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Recent Reviews
Samantha Hunt
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle Many of the narrators in novelist Samantha Hunt’s debut story collection, The Dark Dark, are unreliable. Whether they speak in the first person or the omniscient third, they are not to be trusted. Unreliable narrators are in fashion in contemporary fiction, but their use is especially fitting in Hunt’s stories … The stories are marked with superbly nuanced writing, a rich sense of visual detail and perhaps a kind of courage on the part of the author, as she dares blending fantasy with naturalism. Her characters struggle in small spaces, but we are fully convinced that while the outside world may be swirling in chaos, what happens in those small rooms and dark houses, and the people who live in them, is far more threatening.
Alan Hollinghurst
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle The story may focus on the uneasy coexistence among different classes and races in the middle of the Thatcher era in England, but the times themselves are the central character. On the surface – and, make no mistake, the significance of surface is more than superficial here – the setting seems obvious and apt … The world of the upper classes is unsafely sheltered within a bubble of self-delusion, and the greatest self-delusion of all is that somehow their rank and privilege will protect them, not just from AIDS but also from the social, political and moral decay that their studied class indifference has wrought.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle The issue of what is true and what is fiction is personified by an old woman Alex, his grandfather and Jonathan find in a house packed with labeled storage boxes. Could she be Augustine? At first, we think she is, but as she tells the story of the Nazi invasion of the village in 1942, her identity becomes more elusive. Here and elsewhere, Foer intentionally muddies the water … Everything Is Illuminated is often brilliant, occasionally a bit arty for its own good and sometimes a challenge. But there are extraordinary payoffs at the end of the book that make it all more than worthwhile. The eventual fate of the people of Trachimbrod, and the surprising revelation of Alex's family history and its complicity in the Nazi persecution of the Jews, are nothing less than shattering.
Ian McEwan
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle We generally think of accidents as events we cannot control, but is an event accidental if it occurs because we fail to control it? … Accidents and unanticipated occurrences happen to the Tallis family in tragic-comic proportions … McEwan courageously employs a ‘gotcha’ ending in Atonement...the device works beautifully because it comes directly and credibly from the novel's constructed reality … In this great exploration of accident versus moral choice, there are surely no accidental word choices. McEwan's writing is lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense.
David Searcy
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle Each of these topics and so many more beget dazzling asides that, of course, turn out to be integral to Searcy’s apparent topic ... And that’s the point, really — what makes Searcy such a master storyteller is that he is a master observer, sharing his vision through essays that read like exquisitely crafted short stories.