RaveThe Washington PostA work of autofiction, one that disparages the genre while indulging in its most egocentric tendencies ad nauseam. It is hilarious, depressing, tedious, refreshingly mean-spirited and often brilliant ... Tottenham cuts the figure of an erudite and rakish stand-up comic, wielding his expansive vocabulary as much to goad as to gloat ... A strong entry in the canon of antisocial fiction, Service is also a sincere meditation on the self-destructive urge behind the act of writing.
RaveThe NationA sentimental education for [Hoberman\'s] generation of cultural observers as much as a meticulous history of a time and place in which some believed that art could change the world ... A serious effort of research, reporting, and criticism written with the enthusiasm of a fan, Everything Is Now feels like the culmination of a life’s work, the New York book that Hoberman was born to write ... Hoberman’s intervention is to center the role of film in this moment without downplaying or overstating the influence of concurrent innovations in adjacent media; he accomplishes this by means of a geographical specificity that elucidates the ease with which like-minded people were simply hanging out ... The gossip is juicy and the details are rich ... A testament to the depth of Hoberman’s documentation, a gift to the freaks who thought they’d heard it all before, even if they may struggle to follow the onslaught of proper nouns as one paragraph moves to the next ... The availability of extensive archival material from the alternative press—The Village Voice, the East Village Other, and Rat—in contrast with contemporaneous reports from The New York Times affords Everything Is Now the conversational quality of an oral history, substantiating the magnitude of the downtown renaissance with an authoritative intimacy.
Michel Houellebecq, Trans. by Shaun Whiteside
PanThe BafflerThis used to be called \'existentialism,\' and later, \'emo,\' but at the end of the twenty-first century’s second decade it reads more like cringe. The morose sexual fantasies of a wealthy, middle-aged white man, Houellebecq’s literary specialty, are a hard sell in a post-#MeToo literary market ... finishing in signature style, without resolution, Houellebecq invites his audience to stare with him down the precipice of the unknown, to ask ourselves what is funny, what is not, what it is that we despise, and what that says about ourselves. Were his words uttered in the context of politics or public life, where people were once expected to pretend, at least, to believe what they say, it is unclear whether Houellebecq would be able to continue selling the number of books that he does ... Houellebecq wants us to laugh, but as the contempt he glorifies proliferates beyond the pages of his novels and the borders of France, it becomes easier to conclude, in the words of another European troll past his prime, that joke isn’t funny anymore.
