RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksSmith tests what a \'pandemic novel\' and a \'pandemic author\' might be ... On the one hand, this is an author’s (and, I might add, an English professor’s) fantasy. It is a fantasy in which literary criticism is an essential business, where close reading intervenes in a moment of trauma as if the moment itself were a text that could be analyzed, a riddle that could be solved ... On the other hand, the scenario is a nightmare in which authors are asked to tell readers what a moment means when they don’t know themselves ... Companion Piece invites us to read Sand as a version of Smith herself. Like the narrator of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (2014–’18) or the eponymous heroine of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), Sand exists in the liminal space between autofiction and allegory, between the writer and The Writer ... Most of all, Smith loves to write about \'revelation[s] of artisan beauty.\' Unlike Francesco del Cossa’s frescoes in How to Be Both (2014) or Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture in Summer, however, the Boothby Lock is fictional. The ekphrasis with which the novel begins is entirely a work of Smith’s imagination — perhaps the key to Companion Piece ... With equal parts humility and wonder, Smith celebrates the ways that literature’s community has grown. At the same time, she queries how the vision might be more expansive still. Situating herself in history, she invites us to co-create a more inclusive world through language. In a word, Smith is a wordsmith.
Lauren Groff
RaveHarvard ReviewIts premise is simple: the life of a medieval nun, the story of a rebellious teenager’s transformation into a respected spiritual leader. However, this plot synopsis does not do justice to the whimsy, empathy, and urgency that saturate the novel’s pages ... Matrix takes historical specificity seriously but eschews historical realism ... With a sure hand, Groff shows us Marie’s abbey as a utopia ... What if a utopia like Marie’s had been allowed to flourish? Matrix makes us nostalgic for this past, one we never had ... here is a novel where Groff is at the height of her powers, writing with honesty and conviction about what it means to make a meaningful life. Matrix, which has already been longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction, is not to be missed.
