PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)...it is not the sophistication of artificial intelligence or neurofeedback that we need in order to gain insight into how Powers’s novels think and feel: all we require is a ctrl-f search ... \'Bewilderment\' (\'confusion arising from losing one’s way; mental confusion from inability to grasp or see one’s way through a maze or tangle of impressions or ideas\', according to the OED), along with its loose synonyms, is a useful word-key for unlocking Powers’s oeuvre ... The Overstory is the superior novel ... This is a tender and moving novel of multiple bewilderments ... While the subject matter is weighty, the narrative feels lighter on its feet than some of Powers’s previous novels, and it makes for compulsive reading ... There is a great deal of sentimentality in Bewilderment that comes close to mawkishness at times but achieves genuine poignancy at others. But sentimentality, or sentiment, can be its own kind of truth ... Yet, there is an overwhelming sense that the form of this novel is not always open to bewilderment itself. For all the \'wonderment,\' \'bafflement,\' \'puzzlement,\' \'amazement\' and \'fascination\' so frequently flagged, it is a slickly controlled affair ... The emotional gravity of Bewilderment is palpable on every page, in its poignant depictions of the knotty love between a father and son.
Ali Smith
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)All great stylists are idiosyncratic, and Smith is one of our greatest. Few writers today can make a more compelling claim to singularity of innovation and sustained brilliance. Antically digressive, linguistically dexterous, tonally playful, learned but unpretentious, everyday but lacking condescension, and fundamentally romantic, Smith somehow pulls off the feat of tracing the unique quiddity of her characters while always sounding like herself ... The main question Smith has faced is how to turn the immediate real world into art while staving off the threat of obsolescence. More intimately, such a project, with its method of rapid response, risks at the very least emphasizing (at worst exhausting) the aesthetic possibilities, or limitations, of a writer as distinctive as Smith ... The Seasonal novels in their weaker moments can start to feel like an echo chamber, much like one’s social media. But ultimately it will be their aesthetic value, and not their sentiment, that will determine their ethical and political affect ... Summer is a superb novel, the standout season, and it mostly dispels the uneven weather. A virtuoso individual, it is also a conscientious team player, at last bringing the narratives of the Seasonal novels – which have for the most part appeared to be stand-alone stories – together ... Summer deconstructs its own formula from within. The style and content work hard to keep each other honest; and the novel’s meaning and affect are in excess of its patterns ... Smith’s distinctive style is a profound gift precisely because it is a kind of love. At once tolerant and critical, generous and exacting, this novel is in its very form an implicit defence of otherness and difference ... we should be thankful.
Hilary Mantel
MixedLiterary Review (UK)Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the Light ... it is this novel’s closing sequence that forms the trilogy’s most stunning achievement, as the full force of the state machinery Thomas has engineered is brought to bear against him ... It is testament to Mantel’s powers that Cromwell, who, we are reminded, has killed (directly and indirectly) many innocent people, has become something of a sympathetic character ... Cromwell emerges like one of the spirits in the mystical visions he is prone to (accounts of which provide some of the novel’s most beautiful and haunting passages). This perhaps makes it all sound rather serious, which it is, but Mantel can be very funny too and a wry humour simmers throughout ... For all its virtues, though, The Mirror and the Light is a notably flawed novel, inferior to its predecessors ... At almost nine hundred pages, it labours under the weight of its material ... It is marred in places by a dependence on exposition (often masked, rather awkwardly, as interior monologue), and there is a feeling that things are happening simply because they can, rather than because they are essential. Here at last boredom begins to creep into the trilogy. That the novel largely eschews lyricism also contributes to the sense of fatigue ... What Mantel does with point of view across the series is a monument to the novel form and its crowning innovation, free indirect style. But the narrative perspective has become almost too close to Cromwell in this final instalment, and the effacement of the intervening authorial voice too complete ... Still...Mantel’s ability to make [Cromwell\'s] end as gripping and moving as anything in 21st-century literature is astounding. The Mirror and the Light is a commendable and imperfect novel that saves its best for last.
Nell Zink
PanThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... exudes the self-conscious ambition of the big American novel. The sweep is broad and the themes weighty, though Zink is really aspiring here to a conventional kind of ambitiousness, grappling with the eternal tensions of the public and private spheres in familiar ways. But form and content get awkwardly separated. The what (9/11, contemporary politics, climate change) overrides the how ... there’s something compromisingly straight-edge about the novel itself. The prose is well behaved, free from stylistic gusto and excess, so that it all feels uncharacteristically pedestrian. When Zink does go in for a flourishing riff it tends to be awkwardly arch and knowing ... this stop-start format risks killing momentum, thwarting the development of themes. This can be fatal for a novel that elevates ideas above form, and Doxology indeed lacks friction. Each time a segment ends, the building pressure is released as the narrative jumps from one plot point (and its attendant ideas) to the next ... Zink’s small parcels of narrative encourage contrived conclusions, tied up with one-liners that are either faux– profound or too pat ... For all its breadth, this is a novel in a hurry. Things that should be shown are told too quickly ... The very final section, on the other hand, which deals with Flora’s pregnancy and her baby’s contested paternity, is intensely personal and implicitly political. It is superbly done and here Nell Zink shows us how it all could have been. If only she had let those straight edges go a little wobbly.
