A weekly appreciation for the art of the review.
There were young guys in tuxedos and sunglasses excitedly mixing the kind of swagger that grows in Brooklyn with the kind that grows in midtown and on Wall Street. There were outfits that insisted the wearer comes here often; outfits that insisted the wearer does not come here often, and perhaps likes it that way; and outfits that said the wearer doesn’t come here often but is self-conscious about dressing appropriately.
I can imagine St Aubyn, like Raymond Chandler, keeping a notebook of devastating descriptions to be deployed when an otherwise bland paragraph is in need of horsepower.
Years later Dickens tended to dismiss his early journalism as picturesque juvenilia. Hardly. Already the writing is what we now readily identify as “Dickensian,” glorying in that mix of humor, archness, and bounce, that theatricality, which belongs to “the Inimitable” alone.
So begins the love story of Hazel and Augustus, star-crossed from day one. It brings them from hospital ICUs to Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam and back again, and it’s driven by some pretty weighty questions
-At the Portland Mercury, Alison Hallett discusses John Green’s The Weight of Our Stars.