RaveThe Globe and Mail (CAN)The absence of dialogue – everything is filtered, monologue-style, through the narrator – adds to a building feeling of claustrophobia and uncertainty ... While the story of the stranger who arrives in town and appears to upset the order of things is an old one, Bernstein’s novel feels entirely original; something ancient and unnervingly modern all at once.
Emma Donoghue
PositiveThe Toronto Star (CAN)Most of Haven revolves around the quietly enthralling details of the monks’ hard-won survival: the collecting of rainwater, the fashioning of ink and quills for the copying of holy texts that is to be their legacy, the building of a midden, the making of tallow for candles ... The novel’s subtle, vibrating tension lies in the lag with which Trian’s and Cormac’s feelings about Artt catch up to our own — right from the get-go we want to toss this sadistic, tyrannical know-it-all off a cliff ... Even as these frustrations inexorably build, it’s unclear where it’s all going until basically the end, when an incident catalytically forces resolution. It’s a spoiler, so suffice it to say will is involved. God’s? Perhaps. Emma Donoghue’s, definitely.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud
RaveToronto Star (CAN)Son of Elsewhere abounds in such perceptively written, funny-slash-poignant anecdotes...In another, Abdelmahmoud goes to Nashville on a kind of pilgrimage (he has a \'deep romance with the American South\' tied to his love of country music, in whose banjo he recognized, right away, the nostalgic strains of African guitar) and is picked up by a Sudanese Uber driver who, affirming a shared characteristic of Southerners and Sudanese, insists Abdelmahmoud stay with him...Abdelmahmoud amiably refuses and \'after the customary twenty-one rounds, he relented and wished me a good time\'...If Sudanese music’s heartbeat is the Nile, this book’s is Highway 401 — a comparison that might seem, at first blink, a tad strained, but Abdelmahmoud uses his outsider’s eyes and flair for description to lead us to the poetry...It’s all written in a breezy, easygoing tone, but don’t let that fool you: this is a thoughtful, often profound book.
Rachel Cusk
RaveToronto Star (CAN)Cusk, as always, is brilliant at the subtleties of human dynamics, which here are as ever-changing as the landscape against which they’re set ... There are the expected digressions — mostly compelling — on topics like art and freedom. There’s sly humour, too ... Though the novel is plotted, it mostly operates according to a sinister dream logic.
Emily St. John Mandel
PositiveThe Globe and Mail (CAN)The novel’s multiple, at times complex changes in locale, perspective and time are signalled and made smooth through corresponding stylistic shifts ... Other times, The Glass Hotel presents like an old-fashioned mystery novel, the mystery being how the phrase \'Why don’t you eat broken glass\' ended up on one of the hotel’s high glass walls around the time Vincent and Alkaitis first meet. (The horror this induces in staff and guests struck me as a bit old-fashioned. Aimed at no one in particular, the phrase is arguably more odd than menacing.) Narratively speaking, St. John Mandel is an effortless multitasker. Threads are dropped, picked up and relaced like a cat’s cradle, while the sprinkling of fantastical elements...mitigates the use of coincidence as plot strategy. It’s not always seamless. My attention wandered during a few detail-heavy stretches that felt a bit too explainingly faithful to the Madoff source material. I could not help feeling, too, that the peevish, victim-blaming Alkaitis who ends the novel, familiar from post-arrest Madoff interviews, did not quite jive with the more empathetic and reflective man we meet at the beginning. (In their inner voices, St. John Mandel’s characters can blend a bit.) Where the novel persistently shines is in its nuanced probing of the themes—guilt, complacency, loss, and theft—that serve as its ballast.
Kathryn Davis
PositiveThe Toronto Star (CA)Duplex has a series of recognizable events though calling the totality of them a plot is like saying that a lava lamp has a narrative arc ... Duplex has a sinister, end-of-days-ish feel though at one point Mary notes the failure of all prophecies foretelling such. Time has multi-dimensional, textural and even emotional qualities: it stretches like taffy or feels \'sad\' (though it still \'heals all\'). Paradoxes abound: the robots have the ability to see everything that has happened and ever will happen, yet they need humans \'to change things.\' There’s a nod to Lewis Carroll in the grey hares that suddenly start appearing everywhere; when people disappear, however, it’s down wormholes, not rabbit holes.
Meghan Daum
RaveThe Toronto Star (CAN)A brilliant and witty personal essayist, Daum injects the personal here too ... Daum is far from an all-out Peterson supporter, but her suggestion he has anything reasonable to say will make some dismiss her outright, thereby highlighting her nuance point, part of which is that it’s not necessary to buy into an ideology wholesale ... Daum’s taking-on of the excesses and hypocrisies of #MeToo, gaslighting, intersectionality, cancel culture and the commodification of feminism — nay, the very suggestion that such excesses and hypocrisies exist — will inevitably, wearyingly, rub some the wrong way, and they will say so, especially online, perhaps with an eyeroll GIF. Through my own decidedly Gen-X lens, The Problem with Everything never struck me as contrarian, but rather as a cri de coeur: a brave, necessary and, yes, nuanced, corrective.
Caleb Crain
RaveThe StarLike Venus rising from the foamy sea, Caleb Crain’s first novel, Necessary Errors, appears to have entered the world fully formed, wanting for nothing ... Much of the novel’s copious, rich humour is to be found in Crain’ finely tuned ear for dialect ... But the novel’s nostalgic, time-seizing sensibility, it’s thwarted-writer/narrator, all powerfully — and favourably — recall Proust; Crain luxuriates in detail and dialogue to the degree that we often seem to move forward more slowly than in real time. When Annie tells the group about the Thomas Mann stories she’s reading it’s a description that could well be applied here: \'I find I get quite lost in it. . . Nothing whatever happens for pages and pages, and one doesn’t mind somehow.\'
Caleb Crain
MixedThe Toronto Star (CAN)... the plot often feels secondary to Crain’s interest in friendship and group dynamics ... Despite the novel’s 21st-century concerns, Crain’s esthetic sensibility continues to feel more rooted in the 19th — even his name fits the bill ... His sentences have the unhurried, languid feel of early Henry James...Like James, Crain gestures elegantly at things instead of explaining them; he’s rarely ironic, or cutting. Few writers today are as meticulous on the line, or with their imagery ... But where in Necessary Errors those qualities felt like strengths, in Overthrow, they’re sometimes a detriment. There’s a lot to take in; so much so that halfway through this 400-ish-page book, its relentless accumulation of detail starts to feel like freight ... There are thriller-ish aspects to the digital-surveillance plot, but Crain never succumbs to them. I often wished he would. At times it feels as if he views momentum as somehow embarrassing: no sooner is it achieved than we go down another descriptive rabbit hole. (That the novel dabbles in some fairly dense web-based terminology doesn’t exactly broaden its appeal, either) ... A firmer editorial hand would have helped curb some of these flights of fancy. As it is, Overthrow is a novel easy to admire, but not always easy to enjoy.
Rachel Cusk
PositiveThe Globe and Mail (UK)Cusk is happy, in her new collection of previously published non-fiction writing, to fill entire paragraphs with colon-based sentences. This makes her writing feel a bit like gently crackling fireworks, or, when a point is made more forcefully, the toss and slam of a tennis serve ... n style and setting, Coventry’s longer personal essays – by far its starring attractions – have a surprising amount in common with the Outline novels, the difference being that Cusk is no longer a mute interlocutor, but an indelible, opinionated presence. That feels like a relief, frankly, as though Cusk has ripped the duct tape off her mouth after a self-induced hostage-taking ... there’s a downbeat seriousness to these pieces that isn’t always easy to take in large doses.
Emily Nussbaum
RaveThe StarNussbaum’s witty, whip-smart writing...has breathed new life into the art of criticism itself at a time when fan blogs and websites such as Rotten Tomatoes were starting to make critics seem redundant ... Nussbaum’s chatty, unpretentious style is a big part of her appeal. When she throws around terms like \'auteurist,\' it’s devoid of the snobbishness she’s made it her mandate to slay ... Equally enjoyable is her obvious thrill at the serendipity of her position amidst the embarrassment of riches that constitutes the contemporary TV landscape ... the book’s long, thoughtful essay on the #MeToo movement is a highlight. Nussbaum isn’t afraid to be transparent as she grapples with the fall of her erstwhile heroes ... I Like to Watch...indelibly captures the arc and spirit of TV’s thrilling, two-decades-long (and counting) coming-out party.
Miriam Toews
RaveThe StarTo read this intelligent, slow-burner of a novel, with its indelible characters and finely calibrated emotionality, is to realize how rarely women are shown, in novels or film, debating anything except relationships. The trope of female hysteria versus male rationality is also subverted: here, logic is the prime tool the women can wield against the men’s deepest animal urges ... Counterintuitive as it sounds to use a male intermediary in a book called Women Talking, as fictional strategy it’s brilliant, for reasons that slowly become apparent. In the same way science fiction can bring our earthly conflicts into sharper relief, the obscure specificity of its setting makes this novel’s uncanny relevance to the present moment ...even more profound. Mercifully leavened with Toews’ trademark wit, it’s her best, most ambitious novel to date.
Leanne Shapton
RaveThe Globe and Mail (CAN)... none of the thirty-plus entries in Guestbook, which proclaim themselves, through a subtle debossing on the book’s cover, to be \'ghost stories,\' is a ghost story in the typical sense, although many do reference ghosts or the uncanny ... Others present like riddles, juxtaposing words and images that challenge us to discover a through-line ... There are shades of W.G. Sebald and Edward Gorey in Guestbook’s randomness, sly humor, and reliance on crepuscular, black-and-white photos and artwork. As with the latter, Shapton revels in a kind of gothic inexplicability and ominousness. Her unanchored, fragmented texts, and the images that accompany them, tend to focus on banal lives in media res. There’s a gently voyeuristic element here, too: The rough amateurishness of its imagery can make Guestbook feel like a riffle through someone’s sock drawer (a lack of prurience stops me saying underwear). Mortality being a constant presence, the general mood is melancholic ... [a] mesmerizing book.
Edith Sheffer
RaveThe Globe and MailBy putting Hans Asperger’s career in Nazi Vienna under an unfavorable new lens, historian Edith Sheffer’s riveting and often devastating book, Asperger’s Children, may well accomplish what Asperger’s exile from the DSM failed to. Readers are likely to conclude that the stigma lies not with the diagnosis, but with its namesake ... Sheffer’s approach is dispassionate (necessarily, one feels), but the individual cases she describes are vivid, wrenching and make for difficult reading ... The question of complicity—a term much discussed lately, albeit for different reasons—is very much the subtext of Sheffer’s book. And it is her intelligent, measured exploration of its nuances that makes Asperger’s Children transcend the specificity of its subject matter.
Rachel Cusk
RaveThe Toronto StarFaye has a series of encounters with people who, dispensing with small talk, and even standard greetings, launch into unprompted monologues ... Why this approach, even on its third round, is never dull, contrived or pretentious has something to do with the characters and their soliloquys and a lot to do with Cusk’s thrilling intelligence and lightness of touch. Her work has been described as darkly serious, and it can be, but she’s also deviously funny ... A triumphant finish to an ambitious, unconventional trilogy cements Cusk’s position as one of today’s most original fiction writers. The charged delicacy of these books is underpinned by what is sure to be their durability as literature.
Lauren Groff
MixedThe Globe and MailAs with Fates, Groff often dips a toe into the uncanny. This yields her mixed results ... hat, presumably, is not the effect Groff was aiming for, but in the context of her often elegant but structurally conventional writing, what’s meant to unsettle can come off like a game of narrative dress-up ... Groff finds bitter humour in her character’s disillusionment, yet the built intimacy is undercut by a few shaky details ... Groff does a nice job paralleling her characters’ vulnerability in Florida itself: a place largely created by human hands shows signs of coming undone, paradoxically, through human-created climate change. Groff is at her best when transmitting this through simple gestures and phrases ... Those who like their fiction served with a side of optimism needn’t worry: Groff consistently skews hers toward redemption.
Carys Davies
RaveThe Toronto Star\"As Cy stumbles westward, oblivious to the futility of his quest, such is Davies’ command of her material that she makes of him not merely an object of comedy, or pity, but of empathy ... A multi-faceted gem of a book, West taps the spirit of the great quest novels of Twain, Melville, Cervantes, but with a gentle feminist twist and a fraction of the page count.\
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Ingvild Burkey
RaveThe Toronto StarLike its predecessor, Winter is divided into the season’s three months, each preceded with a letter to Knausgaard’s unborn daughter (January is addressed to \'my newborn daughter,\' as she was born prematurely). It’s a touching gesture, though one wonders what her reaction will be when she reads these books and discovers not Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, but rather mini-treatises on Q-tips, safety reflectors, spilled petrol and sexual desire ... The few winter-specific entries offer some lovely evocations of the snowbound Scandinavian landscape that will resonate with Knausgaard’s latitudinal neighbours. Even when discussing other subjects, though, the essays as a whole reflect the season’s mood of quiet introversion.
Ian McEwan
PositiveThe Toronto StarThe goofy riffing strongly suggests that McEwan is having the time of his authorial life. It’s great fun for us too. Fun enough that the sly injection, at novel’s end, of certified McEwanesque suspense takes us thrillingly unawares.
Amy Schumer
PositiveThe Toronto StarThe equation here is simple: If you love Schumer, then you’ll love her book, which extends and deepens our sense of her personality ... In the end, it’s her titular lower-back tattoo that provides the metaphor for her outlook on life: make mistakes fearlessly, and wear them with pride when you do.
Garrard Conley
PositiveThe Toronto Star...[a] thoughtful, well-written and unsensational memoir ... Boy Erased isn’t a smug tale of liberal awakening: Conley is frank and articulate about the sense of loss that has come with denying his religion and, as a consequence, the family he still loves.
