Positive4Columns... cannot be understood without its predecessor. Picking up immediately where the first book finished—sophomore year—there’s something surprising in such a direct sequel ... Even the most minute experience is worth chronicling if Batuman’s eye for absurdity can find some purchase. This commitment to real life; both praised and criticized in The Idiot, also had the beneficial side effect of suspense ... like life, anything could happen next, but this fidelity also left the reader in the lurch, abruptly breaking off a richly realized narrative. How, then, to continue? ... Unfortunately, it’s rare to have a second decades-old manuscript lying around. This leaves Batuman with the curiously historical task of how to recreate the same voice at an even greater remove. While Batuman is remarkable at conjuring experiences now solidly in \'lost time,\' the sharpness of Either/Or can seem slightly turned down, perhaps suffering from the unusual situation of there being another novel so similar—her own ... the pleasures of Either/Or, if taken on its terms, are considerable ... it’s a treat to hear Batuman’s thoughts about nearly any work of literature ... Selin’s second act might not be the advance one hoped for, but that was never promised in the first place. Batuman is still investigating how experience transforms, how that everyday shapelessness starts to feel like something inevitable. So far, no conclusion. But in the meantime—in the spirit of the aesthetic life—why not live inside the style?
Lauren Oyler
PanThe Nation... resolute in its indifference to do-gooding. What the author thinks the novel should be doing instead, however, is less clear. With formidable defenses of irony and sarcasm, the novel’s pugilistic voice is determined to never be caught off guard ... The finality of this arch cynicism is arresting, but perhaps a bit too easy ... not every book has to be an overt political statement, especially when we’re so often being sold something on the sly, but the degree of emphasis placed on this refusal seems overzealous, a poster’s hedge against being seen as too sincere ... There is risk in letting yourself be understood, and Oyler does not take this risk ... something like Rachel Cusk’s Outline novels if the narrator never listened to anyone else’s story. The solipsism is the joke, yes, but it still feels like an abandonment of something that might have made the novel more complex, or simply provided some relief ... Capturing the spirit of the Internet has become an obsession of recent literary fiction, with authors fearing their voices will be lost in the din and feeling the pressure of relevance hovering over them. Oyler’s novel does it more successfully than most, but somehow that success feels like failure at the same time, a novel so determined to anticipate its criticisms that it, in effect, outsmarts itself.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Trans. by Ottilie Mulzet
RaveThe Baffler... his latest, longest, strangest, and possibly greatest novel ... though it has its confrontations with despair and nihilism, Wenckheim is the funniest of Krasznahorkai’s novels ... Part of Krasznahorkai’s genius has been his ability to absorb the tectonic changes of politics and culture into his singular style: his challenge of despair is applicable under any economic system ... Krasznahorkai’s work remains a powerful and pessimistic challenge to all forms of received thought, particularly intellectual laziness and the vain overestimation of our own goodness ... Maybe it is actually quite difficult to imagine the end of the world when we’re bombarded with so many false images of it. Figuring out who will get their face bitten off by a zombie on next week’s The Walking Dead (now entering its tenth season) isn’t a representation of the end of the world: it’s a franchisable facsimile of the world we can’t understand and maybe never could. Krasznahorkai invites us to consider more deeply the disorder that’s always lurked inside.
