MixedAV ClubRacism serves a critical function in all of Packer\'s stories, but at her best, she spies it from a distance that casts a watchful eye on the sad self-imposition underlying its fated reality ... Not much of a stylist, Packer pitches her stories against a uniformly stoic backdrop in which knife fights and molestation take on the same tenor as uneventful errand runs. Too much of Elsewhere feels belabored and stripped of personality, but the author\'s pronounced mistrust of resolution tempers her overbearing tendencies.
David Foster Wallace
RaveAV ClubMore self-aware than might be healthy, the tangled souls situated in eight new stories by David Foster Wallace tack through a series of actions that read like extrapolations on Edvard Munch\'s painting The Scream ... Oblivion\'s predominantly long stories burrow into the whole of consciousness with pitched-up purpose. At the core of the collection is \'that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once\' ... His sentences crackle and swoon, patiently peeling back layers of artifice that cloak the Big Questions ... As the stories stack up, however, the catalog of manic spasms and base behavior turns into a strange sort of love letter to human toil.
Monique Truong
RaveAV ClubWith dazzling sweep and a sturdy sense of purpose, first-time novelist Monique Truong eyes Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, through the shielded vision of their live-in cook in The Book Of Salt, a dreamily immersive novel that strains thoughts on food and language through a story about roots, faith, and the beguiling rewards of escape ... Truong winds a virtuosic path through the book\'s murky impasses, writing with a meditative hum that proves as wide-eyed as it is solemn. The same qualities carry through to her characterizations of Stein and Toklas, a couple whose codependence strikes Binh as endearing and absurd.
Zadie Smith
RaveA.V. Club...Smith is back in form with On Beauty, a boisterous novel about two warring families pitched on either side of the liberal-conservative divide. Cloistered around Wellington College (a would-be Harvard just outside Boston), the Belseys fall in line beneath Howard, a theory-clutching white professor with leftist leanings, and Kiki, his African-American wife ... The family's foil comes to town behind Monty Kipps, a visiting Trinidadian professor whose staunchly conservative views — on issues ranging from affirmative-action to the classical canons of academia — drive Howard up a wall ... Instances of infidelity and tin-eared arguments give On Beauty an occasional melodramatic air, but Smith's strengths as a storyteller shine as big events echo small tectonic identity shifts. In the end, On Beauty stands as a rich survey of people living through complex fates that their tidy ideas fail to account for.
Jhumpa Lahiri
RaveThe A.V. ClubThe Namesake is so soft and subtle that it feels barbaric to heap on the praise it deserves. Everything about it – the richly drawn characters, the intergenerational sweep of the story, the exquisite tweak of details – signals a talent grand enough to warrant blinking lights, though first-time novelist Jhumpa Lahiri seems better suited to a spotlight implied by shadows … A master of withholding and letting details do the work that only details can do, Lahiri crafts a wondrous world where allegiances to family, heritage, and self linger without serving as prime motivators.
