RaveThe New York Review of Books... brilliantly funny ... Schine is...a novelist of sustained light wit and great formal economy. Her scenes in this new novel are especially lean and staccato, everything counting, the dialogue concise and convincingly absurd. She knows the importance, for any good comedy, of characters who are consciously funny as well as those who are unknowingly so ... At its snappiest, the talk in her novels is like a very well written sitcom, shaped in short scenes, with little narrative padding. The risk entailed in so brisk and hilarious a performance is that the characters may seem more the properties of an enormous predetermined joke than plausible human beings ... Schine explores the paradoxes of twinhood deftly ... Schine...runs \'ten years, twenty, maybe, thirty\' into the future, seeing her daughters grow old. The effect is beautiful, wistful, wry ... It also inevitably gives us a tantalizing sense of a good hundred pages or more of the story that Schine could have given us if she’d cared to. Readers may be unsure if this last-minute dash is a narrative coup or a gracefully handled cop-out. Either way, it is hard not to feel that the real life of the book lies not in its coda but in its sparkling exposition and development.
Edmund White
RaveThe GuardianIt is such a vital and engrossing book because White has evidently written in it precisely what he wanted to write. He has a luxuriantly observant memory, and his past is evoked with keen feeling as well as a pervasive self-deprecating wit ... If his homosexuality is the governing theme, the sexual impulse itself is the animating principle. The book turns on the illuminating paradox of homosexuality being a struggle, a source, at different times of his life, of \'terrible pain\', as well as the most irresistible natural compulsion ... No other writer of White\'s eminence has described his sexual life with such purposeful clarity. So unusual is it that one feels in writing about it a challenge to the norms of what one can say about the private life of a living writer ... His account of himself is clear, humorous, never coy. He knows that his \'painful honesty\' is the source of his humour. And we feel strongly, at the end of this remarkable book, that it is more than that: it is the source of everything, however artful and luscious, that he has ever written.
Alice Munro
PositiveThe GuardianMunro's tone can be bracingly dry. She has no time for those implausible feats of memory often enacted by fictional protagonists; she simply tells us, with unhesitating naturalness, about her characters' early lives, including many things which they themselves will later remember differently, if at all … The long range of Munro's stories is only made possible by her apparently effortless possession of decade beyond decade of the past, her technique being the opposite of so much information-bolstered fiction of the present: she knows that life in the past was unhampered by any sense of its future quaintness, so she doesn't explain. She gives us a past as unselfconscious as today … Munro has a genius for evoking the particular and peculiar atmosphere of relationships, their unspoken pressures and expectations.
