PositiveThe Chicago Review of Books... has a great voice. Propulsive and poetic, full of quick-hitting monosyllables, it pounds out a drumbeat of pure sound, amid which, if you focus, you can find plentiful deadpan insights into the consummate strangeness of contemporary Middle America ... Kwak’s novel also has a great character, the titular Ricky ... So—compelling voice, compelling character. But the two, together, also compel a question: why the two, together? The voice is Ricky’s. He narrates the entirety of the novel in the first person. Never, however, does there come an explanation for the flair and rhythm of his unabashedly writerly sentences. He is a reader, we learn, but not a verbal virtuoso in daily life, not a diarist or a rapper or a slam poet. Wrestlers play to the crowd, and at Ricky’s level they write their own lines. But how many wrestlers have the prose stylings of a millennial Denis Johnson? ... Kwak is clearly a student of Johnson, and of Barry Hannah, who gets an epigraph. He lives happily in the very particular niche that combines masculine, vulgar, lyrical, and funny-ha-ha/funny-strange. Perhaps due to his history as a writer of intense, compressed works of flash fiction, he seems less interested in the advice of Elmore Leonard—another aficionado of the dirty and bizarre American middle, but one who’d rather axe the lyricism ... If this is purposeful defiance of expectation on Kwak’s part, it would be consistent with his approach to narrative. Nothing you could call a plot really emerges. If anything, Go Home, Ricky!, as stubborn as Ricky himself, actively resists easy summary ... Ultimately, what Go Home, Ricky! cares about is precisely the nothingness that greets you when you’ve lost all sense of identity and purpose. For the reader, this means some scenes of absolutely no narrative importance or momentum ... offers an endearing and distinctive portrait of the Midwest ... Just at the moment when Jonathan Franzen has returned to his Midwestern roots, Kwak’s equally Midwestern book has presented itself as something like the opposite of a Franzen novel: a quick, wild, first-person narrative careening off on its own, looking at whiteness, marriage, parenthood, and religion very much from the outside in, with no nuclear family in sight. In the bargain, Kwak adds a feel for unique experiences of racial difference, unmapped idiosyncrasies of identification. And he knows his way around pure American (male) garbage, the scuzzy stuff most novelists would leave out, from bathroom hand jobs to wholesale appropriation of indigenous lands and culture. If he can resolve that question of voice and character, deepen the connection between sound and meaning, he may soar. Go Home, Ricky! finds him still on the ground, but off to a very solid start.
Madeleine Watts
PositiveFull StopWatts’s protagonist, the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of real-life explorer John Oxley, is fairly Hazzard-esque: introspective, stubborn, transgressive, and precise about language and history. And Watts looks to the future much as Hazzard did, with a sense of opportunity undercut by ill fate ... The Inland Sea has a profound ecological consciousness, grounded in an acute sense of place ... The Inland Sea doesn’t fail, as art or as argument. But it does read, at times, as if it’s aiming primarily for proof of concept, aiming just to show that Ghosh’s challenge can be met (and that a feminist consciousness helps a novelist meet it) ... The narrator brings the philosophizing on the inland sea to a perfectly satisfying conclusion ... The Inland Sea demonstrates both what realist fiction can offer, as we try harder to grapple with climate crisis, and what it can’t. You can’t shoehorn the melting icecaps into the quaver of a lover’s voice. But you can describe how hot it is in the bedroom even out of season, how hard it is to sleep ... Nonetheless, in its ambient, unsettling way, the novel also offers a more immediate imagining of the openness we can practice, if we care to, while we still have the chance.
Jess Row
MixedFull StopBeyond literary scholars and writers of fiction, its audience will surely be rather limited, subject to a kind of enclosure Row could perhaps do more to question. Within the enclosure, the book’s impact seems likely to be great, spreading and deepening over time. I got the sense, however, that some readers will not feel acknowledged or addressed, and that some will not be able to distinguish Row’s valid message from the unsavory aura of \'virtue signaling.\' Some may suspect that, in full view of a separate audience whose approval he seeks, he is essentially just urging other white writers to think more like him, write more like him, work harder to be as conscientious as he. This impression could be exacerbated by the general lack of examples of works of fiction by white writers ... His scruples are welcome, but ultimately they weigh his book down. You might be able to play, joke, or dance scrupulously, but it’s much harder to do so while insisting upon your own scrupulosity. Playful or pithy self-criticism, surely, even with the stakes so high, would ring truer than exhaustive, deadly-earnest self-criticism. He can’t quite shake the posture—characteristically white and male—of a self-seriousness that also feels like a desperate stab at maintaining control ... Row is better at diagnosing than at writing prescriptions, and others may have covered his most vital messages more succinctly, wittily, and cogently ... Still, Row’s dogged interrogation of whiteness from a position of whiteness, and his insistence that this work is uncomfortable but necessary, merit a broad and thoughtful readership.
Brice Matthieussent
MixedFull StopThe book under review here is an American translation of a French novel about a French translation of an American novel about an American translation of a French novel. If this all sounds confusing, that’s because it is. Abject bewilderment is surely in store, what’s more, for any reader hoping that the book’s confusions don’t extend past—or actively mess with—this basic recursive structure, which, like a set of nesting dolls, at least manages to be organized ... If straightforward realism (or understatement, or minimalism, or modesty, or crystalline aesthetic order) tends to be more your thing, Matthieussent’s demanding and self-indulgent concoction, many-layered and messy like a smashed mille-feuille, might be a bit much. Even readers drawn to experimental fiction and intrigued by the challenge of the strict Oulipian premise—a novel made up entirely of footnotes—might be disappointed to find that Matthieussent is not interested, after all, in pulling off that particular feat ... His metaphors and digressions, though entertaining, tend to muddle more than they reveal ... It is one of the unique triumphs and one of the limitations of Revenge of the Translator that it will be most richly experienced by those who can compare it to its French fraternal, not identical, twin ... It’s a credit to Ramadan that Revenge of the Translator, in its entirety, manages to feel like a necessary transgression.
Lisa Halliday
PositiveFull Stop...deftly textured ... Asymmetry is a remarkably well-modulated novel, drunkenly sober, whimsically somber ... What Halliday sustains more broadly is an exacting control ... It hardly needs saying that Halliday’s dissonant hum resonates right now, that we (who?) are presently, constantly asking troubling questions about the personal and political asymmetry — and continuity — of disparate lives.
