Janet Maslin pans Joshua Ferris' new novel The Unnamed in the Times today, citing "authorial overkill" and "writerly preciousness" as reasons. She lost authority on the subject, however, in her very first sentence, when she dismissed Ferris' first book, Then We Came To the End, as "charming but weightless." That makes me think she may not have read Then We Came To the End very closely. Or at least not closely enough in the beautiful and powerful central chapter, where we follow a lonely, career-minded advertising executive facing a diagnosis of breast cancer with the support of her commitment-averse boyfriend-who breaks up with her a few days before [...]

So in today's Times Janet Maslin tears into Malcolm Gladwell's new greatest hits book collection. It is brutal, because she is endlessly making fun of his sentences and his paragraphs: "He liked to begin by framing some kind of broad question. Then he liked to change subjects abruptly. Let's suddenly talk about Ben Fountain and Jonathan Safran Foer." Ha ha, that is funny. For some reason though, this makes me uncomfortable! And when I am uncomfortable with conflict, I ask myself: whose side am I on? After some internal investigation, I realized: I'm not on either of their sides! Why should I be? What horse do I have in [...]