RaveThe Wall Street JournalA characteristically Malcolmian work, reflecting on and resisting the conventions of the form in which she writes. It is built around a series of photographs ... The approach feels deceptively simple, even obvious. But it cleverly allows her to avoid imposing a singular narrative on her life ... She contemplates the difficulties of memoir-writing, of making a narrative from uncertain recollections. In short, her story is—as always—the construction of the story. Malcolm’s trick is to undo the knots in a narrative by discussing them directly. The knots then become her subject, and they are inevitably interesting ... Malcolm was always present in her writing, but she remained a slightly mysterious presence. Part of the pleasure of this memoir is simply in getting to know her a little bit more ... The other part is in reading new sentences by Janet Malcolm. They land like the opening lines of classic novels—hard, shining, immovable truths.
Jennifer Egan
MixedThe Wall Street JournalBreathless ... Egan seems, oddly, not to have thought through the narrative potential of her own fictional creation ... Egan’s innovation does not yield innovative insights. Cool new things become possible at the cost of privacy, but we already know that technology operates this way. The novel’s moral complexity amounts, in other words, to a shrug ... Egan tries to jazz things up by offering narrative innovation instead.
Zadie Smith
RaveThe Wall Street JournalMs. Smith gives form to our experience of 2020 ... They are lean and powerful—the collection is less than 100 pages—like pencil sketches that capture a scene or a figure in a few brief masterly strokes. When we do look back on this period, these are among the essays we will turn to ... Even as she turns polemical, castigating the hypocrisy of \'blue hearts\' who read all-black books and \'educate\' themselves on black issues while also keeping black children out of their schools, her fictional powers shine ... These essays explore, wonder, argue and prod. The pleasure of reading them lies not in receiving experience in a finished mold, but in joining Ms. Smith as she takes our shared bewilderment and begins to pour.
Maggie O'Farrell
MixedThe Wall Street Journal... the idea that motivates Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel...is an awkward one. What father would memorialize his dead child as a depressed man who contemplates suicide and the murder of his uncle before being murdered himself? ... If one is able to overlook this central flaw, then the novel offers a moving portrait of a mother’s grief ... Ms. O’Farrell depicts her as a mishmash of Shakespearean heroines ... One is almost tempted to exclaim that she is the real poet—brooding and eccentric, steeped like Prospero in ancient magic, an observer and interpreter of human affairs. Shakespeare himself remains oddly flat ... Ms. O’Farrell’s prose is characteristically beautiful. Here, as in her memoir, she uses the continuous present tense to give the everyday the quality of a dream. But the close correspondence between her experience and that of her character inadvertently highlights the lack of correspondence between Shakespeare’s life and the events of the play. Despite much that is lovely, in the novel’s animating impulse—connecting Hamnet to Hamlet—it falls flat.
Elizabeth Tallent
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal[Tallent\'s] writing is beautiful and precise, full of flashing insights and bracing honesty ... Mantras about being willing to fail or the need to \'fail fast, fail often\' are vapid and trite—the stuff of unreflective Silicon Valley narcissism. But there is a latent theory here of art as failure, or even as Faulknerian splendid failure. Ms. Tallent managed to break her silence because she decided to \'live without the radiant book this one has failed, over and over, to be, the ravishing book now absolutely beyond reach, because it’s become this one instead.\'
Leslie Jamison
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMs. Jamison turns her careful, exacting gaze on herself. Here are essays on the strangeness and mystery of ordinary life—broken relationships, longing and loneliness, becoming a stepmother, giving birth. Her closing portrayal of pregnancy, set against her adolescent eating disorder, reads like a prayer and a love letter ... Ms. Jamison...[has] been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, but [she is] different enough from those figures...to make one a little suspicious of the comparison. Are those the only terms we have for making sense of female cultural critics? The better praise may be to say that [she is] expanding the pantheon.
Karen Olsson
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... the story of André and Simone Weil has the quality of a fairy tale—not the chirpy Disney kind but the Brothers Grimm kind. It’s disturbing and strange ... Ms. Olsson is enthralled. Drawing on the Weils’ writings and letters, she traces their intellectual tug of war as it played out against the backdrop of war-torn Europe. But this isn’t a biography in the traditional mold. Ms. Olsson, a journalist and novelist, layers in reflections on the history of mathematics and the nature of the unknown. The story builds with the poetry and precision of a theorem, shifting intermittently into memoir as her quest to understand the Weils recalls her own youthful obsession with math ... one longs for Ms. Olsson to pursue her intriguing theory a little further ... How does gender alter the equation of genius, the search for truth?
Jia Tolentino
RaveThe Wall Street JournalShe writes with incisiveness and moral urgency about the way online platforms confuse being politically active with merely seeming so through the endless self-presentations of images and tweets ... The pleasure of these essays lies in watching Ms. Tolentino grapple so rigorously and honestly with such fraught subjects—for instance, the history of gendered violence at the University of Virginia, her alma mater, and the disastrous Rolling Stone story about an alleged gang rape there. At times, it also lies in her ruthless wit.
Jonathan Bate
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... Shakespeare didn’t merely draw from certain sources; the ancients shaped the very cast of his mind. \'Shakespeare,\' writes Mr. Bate, \'had a classical intelligence.\' It’s a beautiful formulation, reminding readers of a kind of lost language, a way of thinking and a fluency with classical mythology and history that have lapsed in us. It’s also a clever formulation, allowing Shakespeare both more learning and less. It makes it possible for Mr. Bate to argue that the importance of Cicero to Shakespeare was not strictly dependent on his actually reading Cicero: \'this was an influence transmitted by osmosis as well as by education.\' That’s convenient, especially if one’s formal education ended at 13. Still, even as he leans toward less, Mr. Bate can’t resist giving Shakespeare more ... These readings grew out of a series of lectures and they retain the quality of the lecture hall in the best sense—slightly rambling, generally informal, frequently exquisite.
Janny Scott
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalA former national reporter for the New York Times, where she specialized in stories about housing and race, Ms. Scott is a keen observer of social forces and mores. The story she tells could be the plot of an Edith Wharton or Henry James novel. Her prose, too, has that Gilded Age feel: decadence, decay and drink waft gorgeously off the pages. Yet this study of privilege is also timely, prompting thoughts of the recent college-admissions scandal. Ms. Scott can’t have had that particular example in mind while she wrote, but she does gesture to our new gilded age of inequality and excess, of billionaires erecting mansions and fixing their children’s futures.
Amy Hempel
RaveThe Wall Street Journal\"Ms. Hempel’s prose is characteristically spare—some stories are no longer than a page—but in that care and precision, scintillating as the blade of knife ... This singing-to-danger is most apparent in the lyricism of \'A Full-Service Shelter,\' but in fact all the stories here are songs of sorts. When there is a shock, a crisis, a scene of horror, Ms. Hempel sings to it, and the result is an exquisite collection by a master of the genre.\
Larry Loftis
MixedThe Wall Street JournalLarry Loftis tells it again for a new generation, reweaving the usual account of her wartime activities into a kind of nonfiction thriller ... Mr. Loftis’s writing is frequently difficult to tolerate. He takes a story that is already dramatic and tries to make it more so with cheesy coats of romance and horror ... Fortunately, febrile prose can’t undercut the sheer power of Sansom’s story and of Sansom herself.
Hugh Ambrose
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalAmbrose’s story brings to the fore how much has changed for women in politics but also, more startlingly, how little ... as America approaches the centenary of women’s suffrage, Liberated Spirits offers an important, timely look at an era that is usually remembered for its speakeasies and flappers, rum runners and alcoholic writers. Behind all of that was the burgeoning politics of American women, determined to remake the country that had forgotten them.
Maggie O'Farrell
RaveThe Wall Street JournalIf this sounds morbid or melodramatic, let me assure you it is not. Ms. O’Farrell turns these moments over so brilliantly, uncovering in the particulars of each those shining, universal experiences, that they are a pleasure to read. And, indeed, difficult to stop reading ... There are echoes of Virginia Woolf not just in the rhythm of the prose but also in its dreamlike immediacy. The effect, ingeniously, is of a life told through the gaps, those near misses, on the eluding of which the rest of life hangs.
Isabel Allende
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewThe story owes less to magical realism than to histrionic crime dramas … As the trio journeys upstate, the novel flashes back through each character’s past...They plead with the reader to have sympathy for Latino immigrants, which is a fine humanitarian agenda. But heaps of suffering and misfortune cannot give depth to thin characters … Allende is clearly eager to weigh in on the political moment. But the story is too shallow and the writing too syrupy to make for a thoughtful treatment of the subject.
Rebecca Traister
PositiveThe New RepublicDespite the frustrations and inequities it describes, Traister’s book is laced with the excitement of a nation that is finally, fully waking up—undoing the shackles of oppressive customs and ushering half the population into independence on a massive scale.
Maria Konnikova
PositiveThe New RepublicThe scams Konnikova recounts cheat lonely young women and esteemed academics alike. No one is really safe, because the con is less about who you are than where you are at a certain time in your life ... Konnikova’s book promises to make life just a little bit harder for con artists everywhere.
Gloria Steinem
PositiveThe New RepublicSteinem’s memoir is a hymn to process, to the characters, moments, and insights of the journey.
Larissa MacFarquhar
RaveThe New Republic“MacFarquhar’s narrative alternates beautifully between profiles of individual do-gooders and this history of ideas that undermine their work. She returns us to the age-old questions about how to live, not by thinking in philosophical abstractions or hypothetical scenarios but through the lived experience of real people—their psychology, influences, relationships, triumphs, and shortcomings: the messy place where ethics actually lives”
