As in Pink’s previous books, the characters in his latest brim with unflinching idiosyncrasies and experience muted epiphanies ... his distinctive candor is captivating, profound, and personal ... his stories have an effortless credence. The beauty of writing people from personal experience is that you’ll neither fetishize nor pity them. In his latest collection, Pink bares his all—teeth and heart—and it’s a sight to behold.
In Pink’s writing style, words cascade down the page as he creates a line break after every sentence. The ample white space means it’s never long before the reader is turning the page, creating a momentum often at odds with his story’s protagonists ... Pink’s writing captures the flared tempers, the petty grievances, and employee solidarity of the 9 to 5—but most of all he skillfully conveys the toil ... Pink’s writing is made increasingly palatable by the very same thing used to get through the tedium of the working day: humor. Each of these stories is buoyed by Pink’s off-kilter sensibility and comedic nonsequiters.
... Pink’s style: brief paragraphs, often mere sentences or fragments, descending in short order toward what might be an insight, a judgment, or a joke—or one of the phrases repeated like an incantation throughout a story ... In 'The Machine Operator'...Pink’s narrator is a noticer, a recorder, a performer of his observations in a world where little beyond the moment matters, conversation is mostly a matter of trading wisecracks and insults, and circumstances are beyond one’s control. Pink can make perfect little sentences...or poke fun at the tools of his craft ... He can be funny, faux-profound, loopily self-aware[.]
