All the King's Men, Catcher in the Rye and The Pawnbroker are among the novels discussed as true works of the imagination

The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel

Literature & Fiction

Baumbach, Jonathan

Literary

NYU Press

Babble

Fiction Collective 2

Babble, a babybook for our time, is a fiction about (1) loss of innocence, (2) rites of passage, (3) family life, (4) babies, (5) baby-sitters, (6) war and peace, (7) robots, (8) raw youth, (9) crime and punishment, (10) stories, (11) sex and death, (12) language, (13) advanced education, (14) love, (15) the invention of culture, (16) mystery, (17) play, (18) fathers and sons, (19) superheroes, (20) the dehumanization of art. Babble is a baby book for grown ups, a comic novel about entering and losing the world, an adult dream of lost babyhood. Like Baumbach's previous novel, Reruns, though moving perhaps one step further out (or in), Babble depicts our world through a screen of metaphors, using the stuff of dreams, memory and cultural fantasy.

Humor & Satire

Imagine a bookish man named Francis D., swimming at a public beach in Cape Cod, who drifts out beyond his depth. Imagine that he doesn't drown, that the tide carries him to a private cove where he is rescued by two mysterious young women named Charlotte and Emily. Imagine then that Francis leaves behind his former humdrum life-his formidable wife and teenage daughter-and embarks on a series of violent and erotic adventures, as dream-like as reels of film. Imagine at the same time that a man named Joshua Quartz is telling his silent wife, Genevieve, the story of Francis's adventures, that they have little other communication, that the story is a way of keeping contact between husband and wife alive. Imagine that at some point Genevieve tells her own story, within and without Joshua's account. Baumbach's characters make occasional connections, make love and war, in the disguises of metaphor. If the main action is dream-like or fantastic, the real world is always at the window looking in.

Chez Charlotte and Emily

Contemporary

The fourteen stories that make up Jonathan Baumbach's eighth book of fiction deals with parents, children, love, basketball, billiards, reading, marriage, divorce—the essentials of everyday life which, through the author's unique strategy of narrative, come to the reader in unexpected ways. Combining comedy and nightmare, these stories distinguish themselves by the charge of their imaginative life, their concern with language, and the play and replay of their form. 
"Familiar Games" describes a one-on-one basketball game between a 12-year-old boy and his mother, a match that evokes a childhood memory of sexual mystery; "Passion?" concerns the disrepair of a marriage that has presented itself to friends and the world as ideal; "Children of Divorced Parents" centers on the problematic career of a filmmaker who, after several failed marriages, continues to pursue the illusion of first love; and the title story, "The Life and Times of Major Fiction," investigates the mysterious career of a literary confidence man, an impassioned lover of good books, whose life is itself a pastiche of the plots of major fictions.

The Life and Times of Major Fiction

United States

Separate Hours

A disturbingly honest, elegantly imagined unveiling of the way truth becomes elusive in a long-term relationship, Separate Hours is a love story about the betrayal of love. Yuri and Adrienne Tipton, both psychotherapists, conduct their separate practices in a shared basement office in an upper Westside New York brownstone.  They also share a ten-year-old daughter, a too-comfortable life, an apparently happy marriage, and a connectedness that blurs the edges of their separate identities. Who is telling the real truth?  Can either of the novel's narrators be taken at their word?  Adrienne and Yuri tell the story of their life together (and apart), trying to make sense of the darkly irrational.  When Adrienne claims that in a movie of their lives, she would be the more sympathetic character, the novel, to test her premise, gives us a possible scenario for the movie. In the further quixotic pursuit of clarity, the novel turns Yuri and Adrienne's marriage into a case study prepared for a psychoanalytic journal.  Separate Hours zeroes in on their marriage and the few things outside that come close enough to get caught in its tentacles.  For all the novel's comic elements, it underlying vision is dark. From the moment of Yuri and Adrienne's initial meeting, they embrace the conflict.  Although they appear to understand what drives them, their behavior for the most part is blindly compulsive and deathbent.  Self-knowledge has little impact of how they live their lives. Baumbach's seventh novel examines a postmodern marriage in crisis, as if it were a "patient etherized upon a table."

A disturbingly honest, elegantly imagined unveiling of the way truth becomes elusive in a long-term relationship, Separate Hours is a love story about the betrayal of love. Yuri and Adrienne Tipton, both psychotherapists, conduct their separate practices in a shared basement office in an upper Westside New York brownstone. They also share a ten-year-old daughter, a too-comfortable life, an apparently happy marriage, and a connectedness that blurs the edges of their separate identities. Who is telling the real truth? Can either of the novel's narrators be taken at their word? Adrienne and Yuri tell the story of their life together (and apart), trying to make sense of the darkly irrational. When Adrienne claims that in a movie of their lives, she would be the more sympathetic character, the novel, to test her premise, gives us a possible scenario for the movie. In the further quixotic pursuit of clarity, the novel turns Yuri and Adrienne's marriage into a case study prepared for a psychoanalytic journal. Separate Hours zeroes in on their marriage and the few things outside that come close enough to get caught in its tentacles. For all the novel's comic elements, it underlying vision is dark. From the moment of Yuri and Adrienne's initial meeting, they embrace the conflict. Although they appear to understand what drives them, their behavior for the most part is blindly compulsive and deathbent. Self-knowledge has little impact of how they live their lives. Baumbach's seventh novel examines a postmodern marriage in crisis, as if it were a "patient etherized upon a table."

In a quest to find the perfect marriage Jack marries seven different women, including a childhood sweetheart, an older woman, and an obese woman, while he also searches for the perfect career

Seven Wives

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Baumbach, Jonathan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Baumbach, Jonathan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Baumbach, Jonathan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel

The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel

Babble

Babble

Chez Charlotte and Emily

Chez Charlotte and Emily

The Life and Times of Major Fiction

Separate Hours

Separate Hours

Seven Wives