RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewExceptional, hilarious ... It would be easy for the satire to become heavy-handed. But Sammartino is extraordinarily good at balancing the farcical nature of contemporary America with the complex humanity of his characters. He’s also a magnificent sentence writer, with a gift for pulling poetry out of an American vernacular that recalls the early work of George Saunders, and a sense of the beauty in shoddy landscapes ... While many novelists are struggling to figure out how best to address the state of the nation — centerless, ridiculous and terrifying, doomed yet trivial, dire yet unheroic — Sammartino seems to have cracked the code.
Adam Levin
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt’s a timely setup in this age of disasters beyond parody, and Levin homes in hilariously on the lame official response ... one of those sweeping, polyphonic, absurdist epic novels like they used to make, though to me Levin most closely resembles his fellow Chicagoan Stanley Elkin. Like Elkin, he has a boisterous yet mournful sensibility, nihilism backed with vaudeville shtick; like Elkin, he has a gift for the riff and the digression, the labyrinthine shaggy-dog joke that roves and ranges until you’ve almost forgotten the setup ... Unlike Elkin, Levin doesn’t always know when enough is enough. There is a strong Infinite Jest energy here, which, while often brilliant, can verge on a \'Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson doing cocaine together\' sort of vibe ... There’s no doubt that Levin’s a gifted wit and a master of repartee, but even with the finest comedians, at a certain point the orchestra starts playing and someone backstage is looking for the curtain hook ... Despite its occasionally exasperating self-indulgence, Mount Chicago has passages of real charm and brilliance ... In the closing sections, when Apter and Gladman finally meet, the author achieves a sustained, operatic balance of comedy, grief and despair that is worth the wait. It’s a genuinely breathtaking achievement and brought tears to my eyes. Those last hundred pages showed me the kind of novel this talented author is truly capable of.
Stephen Markley
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"But Markley clearly has more on his mind than a tightly wound plot... The novel churns with such ambitious social statements and insights that at times it feels like a kind of fiction/op-ed hybrid... Ohio would have been a better novel with less of this explication. The most moving parts of the book are those that step back and let the events and the actions speak for themselves, as when one character (the shy, bookish one from high school) recalls his three tours in Afghanistan. The beautifully precise details are all the more vivid for their lack of accompanying commentary ... The real core of this earnestly ambitious debut lies not in its sweeping statements but in its smaller moments, in its respectful and bighearted renderings of damaged and thwarted lives. It’s the human scale that most descriptively reveals the truth about the world we’re living in.\
