On the last Sunday before Christmas the New York Times Book Review ran on its cover a review of a collection by the French writer Emmanuel Carrère which includes a story, reviewer Robert Gottlieb told us before the jump, about a man who “one day cracked open his sleeping wife’s head with a rolling pin, shot and killed their two children” and then drove “40 miles to his parents’ home and murdered them as well.”
Over in the Review section, an essay appeared in the last page entitled, “Is Anyone Happy Anymore?”
Not at the Book Review, I thought.
