RaveThe Sydney Review of Books (AUS)Both [Didon\'s] sharp authority and cool intuition are abundantly displayed in this gathering of excellent previously uncollected odds and ends ... This brief survey of Didion’s career advances no particular thesis, but casually surpasses, in insight and intellect, many of the contemporary essayists who remain under her influence ... Didion’s perceptivity is not wielded selectively, in the service of elevating her status, rather her judgment is as rigorously applied to her self-examinations as it is to her examinations of others ... Didion, as a reporter recording both the event and her reaction to it, seems caught between insouciance and panic. It is this coolly ambivalent figure to whom so many find themselves attached, an exquisite prose stylist recounting the creeping, amorphous anxiety we recognise in ourselves with the pinpoint nonchalance we aspire to project ... Didion’s specific genius, once again on display in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, is that she orders her prose with such painstaking precision that one cannot help but glimpse the disorder roiling just beneath.
Ben Lerner
RaveThe Sydney Review of Books (AUS)The peculiarly uncomprehending nature of teenagehood is a model that suits The Topeka School, as does its partial setting in the Clinton years, a time that, in retrospect, has the shape of the wild, unknowing adolescence that presaged the defective maturity of the American present ... will be treated as a book of the moment, articulating the distinctive contemporary panic around authenticity, what it means to believe politicians and one another. Most of the responses to this novel will likely speak about its portrayal of toxic masculinity and account of the origins of current political language – the particular way it has become unmoored from truth ... what the novel does, through its concern for the present, is show that America has long been anxious about authenticity, and that these problems that seem particularly modern and distinctive are in fact spread wide across cultural and temporal planes, their symptoms and consequences ubiquitous ... By pointing outside the bounds of the novel, to other texts, other incidents, acknowledging a book the reader has encountered, Lerner elegantly conjures the residue of literary memory, a formal recognition of community, of the fact that the reader is a person in the world, his world ... Lerner is particularly skilled at writing about art ... in Lerner’s novel the poetic possibilities of speech and writing are exhilarating ... If you find that you are able to put aside your suspicions of a certain kind of contemporary literature as strategy, as self-reflexive performance, you will discover, in this novel, new ways of speaking that refer to old ways of being, existing high above the cities and in the tangled depths of your anxieties about what others think and what they see.
