Review by New York Times Review
#+ |9781101947296 ~ at age 3, before she could write by hand, Barbara Newhall Follett was banging out words on her parents' Corona. Her first book, a lyrical romp about a child runaway, came out in 1927 when she was 12. The Saturday Review of Literature called it "almost unbearably beautiful," and this newspaper deemed it "wonderful." A second book, based on her adventures at sea, earned more accolades just a little over a year later. But at age 15, Follett was arrested in San Francisco after fleeing the suffocating plans of her mother. "I felt I had to have my freedom," she told a reporter. A decade later, Follett walked out of the apartment she was sharing with her husband in Brookline, Mass., evidently seeking freedom once more, this time from her marriage. She was never heard from again. Child prodigies are exotic creatures, each unique and inexplicable. But they have a couple of things in common, as Ann Hulbert's meticulous new book, "Off the Charts," makes clear: First, most Wunderkinds eventually experience some kind of schism with a devoted and sometimes domineering parent. "After all, no matter how richly collaborative a bond children forge with grown-up guides, some version of divorce is inevitable," Hulbert writes. "It's what modern experts would call developmentally appropriate." Second, most prodigies grow up to be thoroughly unremarkable on paper. They do not, by and large, sustain their genius into adulthood. What happens to alter the trajectory of shooting stars like Follett? In "Off the Charts," Hulbert attempts to capture the complicated lives of child prodigies without descending into voyeurism or caricature. She has tried to "listen hard for the prodigies' side of the story," to her great credit. This is an arduous task, and it sometimes shows in the writing, which can be stilted in its reliance on quotes and documentation. But Hulbert's diligence results in a surprising payoff: The best advice for managing a child prodigy may be a wise strategy for parenting any child, including the many, many nonbrilliant ones. Hulbert, The Atlantic's literary editor, wrote her last book, "Raising America," about the tortured history of parenting advice. So she is appropriately wary of preachy morality tales. "My goal isn't to pile on the stark cautionary fare. Nor am I aiming to crack some 'talent code,"' she writes in the prologue for "Off the Charts," to our great relief. Instead, she tries to place each of the boys and girls featured in the book in a specific time and place; their celebrity reveals much about their particular moment in American history. For example, Bobby Fischer's chess prowess might not have been impressive enough for adults to overlook his breathtaking egotism - but for the launching of Sputnik and America's anxiety about creeping Soviet domination in education and science. One era's prodigy is another's anonymous misfit. The book begins with the story of two gifted boys who attended Harvard at the same time, in the early 1900s. Norbert Wiener, a budding philosopher and mathematician, was 14, and William Sidis, a star in linguistics and mathematics, was only 11. They were not friends, which was a shame. Both suffered under the weight of their elders' intellectual expectations, combined with the impossibility of fitting in as boys among men. They were told they were superior, but then punished if they acted like it. Their identities depended on superhuman smarts, which made any academic failure feel like a knife to the heart. Wiener would struggle with depression for the rest of his life, but he did manage to eventually find professional fulfillment at M.I.T., where he helped invent the field of cybernetics. Sidis was not so successful; after fleeing a criminal charge related to a political protest, he did low-level accounting work in New York. He continued to alienate others with his stubborn arrogance before dying at 46 of a cerebral hemorrhage. What would have helped these boys and the other struggling prodigies in this book? Maybe nothing. But after poring over their words and stories, Hulbert has concluded that they might all offer parents similar advice: Accept who they are. That doesn't mean protecting them from failure or stress; quite the opposite. "What they want, and need, is the chance to obsess on their own idiosyncratic terms - to sweat and swerve, lose their balance, get their bearings, battle loneliness, discover resilience," Hulbert writes. Interestingly, this is the same advice contemporary psychologists tend to give to all parents, not just the parents of prodigies. Parents must hold children accountable and help them thrive, which is easier said than done; but if they try to re-engineer the fundamentals of their offspring, they will fail spectacularly, sooner or later. And this lesson is particularly obvious in the extremes. "Extraordinary achievement, though adults have rarely cared to admit it, takes a toll," Hulbert writes. "It demands an intensity that rarely makes kids conventionally popular or socially comfortable. But if they get to claim that struggle for mastery as theirs, in all its unwieldiness, they just might sustain the energy and curiosity that ideally fuels such a quest." THE SPECIAL CHALLENGE for prodigies IS that they are exceptional in more ways than one. "Genius is an abnormality, and abnormalities do not come one at a time," explains Veda Kaplinsky, a longtime teacher of gifted students, in Andrew Solomon's "Far From the Tree," a book that is cited by Hulbert. "Many gifted kids have A.D.D. or O.C.D. or Asperger's. When the parents are confronted with two sides of a kid, they're so quick to acknowledge the positive, the talented, the exceptional; they are often in denial over everything else." The very traits that make prodigies so successful in one arena - their obsessiveness, a stubborn refusal to conform, a blistering drive to win - can make them pariahs in the rest of life. Whatever else they may say, most teachers do not in fact appreciate creativity and critical thinking in their own students. "Off the Charts" is jammed with stories of small geniuses being kicked out of places of learning. Matt Savage spent two days in a Boston-area Montessori preschool before being expelled. Thanks to parents who had the financial and emotional resources to help him find his way, he is now, at age 25, a renowned jazz musician. Interestingly, some prodigies may actually do better when their eccentricities are seen by loving adults as disabilities first - and talents second. Hulbert tells the story of Jacob Barnett, born in 1998, who withdrew into autism as a toddler in Indiana. His parents tried every form of therapy they could find, before finally discovering that he could be drawn out through his captivation with astronomy. His mother, Kristine, took him to astronomy classes at the local university - not to jumpstart his genius but to help coax him back to life. "If I had stopped and let myself bask in the awe of Jake's amazing abilities - if I had stopped to ponder how unusual he really is - I don't think I could have been a good mother to him," she explained. The most vivid section of the book comes at the end, when Hulbert reunites with the musical prodigy Marc Yu, a decade after first interviewing him at age 6. With his mother's support, Yu had tried to ease up on his musical career and live a more normal life, an approach that had worked for other prodigies, including the child actress Shirley Temple. But Yu found that the strategies that worked at the keyboard were useless in high school, where no amount of discipline and focus could make him cool. The adorable, joke-cracking boy she'd remembered had grown into a lonely teenager. "I always expected things to go my way," Yu told Hulbert. "If I wanted it, I worked hard enough, I got it, and people loved me. That's no longer true, and I feel I exist in the shadow of popular kids." Yu's story reinforces one of Hulbert's central, if unsatisfying, findings: Children's needs change. If you think you've got a child figured out, you will be proved wrong momentarily. As Hulbert writes: "Prodigies offer reminders writ large that children, in the end, flout our best and worst intentions." And adults always overestimate their own influence. amanda ripley is a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective and the author, most recently, of "The Smartest Kids in the World."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 21, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Continuing in the vein of his earlier essay collections, including Inner Workings (2007), Nobel laureate Coetzee again demonstrates his range and precision as a literary critic and his gift for rendering challenging material accessible. His interest is in probing the Western canon for works that are praiseworthy, but also those that fall short in interesting ways. His observations often have biographical significance, as when he suggests that in writing The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne had reason to think of himself as a traitor to his traditions. When he writes that Madame Bovary's brilliance had much to do with Flaubert's ability to present big questions as problems of composition, he reminds us that his own approach is also greatly informed by his compositional endeavors. Such perspectives have the effect of bringing even the loftiest literary lights within reach, as seen in pieces on difficult German-language greats Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist and Walser, and in a four-essay excursion into Samuel Beckett. In discussing Patrick White and other Australian writers, Coetzee deftly unpacks the literature of his adoptive home. We never get Coetzee on Coetzee, but in his dissections and his exegesis, his delicate praise and his casual dismissals, we find some revealing glimpses.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this collection of 23 essays, Coetzee (The Schooldays of Jesus) offers striking, imaginative insights into a varied group of writers, from German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) to modern-day master Philip Roth. Coetzee's entries, roving from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Beckett, and Patrick White, raise numerous questions: Why do novels lie to us? What makes Samuel Beckett like Herman Melville? How do translators make choices? In his essay on playwright and fiction writer Heinrich von Kleist, Coetzee reflects on the author's enigmatic novella The Marquise of O, asking whether there can be aspects of a story that remain unknown even to the author. Yet there are limits to Coetzee's scope: the authors in this collection are, except for Irene Nemirovsky, male. Moreover, Coetzee reveals a blindness to the female experience, as made apparent when he writes, about the heroine of Daniel Defoe's Roxana: A Fortunate Mistress, that anything "resistible" isn't rape and questions how she could be sexually alluring at 50. Nevertheless, Coetzee's many strong and provocative essays, along with the clarity of his writing and the literary biographies he weaves into his analyses, make this in general a worthwhile work of literary criticism. Agent: Peter Lampack, Peter Lampack Agency. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
With this third collection of essays, Nobel Laureate and Man Booker Prize winner Coetzee (Life and Times of Michael K., Disgrace, etc.) brings a novelist's sensibility to the art of literary criticism. The wide range of novels discussed form a chronological look at the genre's development, from Coetzee's perspective. He includes such classics as Daniel Defoe's Roxana, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, along with more contemporary works by Philip Roth, Ford Maddox Ford, Irène Némirovsky, and others. In examining the novels of Nobel Prize winner Patrick White, Coetzee praises the decision of White's literary agent to publish The Hanging Garden posthumously, despite the author's instructions to burn any fragments found after his death. Most noteworthy is Coetzee's thought-provoking analysis of Samuel Beckett's writing, especially the novels Watt and Molloy. Presenting possible interpretations of these challenging works encourages readers who otherwise might never consider them. VERDICT Coetzee is unparalleled in his ability to penetrate the philosophical and psychological mysteries in a work of art. This will appeal to scholars and readers of serious fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 7/17/17.]-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at -Geneseo © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Nobel and Booker Prize winner Coetzee (The Schooldays of Jesus, 2017, etc.) offers another collection of reflective and erudite essays on a variety of poets and novelists.Originally published as introductions to foreign translations or in the New York Review of Books, some of the author's favorites recur: Daniel Defoe, Robert Walser, Zbigniew Herbert, Philip Roth, and Samuel Beckett, the "philosophical satirist," whom Coetzee covers in four of the essays. While discussing Beckett's letters and two novelsWatt, a "fable cum treatise that for long stretches manages to be hypnotically fascinating," and Molloy, a "mysterious work, inviting interpretation and resisting it at the same time"the author focuses on Beckett's language, a "self-enclosed system, a labyrinth without issue, in which human beings are trapped." An acclaimed translator himself, Coetzee is particularly interested in the translations of some authors' works. He laments that any translation of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther that would be "true" for readers of the 1770s as well as for today's is "an unattainable ideal." He quibbles that Michael Hamburger's translations of Friedrich Hlderlin's poetry are "only intermittentlytouched with divine fire." But the "achievement is nevertheless considerable." The essay on Patrick White, the "greatest writer Australia has produced," confronts the dilemma faced by literary executors. Coetzee praises White's agent Barbara Mobbs as well as Kafka's friend Max Brod for refusing to carry out their authors' wishes to have their writings destroyed. As Coetzee writes, "the world is a richer place now that we have [White's] The Hanging Garden." As a longtime advocate for animal rights, his short piece on Juan Ramn Jimnez's tale of a donkey, Platero and I, is especially poignant. Other subjects of Coetzee's probing eye include Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Heinrich Von Kleist, Antonio Di Benedetto, Les Murray, Gerald Murnane, Irne Nmirovsky, Ford Madox Ford, and Hendrik Witbooi.Thought-provoking essays that offer more than mere opinion, as the author plumbs the writers' philosophical and psychological depths. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
