RaveThe New York Times Book Review...furiously driven ...One of the main strands of Banks’s fiction has long been what you might call a working-class New England existentialism ... Foregone is in the same vein, only here the protagonist is an artist. And what Banks reveals of this artist’s life is a profound emptiness, seeded early on, which Fife has run from ever since ... As always, Banks’s prose has remarkable force to it ... The book’s real theme is the curse of being convinced that one is unlovable. And who among us hasn’t suffered that conviction to one degree or another?
John Updike
MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleThis is a book full of reunions — with old lovers, with high school classmates, with aging friends at country clubs; and full of men casting a wistful eye on girls and women who represent a vitality long gone … It can be infuriating and even a touch macabre to read about a man reliving with his classmates jokes that date to grade school. It's in these moments where one feels that, notwithstanding his nuance, Updike has nuzzled a bit too comfortably up against the soft underbelly of American sentimentality, a gauzy, untroubled retrospect that one could fairly say he himself helped to fashion, at least in its literary manifestation. And yet, in maddeningly circular fashion, this is also one his virtues: He risks sentiment.
Darryl Pinckney
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWithout a hint of sloganeering, Pinckney evokes in these scenes a melancholia that transcends his narrator, achieving something rare in fiction — an honestly-come-by sense of cultural and political sadness.
