Jess Row

A book I had an incomplete handle on. Often in essay collections there are two or three exceedingly strong pieces bolstered with a bunch of average ones to make up a book. In this case, it felt like Row had some provocative (and effective) arguments to make about the different ways race plays (or fails to play) a role in white American fiction. It's when he gets off course from this, into political theory, sociology, and even personal history that I feel the individual essays lose their grip a little bit -- it's not that this material is wrong, it just feels shallower, less of an original mind, and more the summoning of expected characters (Derrida, Butler, etc.), with a bit less exegesis than I like.

Plenty of forceful, thoughtful, challenging paragraphs that never quite cohere into the broader punch of idea I hope for from an essay. But those paragraphs, nuggets of insight were more than enough for me to give this 3*, I was weighing between 3 and 4. I think a condensed, long essay version of this could be remarkable.… (meer)