Jane Ciabattari
Five years ago, when Twitter was just another start-up and the iPad was a gleam in Steve Jobs’s eye, the state of print book reviews in this country was undergoing a spectacular and noisy collapse. Newspapers that were failing financially killed off their stand-alone print book sections, or folded them into the entertainment, ideas, or culture sections. They fired staff book editors and critics and cut freelance budgets. Hundreds of newspapers shut down altogether. Many magazines stopped covering books, and the literary quarterlies, for decades the champions of poetry and literary fiction published by independent presses, faced funding challenges as The sparsely populated mile-high plains, bowl-shaped valleys, and jagged mountain ranges of Wyoming, Montana, and other western states inspire a particular literary shape and substance. A robust and increasingly influential literature of the West, with its own set of icons—Bret Harte, Walter van Tilburg Clark, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner—has evolved over the past century and a half. Kate Christensen has been quietly carving a niche for herself as a chronicler of eccentric characters on the periphery of New York’s cultural vortex. Last year’s pen/Faulkner award for her fourth novel, The Great Man, raised her profile. The book’s conceit—two biographers competing for the attention of the mistress, the wife, and the sister, all satellites to a randy and recently deceased figurative painter—was knowing, the tone fang sharp. The women were over the age of seventy but not without allure (the former mistress hopes the first biographer notices that “her hips and waist were still girlishly slender, her step