Brownrigg Reviews
The Delivery Room The Morality Tale
by Sylvia Brownrigg
(Counterpoint, 2008)
It's quite fun to trump the Sunday New York Times Book Review; though their reputation has diminished over the years, it's still fun.
This Sunday's NYT Book Review carries a review of Sylvia Brownrigg's The Delivery Room. If you would like another perspective on this book, as well as her other recent book, Morality Tale, check out my review of it in the November issue of Open Letters.
Here's the opening paragraph of my review as a tease:
"A woman walks into her therapist's offce ... Woody Allen’s films have finished a variation of that set-up in a myriad of ways, nearly always involving self-deprecation or a slash at the shrink. Sylvia Brownrigg’s latest two novels give us two variants of her own … one straight-up woe, the other straight-up humor. In both cases, the therapists end up with a bruised eye. If you haven’t read Brownrigg’s previous novels - The Metaphysical Touch and Pages For You - you haven’t missed all that much. They were classic cases of a writer learning her trade with all the attendant missteps of over-writing, looonnggg passages of philosophy-laden emails, and titillating bi-sexual love affairs. However, with Delivery Room and Morality Tale, Brownrigg has proven that, like fine wine, she’s a writer that just needed a bit more time to mature."