John Green Knows a True Hollywood Ending is Complicated

The Book Review

In this episode of The Book Review, host MJ Franklin interviews New York Times book critic Dwight Garner about his glowing review of Marlon James's novel 'The Disappearers,'

Key takeaways

• Dwight Garner describes reviewing 'The Disappearers' as a once-in-a-career experience that felt both overwhelming and necessary.
• Marlon James's novel explores trauma, sexuality, and identity in 1980s Jamaica through multiple perspectives and nonlinear storytelling.

Main topics

• Marlon James's novel 'The Disappearers'
• Book criticism in the modern era

Notable quotes

"This is one of those books that starts slowly. A lot of people are going to put this away after 75 pages, I fear. Their loss."

"I don't write for writers. I write for readers."

Conclusion

The episode reveals how powerful literature and criticism can be, both in shaping

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I'm John Caramonica, a critic at The New York Times. And I'm Joe Cascarelli, a culture reporter at The Times. Together we host PopCast, a weekly pop culture chat show where we speak to the biggest musicians, actors, internet celebrities, and more. We've had Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo, and Anne Hathaway. We've also hosted live performances with Andre 3000 and Erykah Badu. Plus, we end every conversation with a snack. Catch new episodes of PopCast every week on YouTube. And anywhere you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (0:30) I'm MJ Franklin, and this is the Book Review from The New York Times. Today, we have two interviews for you. I recently sat down with the best-selling author John Green. He's known for his young adult novels, but now he is out with his first work of fiction for adults. I'm excited to share our wide-ranging conversation about writing, fame, and the books that made an impression on him when he was young. That's coming up in a bit. First, Dwight Garner is a longtime staff book critic at The New York Times. Recently, he reviewed Marlon James' new novel, The Disappearers. And spoiler alert, he loved it. He called it, quote, a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far. That's high praise from a tried and true critic. So today, I wanted to bring Dwight into the studio and peek behind the curtain a little bit. I wanted to chat with him about what this book is, what makes it so good, and more broadly, what's it like to write criticism today? Dwight, thank you for joining us. It's great to see you, MJ. Nice to see you too. And wow, this review, it is superlative in so many ways. I think it's the most positive review of yours I've seen. New York Magazine has this great books newsletter called Book Gossip, which pointed out that this review seems to have concretely moved the needle in terms of book sales and cultural impact in ways that few reviews do anymore. So it's superlative in that way. You say the book is a banger, but so is this review. How are you feeling? Well, thank you, MJ. I appreciate that. You know, it's Speaker 3 (2:02) the kind of review that a critic, at least me, only gets to write once in a career. I mean, I've never written a review like that. But then again, I haven't been able to review a book like this, you know? And so you have all these pent-up feelings that sort of emerge. I mean, it's a long book. And I went back and reread the previous book. So, you know, that's about 1,200 pages right there. So it took a long time to read. And then I sort of paced around the room for a couple of days because I sort of was scared to write what I felt like writing for two reasons. One, you're sort of walking on a wire a little bit. And I was worried, too, about sort of adding pressure to Marlon James. It's got to be harder to write with that sort of bearing down on you. And it's probably some literary envy that comes with having things like that said about you. But in the end, I don't write for writers. I write for readers. And this is just... This is one of the rare reading experiences of my life, and I just felt like it was time to come out and say it. Speaker 4 (2:58) Yeah, you said you only get to write one of these types of reviews in Speaker 3 (3:02) your career. What do you mean by that? Well, I suppose you could have two or three. I mean, I think Pauline Kael probably did. But I've just, you know, I've liked a lot of books. I'm not a hater. I tend to look for things to like in a book. So, you know, I like to read. But I haven't had an experience like this before, reading a novel that I was assigned to review for The New York Times. On some level, I forget who said it. It may have been Nabokov. In the end, you go by the prickle on the back of the neck. This is one of those books that starts slowly. A lot of people are going to put this away after 75 pages, I fear. Their loss. And there are some times in the book where you feel like it's starting to slacken a little bit. And then suddenly you can't believe that you're back in this maelstrom again as a reader. And then this happens again and again and again. And it keeps ratcheting up. And it's just one of those experiences that I'm just... Glad that I was able to read that book. I was glad that I got to read it before the rest of the culture did in some ways and be able to say what I was able to say. Can Speaker 4 (3:59) you give us a top line? What is The Disappearers? What is this book about? And who is this author, Marlon James? Speaker 3 (4:06) Yeah, well, Marlon James is a Jamaican writer who now lives in America. He's written four or five novels, the best note of which is Brief History of Seven Killings, which is... won the Booker Prize deservedly in a very serious novel, and it's an excellent novel. I think that The Disappearers surpasses that book. Put most simply, it's about a handful of young gay men, most of them in Jamaica in the 80s and 90s, where homophobia was vibrant in killing. And they meet to put on a play, a sort of under-the-radar, underground production of a Canadian play about men in prison. It involves, you know, rape and it involves sex acts, both desired and undesired. And while they are rehearsing one night, a group of vandals breaks in and basically just kicks the hell out of them. I mean, worse. Eyes are gouged out, teeth are scattered. It's just, you know, a horrible... And Jamaica being Jamaica as it was during this period... The attackers, the marauders, are treated like heroes in the media and by other people. And so Marlon James is exploring, he's Gen X, this was the period he grew up in. AIDS was just on the horizon or just there, just arriving for the first time. And so after this attack, we follow these young men, some of them are a bit older, backwards and forwards in time, sometimes several decades, sometimes a decade or two back. And many voices speak. I admit in my review that once or twice I got a bit lost in the voices. I wasn't sure who was talking. It doesn't matter. It's almost part of being a serious reader. It just happens. It happened to me a little bit. It doesn't matter. James just has this ability to attack his core themes again and again and again from different angles. You just can't believe he has more to say about the things he cares about because you think, oh, he's blown through this notion. of in terms of attraction and repulsion and sexuality and about music and culture and what these things mean to his characters. And you feel like, okay, he said this thing already about whatever it is, about the music out of Seattle in this period or walking the streets of an urban city. And then he just does it better the next time. Speaker 4 (6:16) I'm curious to know how you came to the book because as one of our critics, you have a lot of autonomy rather than typically being assigned. a review like most of our reviewers, our freelance reviewers are, you claimed Ips first. What made you gravitate toward this book in the first place? That's a good question. You know, Speaker 3 (6:37) his last novel, I mean, Seven Killings was more than 10 years ago now. And I had really never read him seriously. For whatever reason, other critics had done his books. I realized I really want to know what he's about. And so I took this as an occasion to go back and read just about everything he's written. I'm lucky. I'm lucky to be able to look at the horizon and single out books I'd like to review. And I saw Marlon, and signing up to do a big book, it's always a bit nerve-wracking in the sense that, you know, taking out a big book is taking out a big project. And it really took over my life. I decided to read behind during my other reviews to catch up with all the stuff he's written. It was a hard book to review, and it's been a weird couple of weeks since it appeared. Weird? How so? I don't know, just this sense of, you know, to me, it's just, it's a book review, you know, but this sense of this Klieg light swinging around to focus on Marlon James, which, you know, I'm proud of. He deserves it. And, you know, I feel like I'm myself a bit as well. And I'm a humble guy. I live in my apartment and I don't go out that much. I'm just a private human being. But it feels good to be able to, good to be able to say something that does move the culture a bit. I didn't set out to do that. This was just the book that was there. When did you know that this book was a masterpiece? Well, probably not until the very end, because even 75 pages before the end, there's another slack period. Then he grabs you. I kept thinking, all right, now is the time. Now is the time this book's going to let me down. And then it doesn't, which is amazing. I don't think I knew it. I didn't feel... sort of the orchestra fully in tune. I felt like there's a lot of practicing, a lot of squeaking in the horn section, you know, for the first 90 pages, you know. And the full orchestra only really starts to swell up 150 to 220 pages in. So that's when I felt like, okay, this is serious fiction. In my review, I wrote that here's a guy, Marlon James, working out on the margins of his subconsciousness. And I feel that's true. So much fiction now, and fiction that I like, by the way. is sort of, you know, micro ironies and observations. And don't get me wrong, I love that stuff. But here's a guy who has a talent that is almost a dry Zerian. I call him a long haul trucker of the human spirit. This is one of those big books that just sort of runs you down over the long haul. You know, and also he has that dry Zerian power, and yet he does have the micro felicities. He's so quotable. I mean, I probably took 30 pages of notes out of this book just about his observations on food and music and culture. Everything. It's just all there. It's the entire package. Speaker 4 (9:12) You have this feeling. This book is it. The hairs on the neck are prickling. How did you approach writing this review after you had that feeling? Speaker 3 (9:23) Oh, God. Well, you know, I approached it the way I approach everything I write, which is, you know, as I'm reading along, I really destroy books as I'm reading them. I underline and I write notes to myself and remember this scene. It might be a good ending or critics do this. That's how most of them work. And then I sit down and I type up those notes. And typing up the notes for this book took me two entire days because I just, there was so much. that I just adored about it. And I had so much to work with. I almost said in the review, and I didn't, I could probably write a book about this book. And I think people will. I didn't even get a chance to get into a lot of things I wanted to get into because listeners might not know. But even though this is a long piece and I hope it sounds considered, you have to do this stuff in a week. Speaker 4 (10:04) I want to ask about... The headline, the top line, book of the decade, if not the century. You mentioned that's a scary thing to say. Can you talk a little bit more about that? What makes it scary? How were you thinking about that? Well, Speaker 3 (10:20) I think on a primal level, you're worried that you're wrong. I am a critic with a big platform. Thank you, New York Times, for letting me do this. But it's scary to use those big words because they're overused and they're blunderbuss. And as a critic, I'm proud of not, or at least very rarely, employing those kind of adjectives and terms to a book. I just don't like to do that. But I just felt like, all right, this is the time to make some noise. And I'm Speaker 4 (10:45) glad I did. The review is tremendously buzzy in a way that I don't think I've seen in a while. I keep joking with friends, like, criticism is back. Not that it ever really left, but, like, it's exciting to see your field get the spotlight. I've been getting texts from people in my personal life, people who aren't readers, who are like, have you read this book? Is it this good? And I'm like, it is that good. The book is sold out everywhere. The discourse seems to be... about both this book, but also this review. Yeah, Speaker 3 (11:19) you know, I haven't seen a lot of that yet, but I think I'm sure that it's coming. A lot more discourse about James, because it's Speaker 4 (11:26) the Speaker 3 (11:26) kind of review that sets up something to bounce off of or... to agree or disagree with. I'm sure people are going to fall both ways, but that's great. I fear in America, and I've written about this, that there aren't as many book critics as there were. And I miss the tumult of the conversation. I've read some really good reviews of this book already. Laura Miller is in Slate, and she agreed. She used the word masterpiece as well. I was happy to see that. But I look forward to the people who completely disagree as well. It's good for the culture. One of my favorite critics is a British critic, Kenneth Tynan, who wrote back in the... 50s, 60s, 70s, for the most part, theater criticism. And he would always be proud of filling theaters. If he liked something, he wanted that theater to be packed the next day. And I've sometimes felt that way about a book, but really never until this one. I have my favorites, and I like books all the time, but never, I mean, this theater deserves to be packed. Speaker 4 (12:16) Yeah, I think a lot about the critic Elizabeth Hardwig. She wrote in 1959 this essay kind of, taking to task a lot of the book reviews. And she, at that point, said there were a lot of bland commendations going around. And what she really wanted was, rather than coverage, she said she wanted the, quote, the drama of opinion. And I think about that phrase a lot, the drama of opinion. And that doesn't mean you have to, like, savage a book. Sometimes loving a book is the drama of opinion. Communicating that a book is a masterpiece is the drama of opinion. And I feel like you set that bar in that conversation. And to see your review break out. It's tremendous. Speaker 3 (12:52) Well, I'm glad you think so. I feel lucky, too. I mean, there aren't many staff critics left in America, you know. I'm one of the few book critics in the country who has health insurance. It's just insane. And I'm lucky, too, to be—I don't go to book parties. I don't know a lot of writers. I have a couple of writer friends that I'm close to,