RaveThe Stranger\"...the chapters concerning Peter Raban (in his mid-20s) and the letters he exchanged with his new wife, Monica...are written with the mastery one expects of... [Raban]: his impeccable historical scholarship, his erudition of all things nautical and geographical, and, most importantly, his command of the language. The sections concerning his stroke and time in the hospital...are unusually conversational. Indeed, while reading these chapters, I could see his ghost talking to me from across the dinner table on the third floor of his Queen Anne home.\
Charles D'Ambrosio
RaveThe StrangerWhen you come across writing that is not just good but brilliant, you have to wonder about the writer, about what goes on in their mind, what made them different from the rest of humanity—something they ate? The way they sleep? The dreams they have? Most us who write for a living cannot describe the lion-sized joy we feel when a piece of writing we have just completed contains two or three good passages. We have done our very best. What more do you want than that? And then you read an essay by Charles D\'Ambrosio and you realize how lame you are, how much more you could have done. It\'s not that he can write lots of great sentences, but that you honestly wonder if he is capable of writing a bad one.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
PanThe Seattle StrangerCoates, the celebrated essayist who is often compared to James Baldwin, clearly thought that, like Baldwin, he could write fiction as gripping as his nonfiction. He tried, he gave it a decade of his life, but he definitely failed ... pretty much a mess from beginning to end ... The main flaw with the novel The Water Dancer is Coates wrote it to sound and feel like a novel ... told with the deliberate gravity of a writer who believes he\'s writing a major work of fiction ...It\'s as if Coates did not want the reader to be uncertain about the status of the work. It\'s not an essay, nor a historical document; it\'s a serious American novel. Page after page, the language insists on this ... The only \'respite\' from this stiff, stilted, novelistic language is when Coates switches to his essayist mode and describes (in a monologue, of which there are too many in this book, or in exposition) an aspect of American slavery that clearly throws light on an aspect of the culture of our times ... I could feel my hand turning every one of its 400 or so pages ...
