RaveThe Washington Independent Review of Books\"An epitome of the serial-theft narrative ... Finkel has crafted The Art Thief with finesse and élan. He tells his tale of obsessive desires and ornate objects in measured and unadorned prose; employs a supple structure that separates the multiple threads of the tale while also exploring their weave; and advances the linear plot with narrative strategies that not only anticipate its foregone conclusion without giving it away, but also incorporate into the unfolding events his retrospective analyses of them ... The Art Thief, put differently, morphs from an entertaining caper story into a claustrophobic study in pathology, shifts in tone from spirited to creepy, and becomes, as a result, an absorbing but disquieting read.\
Blake Bailey
RaveWashington Independent Review of BooksAs dogged in his research into Roth’s life as he is adroit in his reading of Roth’s work, Bailey admirably negotiates the two—sorting the conundrums of life and art embedded in a literary corpus and strategy conceived and executed, in essence, to make them unsortable ... Bailey constructs an engaged and engaging intellectual biography, a portrait of the artist as young, middle-aged, and old man that does both Bailey’s subject and his readers justice ... While Bailey fleshes out Roth’s personal biography with abundant and well-documented details, he also keeps faith with his promise by covering events that sometimes seem uneventful. Roth may have transmuted his \'florid love life\' into art, for example, but its particulars, putting aside Roth’s history with Claire Bloom, are fairly humdrum. That quibble aside, Bailey’s demonstrable skill as a writer mitigates any limitations and amplifies all the strengths inherent in his subject. He offers a clean narrative arranged in six chronological phases and written in brisk and lucid prose ... a masterful work and a very rewarding read.
Edmund White
PositiveWashington Independent Review of BooksThese opinions — unabashedly opinionated opinions — are White’s stock in trade. They can be eccentric...or baffling ... Usually thoughtful, they always provoke thought ... White’s gimlet-eyed fix on writing style is a different matter ... White’s own celebrated style has such finesse that it routinely invests even commonplaces with elegance ... Whether explicit or implicit, everything here rests on White’s sexuality and is seen through it. Since this is a memoir, and not a treatise, White’s identity and experience remain the focus, but they also bristle with extension ... [he] closes The Unpunished Vice on a note neither facetious, facile, nor flip — on a promise made and kept.
