RaveBookforum\"The book revolves around these competing obsessions—love, or rather, men, and her place in academia—even as it busies itself with keeping them at bay. She approaches each topic wielding a linguistic shiv ... Pond is, perhaps, a performance of the narrator’s dissertation: It is wholly invested in the business of coming apart, in the urge toward entropy ... Impurities, of a material or psychological sort, persist, the author reminds us, even if they have been swallowed by Walden’s crystal surface or hidden away in a rural haven. Bennett has found disarming clarity in making them horribly visible.\
