MixedBookforumShteyngart movingly contrasts Lenny’s efforts to fit into this diminished world with Eunice’s struggle for more thoughtfulness and authentic emotional connection. For all the broad comedy that will be familiar to Shteyngart’s fans, he nonetheless handles the ebbs and flows of the relationship with great subtlety ... Shteyngart’s political impulses have always felt halfhearted, as if dutifully honored so as to lend his shaggy, picaresque comedies a sharp edge of satire. The lampoonery in Super Sad True Love Story isn’t unconvincing so much as uninspired ... the more he writes about politics, the less he seems to say ... Shteyngart makes a compelling case that we lose that interiority—the very thing that gives us depth and richness—when we abandon literary culture...As an eloquent lament for this loss, this novel stands as both super sad and true. It is a shame Shteyngart decided this wasn’t enough.
Jonathan Miles
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewBecause the genre that Miles is aping applies fiction’s methods to real-life stories, Anatomy of a Miracle offers the Victor-Victoria frisson of watching a novel impersonate a work of journalism impersonating a novel. It’s a difficult balancing act that Miles for the most part pulls off, and his book is best appreciated as a highly entertaining literary performance. Of course, such faithful reproduction has inherent risks, which he doesn’t entirely escape ... 'Saturated with unrelentingly grim headlines,' goes one typical sentence, 'the summer of 2014 was proving ‘an anxious and depressing muddle,’ as The New Yorker’s George Packer characterized it.' A reader can admire the realism here — this is, indeed, just the sort of shoddy scaffolding that too often fills out such books — without wanting much more of it. Luckily, Miles’s writing has many compensatory virtues. One of them is broad humor ... Another is compassion. Miles specializes in giving fully rounded humanity to characters who might elsewhere be treated as stock figures ... Perhaps Miles’s strengths as a writer, his comic vision and his largeheartedness, make him unable to resist engineering a happy ending for Cameron and a neatly satisfying one for the rest of us. That’s his right, and plenty of readers will appreciate the impulse, but this one was disappointed to see such a copiously talented writer pulling his punch.
Adam Johnson
MixedThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewJohnson’s novel, far from being too labyrinthine, is an ingeniously plotted adventure that feels much shorter than its roughly 450 pages and offers the reader a tremendous amount of fun. This isn’t entirely a compliment. Should ‘fun’ really be the first word to describe a novel about one of the worst places on earth?... Ultimately, the one rule of art is that you’re permitted anything you can get away with. I raise the question of responsibility with respect to The Orphan Master’s Son because the book itself seems to raise it, and because Johnson’s prodigious talent and inventiveness aren’t enough to silence it. Johnson’s very sense of duty may have been what led him astray.
