but the story lacks some essential gravity. While the graduate writing program (1980s style) is entertaining as a send-up, it is difficult to swallow the vague, recurring talk of "true poets" that continues to lace these characters' speech well into their adult lives. Can they really have been that naive even to start? Is this the myopia of the academic writing community being skewered or unwittingly revealing itself in the concerns of the novel?Questions of how, or whether, writing can be taught and what success as a writer might mean fail to seriously engage when characters don't venture far beyond literary types. Much is made of the blind labyrinths of private relationships, of mistaken motives and lost opportunities, but there is little of the possibility of human connection. At its best, this book is a meditation on friendship, misdirected aspirations and the unremitting sweep of time.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    When we first meet the hero of Lan Samantha Chang's [All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost], Roman Morris is attending a writing seminar at 'the School' with the mysterious, renowned poet Miranda Strugis. Disdainful of the other students or, as he calls them, her 'acolytes,' Roman does not offer his poetry for critiques until the end of the course. Meanwhile, the author gives us a 90 page (of this slim 200-page novel) description of a stereotypical writing workshop without answering the burning question, 'Can poetry be taught?' Part One of the novel ends abruptly with the end of Roman and Miranda's relationship. In Part Two, years have passed, Roman is married with a child, a good reputaion as a poet and a teaching job at the University of Nebraska. Bernard, his only friend from the School, is penniless, still working on the same epic poem he was working on as a student, and Roman's wife invites him to stay with them, where he sleeps in Roman's study and gives Roman a good excuse not to write. Chang describes the poet's angst vividly: First Roman is happy with his latest collection, then he starts tweaking this poem, then that one, then decides the whole book is worthless and hides it away. When he comes upon Bernard's manuscript he is blown away by its scope and beauty. Jealous? Hard to say. It's hard to say what Roman feels at any time throughout this book. Roman craves feedback for his own work but is incapable of asking for it. Chang tells us that Roman has never been in love and isn't sure what longing is. He cannot answer the question would he rather desire or be the one desired. At one point Miranda tell him that his poetry, which seems to consist mostly of a dialogue between two characters (There is not one example of Roman's or Bernard's poetry; the only poetry quoted is that of known poets.) has none of himself in it. There is not much that is done well in this novel. The writing is good, clear and pleasant but the characters and their motivations are obscure. Miranda is as mysterious at the end as at the beginning. The best part of this book is the title.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I had an interesting experience reading this book. In the beginning I had doubts, as it seemed to be set up as a modern romance, and I wasn't sure if there would be anything else to the story. But that was just part one. Even in the beginning, the way Chang uses words caught me off guard at times. Words are strung together in charming ways, and I found myself re-reading sentences and smiling. This is a story of people whose lives revolve around poetry, told in delicate prose.As the story progresses, it becomes a tale of heartbreak. These characters have big dreams, sometimes undefined, mostly unfulfilled. Their work seems fantastical and dreamy, but they are always pulled into reality. Friendships die, and people struggle against themselves to resurrect them. The book reminds us of the tenuous balance between relationships with people and careers. More specifically, careers in poetry or literature, working to compose something beautiful and immortal while letting other people and priorities fade into the background.There's much more to this book, though I don't want to spoil it for anyone, and am trying to think of a way to describe it so that someone else can have the same experience I did reading it. As a first taste of Lan Samantha Chang, this story left a deep impression, and I'll definitely be reading more of her work.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Three aspiring poets—Roman, Bernard, and Lucy—meet in a graduate writing program in 1986 and begin a lifelong journey of love, friendship, betrayal, and artistic creation. They are brought together initially by Miranda, the aloof and enigmatic teacher who serves as their first guide to the harsh realities involved with pursuing the creative process. The novel follows these characters over the next three decades as their personal and professional lives progress with varying degrees of success and failure. The solitude, sorrows, and frustrations that attend the path they have chosen are present throughout the story and serve as its major theme.“All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost” is a book that almost, but not quite, worked for me. On one hand, some of the author’s meditations on the act of committing one’s thoughts and feelings to paper were forceful and will certainly resonate with anyone who has ever tried in earnest to do just that. Further, her prose all through the book was a pleasure to read; it frequently had the same lyrical quality as the poetry she describes so well. On the other hand, though, the main characters are drawn in a one-dimensional, stereotypical manner to the point that it is difficult to relate to them: Roman is always too self-absorbed, Lucy is too selfless and understanding, Bernard is too fearful of realizing his talent and his desires. It is also a story strangely devoid of happiness, even when life-affirming events (e.g., fellowships, marriages, literary prizes) occur. It was as if the author felt the need to “bludgeon” the reader with the idea of just how much the act of producing great art costs its creator.I did enjoy this novel, but upon finishing it I found myself slightly disappointed because I had hoped to enjoy it so much more. At slightly less than 200 pages, this is indeed a thoughtful and restrained treatment of a serious topic. However, that brevity is also a drawback in that the author is only able to develop three reference points—their time in graduate school, 17 years later, and about a decade after that—in the characters’ lives. This limited perspective leads to some unrealistic scenes (e.g., people remembering verbatim details of actions and conversations that took places a quarter century in the past) and is not really sufficient to understand the sometimes inexplicable actions they take. The compelling nature of the subject would have supported a much deeper set of characterizations and, I suspect, made the novel a more memorable experience for the reader.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Novels about college English professors hold a special place in my reading life. Richard Russo tops the list with Straight Man, and Jim Harrison’s The English Major has a tight hold on second place. This new novel by the director of the Iowa Writers Workshop will surely find its way onto this list.The story revolves around an intense professor of poetry at a mid-western college. Students fight to get into her class -- even though many are reduced to tears at her caustic comments or her lack of attention. Roman desperately wanted to be her student and receive her approval.The novel will hold a great deal of interest for aspiring writers, because it thoroughly examines the psychology of writing poetry and the relationships between writers and readers – especially readers who are close to the writer.One of the drawbacks of reading and reviewing “advance reading copies” is that I can’t quote from the novel. The prose is so fluid and almost magical, I feel as if the words have become a river and they carry me along on a journey of exploration. Pick it up in a bookstore and begin to read the opening pages. You will walk out with a copy.The only flaw is an occasional penchant for conversations with a level of intensity that made it hard to follow who said what. When I hit one particularly difficult scene, I began to notate “R” for Roman and “B” for Bernard. Despite this minor inconvenience, I strongly recommend this novel due out in September. Before writing this review, I ordered her first two books, Inheritance, a novel, and Hunger, a novella and a collection of stories. I can’t wait to read them. 4-1/2 stars--Jim, 7/24/10