RaveThe Times Literary Supplement[The book] is interested in stories and how we tell them, and in how a life is almost always too complex to be reduced to a neat narrative framing ... A rich and satisfying portrait of the wider Doyle family ecosystem and a fascinating exploration of what it means to tell stories about our lives.
Emma Cline
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Primarily a novel of mood ... Alex isn’t vividly drawn, but that, we sense, is the point: her scrubbed biography might flatten her as a character but the depersonalization works to intensify the critique of the inescapable hollowness of American patriarchal capitalism.
David Nicholls
MixedThe Financial Times (UK)As with its two predecessors, Sweet Sorrow is an odd-couple romantic comedy, the story of a strong-willed artsy woman getting inexplicably entangled with a preening (One Day), prissy (Us), plodding (Sweet Sorrow) male philistine ... Frustratingly, though, the dramatic climax of the book is seriously underpowered and you can’t help feel that Nicholls has pulled the big punches. Which is not — as those who have read it will attest — something that can be said of One Day, which is much the best of the three books. But it is true of Us and unfortunately it’s this latter novel that Sweet Sorrow most closely resembles. Structurally, the books are uncomfortably similar and in both the use of a colourless first-person narrator allows Nicholls to get away with some fairly pedestrian prose and rope in, respectively, the grand masters and Shakespeare without ever really engaging with the work ... I can imagine how a success like One Day starts to exert its own powerful gravitational pull. It would be a great shame, though, if he were to spend the rest of his career writing in its shadow. It’s time now for him to move on from the rom-com, time now for Nicholls’ own reinvention.
David Abrams
MixedThe Telegraph (UK)Which of the characters is going to be reduced to this statistic drives the narrative of the book and Abrams is right to lampoon both this absurd obsession and also the army’s ham-fisted attempts to control the narrative during wartime ... Unfortunately, though, he has largely missed an opportunity to write a potentially great book about war and storytelling, and how one impacts on the other in our PR-controlled times ... while there’s no doubt Abrams has captured the patois of the base...too often this language infiltrates the narration and this, combined with an over-reliance on slapstick, makes the comedy too broad for comparisons to Catch-22 to stand up ... It’s actually when Abrams eschews the quick laugh, as he does in Gooding’s diary entries which, one suspects, are based on his own, that his writing is most elegant, and these passages are evidence that he might yet make a telling contribution to the story of that wretched war.
Javier Marias
RaveThe Telegraph (UK)Marías’s novel is also a riposte to the relentless pacing of genre fiction. For as well as paring down the form he has extended it, telescoping time in such a way that he can articulate the moral and ethical assumptions that inform our seemingly intuitive decisions ... Unsurprisingly, these almost Kundera-like mini-essays impact on the verisimilitude of the narrative, but this matters not for they are beautifully written, and impish in their moral ambiguity ... By contenting himself with a single death Marías is able to cut through the fat of the modern murder mystery so that we might see homicide for what it is: the worst of crimes but also something commonplace, a cliché.
Adelle Waldman
RaveThe Telegraph (UK)...enormously enjoyable ... Like the Hampstead novel, the Brooklyn novel looks to avoid the not-exactly-out-of-leftfield charge of navel-gazing by undercutting its earnest high-mindedness with gentle self-ironising. It’s an approach that serves Waldman well as she both celebrates and skewers the borough’s literati. Her elegant book is quiveringly attuned to the mores of our times ... ngagingly self-aware and pitiably self-involved, Nate is a triumphant creation in his own right, a perfect miniature of an intellectual culture that struggles to privately enact the ideology to which it publicly adheres. But he is also a perfect vehicle for Waldman to explore the women he dates, using his unsparing male gaze to see the ways in which they are complicit in the sociopathy of the New York dating scene ... Much has been made about Waldman’s ability to create a convincing male protagonist, but she should be celebrated, too, for her sympathetic portraits of all the sad, young literary women.
