PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAt times, Meyer’s dense prose and cataloging of bodily excretions — blood, phlegm, tears, urine and feces — tip into excess, and the book’s ending gestures toward a ditch-the-patriarchy resolution in a heavy-handed and arguably anachronistic way. But these are small disappointments in a novel whose protagonist I grew to love and whose concerns I found hard to shake in relation to both her times and our own.
Niall Williams
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewWilliams has painted a lush, wandering portrait of Faha, a village back in time in County Clare, Ireland ... At times, the novel reads almost like an ethnographic study of a village on the cusp of change, calling to mind John Berger’s wonderful fictional trilogy Into Their Labors ... As 21st-century readers, we are invited to lower ourselves into a slower kind of time; we regularly leave the central characters frozen in mid-speech to take a peek at something else ... Where the book’s digressions sometimes bog down are in its more self-reflective moments: Noe the storyteller defending himself against charges (but whose?) of sentimentality and holding forth on the relationship between story and truth, the real and the imagined, and the enriching merits of the arts. Disarmingly, Noe is aware of his own flaws, telling us he was nicknamed \'Know-All\' as a child. \'Oh, just shut up and take me back to Faha,\' I wanted to interject at times. But I couldn’t and wouldn’t; he’s too sweet a fellow, not to mention my elder (and a fictional character). Be kind, he admonishes the reader directly at one point, and it’s a testament to this bighearted novel that I felt duly chastened, almost like a member of the clan.
Peter Orner
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThere’s a beautiful drifting quality to Maggie Brown & Others, a sense of being invited inside a roving, kaleidoscopic mind — reluctant to generalize, tender, astute, with an eye for both comedy and heartache — and adopting its rhythms as your own ... If Orner is bold in his embrace of unconventional narrative structures and organizing principles, his work is also without pretense, powerfully aware of how difficult it is to capture experience on the page ... At times, some of the stories start to feel gloomily repetitive, rehashing failed marriages or love affairs. More interesting is the way Orner captures the power of flickering encounters that don’t count as major milestones but persist in memory for what they have unleashed: a violent urge, a sharp regret, a renewed estrangement from or connection to the self ... Perhaps the collection’s most powerful section is its final one, a wonderfully granular, funny yet also moving novella-in-stories ... Peter Orner is a wonderful guide, training our gaze from window to window, where we find reflections of ourselves even as we glimpse the inscrutable, captivating lives on the other side of the glass.
Maggie O'Farrell
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe result, though not without its fault lines, is marvelous, a contemporary and highly readable experiment whose ambitious structure both enacts and illuminates its central concern: what links and separates our 21st-century selves as we love, betray, blunder and soldier on (and back) through time ... Some jumps didn’t entirely convince me. O’Farrell generally does an admirable job portraying people of different ages, genders, backgrounds and sensibilities from both sides of the Atlantic, but sometimes her supporting characters take up too much space or don’t feel sufficiently grounded in their own particularities ... O’Farrell lands us powerfully inside these charged meeting points, only to shatter them — and land, and shatter, and land again.
