Rave[PANK]In short, the book [The Garbage Times] feels like another weirdly entertaining pit stop on the Sam Pink highway to nowhere, which makes the opening of White Ibis all the more jarring ... In earlier Pink books, the narrator has always felt more like a mouthpiece for his ideology than a fully fleshed protagonist, a faceless everyman whose sharp-tongued misanthropy is powerful enough to be relatable without any kind of relevant backstory. But relatability is not the same as intimacy. White Ibis offers character building on an unprecedented scale for Pink ... The first word that comes to mind is one that is rarely, if ever, employed when discussing Sam Pink: harmony. The same feeling permeates the final pages of White Ibis, showcasing a battle-toughened, confident writer at the top of his game, no longer shackled to the same cyclical narrative, and with no inclination as to where he’s headed next. It’s a sense of intriguing uncertainty that one imagines is as refreshing for Pink as it is for the reader.
