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Annual 'Notable Books' list full of BU names

By Eric McHenry

Several BU-affiliated writers got a pleasant season's greeting from the New York Times Book Review. Faculty authors and recent alumni fared well in the fiction and poetry section of the Review's Notable Books supplement -- the standard bearer of year's-best lists -- published in the December 3 Holiday Books issue.

Saul Bellow, a UNI professor and Nobel laureate, has done it again with Ravelstein, a paean in fiction to the late cultural critic Allan Bloom. The Review's essayist calls it "a lively, haunting novel that explores American male friendship. . . ." Robert Pinsky, CAS professor of English, also makes the list with his latest collection of poems, Jersey Rain. "A sensitive, inquisitive mind, uninjured by belonging to the former poet laureate," writes the reviewer, "works in discursive modes in poems that ruminate on the virtues of public and private life."

Ha Jin (GRS'94), who in the fall of 2001 will return as a full professor to the Creative Writing Program he attended, was singled out for his new short story collection, The Bridegroom. Jin, the author of several books of fiction and poetry, won the 1999 National Book Award for his novel Waiting. The Review also recognized Jin's former classmate Peter Ho Davies (GRS'94) for his collection of short stories, Equal Love. Jacqueline Carey, in the March essay from which the Notable Books blurb is drawn, praises Davies' work for emphasizing "the most basic bonds between people" at a moment when "most of our literature seems to be singing, 'Me, me, me, me.'"

And although space on the list is clearly limited, poet Glyn Maxwell (GRS'88) manages to make not one but two appearances -- for The Boys at Twilight, a selection of poems from his early books, and for Time's Fool, an ambitious novel-length "tale in verse." In a November review of both books, Langdon Hammer calls Maxwell's poetry "literate and sophisticated but not stuffily literary."

26 January 2001
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