A writer friend recommended this short novel to me. I was skeptical, as I’m not a huge fan of novels about graduate school, and this story opens with our main character, Roman, in a poetry workshop taught by award-winning poet, Miranda.

But this is an extremely well-crafted story about the life of a talented man who happens to be a poet. You don’t have to love poetry or graduate school to be caught up in this world.

Roman is talented, but deeply flawed. This is not a novel that when you finish it, you wish it were twice as long. At least I didn’t. I couldn’t put it down ( I read the entire novel on a round trip flight from Chicago to Syracuse), but Roman was not a guy I wanted to go have a beer with. He was unbelievable in a very believable way.

By that I mean, I think many of us have encountered famous or semi-famous people, who have great talent, but maybe because of that talent they are so self-absorbed they destroy all the relationships that are important to them.

Highly recommended.


( )

This is a quiet throwback of a novel. Although it was published in 2010 and the story begins in 1986, it has the feel of something taking place a half century earlier. Although the main characters are very different, this reminded me of [Stoner], with its tight focus on one man's adulthood spent in academia.

Roman attends a prestigious MFA writing program in the midwest, where he attends a seminar led by a prominent poet, Miranda Sturgis. He doesn't participate in class and only turns in work before the final meeting. He's critical of Sturgis and her air of detachment as well as her often cutting remarks about his fellow students' work. Nonetheless, he shows up at her house late one night demanding more and to his surprise, she invites him in.

Later, his joy in winning a writing prize that leads to his getting a tenure-track teaching job is marred by discovering that she was on the selection committee. He marries, has a child, settles down to teach, but also to write, to produce something that will out-shine his one published collection in a way so decisive as to lay to rest his own insecurities, as well as taking him back into the limelight.

He dug a trench into the process and stayed inside of it, waist-deep, sweating out the individual monologues, piecing them together. From inside the trench, there was no way to think of anything else: not marriage, not fatherhood. There was only the strength of voice, of words.

This novel is a look at the life of a man whose insecurities and arrogance shaped his life. It looks at his marriage to a fellow MFA graduate, his long friendship with another member of that program and at his own blindness in seeing how his own behavior affects those around him. It's beautifully written, with a melancholic edge. ( )

There's a heavy-handedness I don't like here. The dumb serious title; the names of the main characters (Roman and Bernard); the fact that this is a story about a poetry workshop. I guess it's mainly the latter - a novel about a poetry workshop. Pocket pool. Insider trading. I'm not trying to say people shouldn't write about these things, I'm saying it didn't really work here. Not totally. These authorial choices never disappeared into the text for me.

That said, this is crisp. Chang's writing moves quickly and lightly over her story.

So far the Rumpus book club is pretty eh. ( )

I liked this bleak little novel very much. A slow start but it certainly packed a wallop. ( )

This book raises a lot of questions: Is it possible to love a book in spite of the total uselessness of the protagonist? Is it possible to be totally enchanted by a story that so closely follows a man you can't stand? Generally, I'd so no, but specifically, when it comes to All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, it turns out that both are entirely possible.

Other questions the book touches on remain unanswered. Like, can creative writing be taught? It's an interesting question on its own, but especially so when the novel in which it's being asked and unanswered is written by the current director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, widely considered to be the best graduate creative writing program in the country.

You'd think that as a current student of writing at the University of Iowa (yes, the same school of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, no I'm not in that program) I'd feel strongly that creative writing can be taught, but I don't. I also don't feel strongly that it *can't* be taught, and, if Chang's book is indicative of her feelings on the matter, she falls into a similar boat. I do think it's a good question and I do think this book navigates that question in an interesting, thought provoking way.

Like I said, the protagonist is a totally useless, aggravating, self-centered prick. I did not like him and I did not sympathize with him, but I did believe in him as a character. Though through the first two-thirds of this book he came off as a totally pompous ass, I appreciated eventually getting a glimpse into his insecurities and realizing that a lot of that bravado was in fact possibly false. It's true that it was slightly annoying to watch this guy fumble through life, totally unaware that he wasn't the only person in the world, but I appreciated the trust Chang put in her readers, that we could move past this, see that she was working to emphasize his flaws, and realize that he really was a well-rounded character - that in fact being a well-rounded character does not mean balancing great and terrible. In this case, the task she created for herself was balancing various shades of shitty. I think part of what made it so great was that it was in such contrast with the writing. Chang writes delicately and beautifully, and it was interesting to see this style used to portray someone who was so definitely neither delicate nor beautiful.

I loved everything about the writing of this book. It was sly, smart, and the pacing was perfect. One of the most difficult things for me as a writer is figuring out how to handle the passing of time. This book covers several decades, which can be a tricky thing to handle. When done poorly, it's jarring and takes you out of the book. Chang handled it perfectly, and in fact I believe the ways in which the passing of time distort our perceptions to be a central theme to this book. The first third of the book takes place during a specific period of time in the protagonist's life, and then follows him through his career. In the last few pages he's looking back at a snapshot of himself and his friends from the first period of time we followed him through, and he can't remember the names of most of the people. It was such a subtle and effective way to get across that feeling of letting go of things that were once so important, and getting some distance and perspective on the way time warps the mind. ( )