NYT book review assignment for AP English 12

Howell will post four NewYork Times Book Reviews each week.  If you can't find his posts, then just google New York Times Book Review and select two for yourself.

Read and write about 2 and email your responses to howellj@dy-regional.k12.ma.us

We are attempting to develop your habits of mind:  you need to habitually think and write like a literary critic to play the game necessary for success in AP English 12.  Therefore, send 2 responses a week to Mr. Howell until you have accumulated at least 8 responses.

Please comment on examples of extraordinary diction, exceptional syntax, and sweeping insight before identifying the reviewer's thesis.  Finish it off with a statement on whether you agree or disagree with the reviewer.

Your responses should mimic the following sample format.

LOVING DAY
By Mat Johnson
287 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $26.
reviewed June 1, 2015 in the New York Times Book Review by Baz Dreisinger, an associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

EXTRAORDINARY DICTION: "Liminal"--"liminal" means on the edge, “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (dictionary.com).  It's a literary term often referring to characters who are not squarely in one particular culture, and their outside status allows them special insight as narrators about the world on whose edge they live.  Huck Finn, The Invisible Man, and even Scout Finch are liminal characters to their worlds.

"He’s wrecked, too, by his liminal ­racial status: His father was an Irishman, his mother was black and he comfortably claims neither — call him a man divided against himself. “I am a racial optical illusion,” he say." (Dreisinger)

EXCEPTIONAL SYNTAX: "It’s a semi-autobiographical one — he has called the book “my coming out as a mulatto” — that can at times feel belabored, but the novel ultimately triumphs because it is razor-sharp, sci-fi-flavored satire in the vein of George Schuyler, playfully evocative of black folklore à la Joel Chandler Harris — yet it never feels like a cold theoretical exercise." (Dreisinger)  

The reviewer has massive ground to cover to fully characterize Johnson's novel, and she freely alludes to genres and authors, setting off her specific allusions with internal dashes--those sidelines separating sentences within sentences--a consistent sign of elevated writing.

SWEEPING INSIGHT:  “In one respect the decaying house is a metaphor for urban America, for the ghettos of Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago: phantoms of the palatial African-American meccas they once were. The house is also America itself, as relentlessly haunted by the obdurate, divisive specter of race as Warren is. Race, after all, is ghostlike: a dubious entity invested with immense power by believers.” Dreisinger pursues a lofty connecting point between the novel’s setting and the massive problem of urban decay, crime, and family pathologies.

REVIEWER'S THESIS:  "But really “Loving Day” is playing with that tired trope; Warren is tragic, yes, but not because he is a “mulatto” — he’s tragic because he, like mostly everyone else in the novel, is haunted by ghosts of painful pasts and broken families: ex-partners, dead parents, rotted loves."

AGREE/DISAGREE: Dreisinger uses the dismissive modifier-"tired"- to puncture the well-filled tire of this review, finishing it off with a deflationary hiss.  "Trope" in this sense means "commonly recurring literary or rhetorical device" (wikipedia), so the reviewer implies that she's read work like Johnson's all too often, been exposed to Johnson's liminal world all-too-often.  And yet, the "painful pasts and broken families" populating the author's work clearly need better defining in our fractured and racially contentious society.  So go out there and read Johnson's work yourself.