All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost

July 26, 2010
Chang, director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and author of Hunger and Inheritance, sticks close to home as she follows Roman Morris from his days as an M.F.A. student in the late 1980s to his soaring career as a published poet, tenured professor, and Pulitzer Prize winner. Unfortunately, the book lends credence to the clichés that plague modern poets and the institutions that foster them: wine-fueled workshops are held by candlelight, and Roman's fantasies about his talented, beautiful, and aloof workshop professor lead to a student-teacher affair. Roman's eventual success brings out his resentment of the academy and its favoritism and politics, but this is a work of fiction, and the championing of creative writing programs should not be its cause. In Chang's hands, the world of poetry is a cliché; instead of a novel, she delivers a case study of the modern poet with little bearing in reality and characters as one-dimensional as the premise. While the language is well crafted, readers may be disappointed by the lack of quality storytelling.

August 1, 2010

At the heart of this novel are a famous writing school and its director, Miranda Sturgis, whose students include the gifted young poets Roman and Bernard. Roman achieves early success, winning a major prize, while Bernard toils for many years to perfect a single poem. Roman had an affair with Miranda while a student but married classmate Lucy. When the affair is discovered years later, Roman's marriage and his friendship with Bernard are both destroyed, and he starts to question the cost of his success and how much of it he earned. Other topics include the relationship between student and professor; the professor's struggle to suffer mediocre students, giving up valuable creative time to mentor them; and the large question of whether teaching writing entails the dissemination of craft or the nurturing of innately gifted writers. The first woman and first Asian American to be director of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Chang (Inheritance) writes from personal history. Her characters are three-dimensional and not predictable, and with her simple, elegant style she achieves a clarity that few writers accomplish. VERDICT This novel will have strong appeal to those interested in academia in general and writing in particular. Chang is an author worth reading now--and watching in the future.--Lisa Rohrbaugh, National Coll. Lib., Youngstown, OH

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2010
Chang is director of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and here she weds her professional knowledge of writing-seminar dynamics to her lucent style, producing a stunning novel that more than fulfills the promise of her early work (Hunger, 1998; Inheritance, 2004). Miranda Sturgis is an exceptional poet, and though her critiques can be ruthless, graduate students at the renowned writing school where she teaches fight to gain admission to her seminars. She proves to be a tantalizing and enigmatic figure to her students, especially Bernard Blithe, one of the most serious poets in the class, and Roman Morris, who fairly burns with ambition. Chang shows the two men, one who regards poetry as an avocation, the other as a means to an end, to be essentially similar in one devastating way: their intense loneliness, which comes from sacrificing all personal relationships for the sake of work. Among the many threads Chang elegantly pursuesthe fraught relationships between mentors and students, the value of poetry, the price of ambitionit is her indelible portrait of the loneliness of artistic endeavor that will haunt readers the most in this exquisitely written novel about the poets lot.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)