MixedVultureAt times the novel exhausts itself. It can seem a little like a machine that won’t power down even after it has started smoking ... The more time you spend with each character, the more delusional they seem to be, even as a sense of novelistic sympathy wells. Brodesser-Akner’s magpie style, layering a hum of worry with dialogue and voice-mails and scenes from mobile-phone games, has a singsongy appeal, but it can be difficult to sustain such a high-strung voice over nearly 500 pages.
Claire Messud
PositiveVultureIt is earnest, rigorous, and indebted to modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; you could call it a professor’s novel ... There are parts in the middle of This Strange Eventful History that read syrupy slow, and it’s impossible not to catch some of the characters’ weariness and sadness ... It can be very funny ... The idea that literature itself can offer absolution may be as quaint and passé these days as the Great American Novel, but Messud’s steady belief in it is intoxicating.
Tommy Orange
RaveVultureA centuries-spanning epic of a Native family that manages to feel profoundly intimate ... The new book stands on its own; reading it feels like focusing your eyes on one eventful corner of a massive tableau.
Catherine Lacey
MixedVulture\"The Southern Territory and X’s perilous escape are a way for Lacey — who grew up religious in Mississippi — to get at the question of what happens when someone who was raised to believe they live in a world with a god absconds from that world. For all the detail, though, parts of her alternate America feel underrealized...Surely a novel about a South that seceded in 1945 might lend more of its plot to Black communities, and surely the North at that time would have its own intense racism. But those ideas aren’t given much narrative priority here ... she begins a grand tour of 1960s and ’70s America and Europe, exercising a subtle influence over familiar cultural products like an artsy, self-actualized Forrest Gump...At times, it’s exhilarating, but the warped cultural history doesn’t consistently enhance the plot; at its worst, it feels like a distraction, and the point of it all can be hard to grasp ... The chapters in which C.M. makes a reporting trip to the Southern Territory are virtuosic ... But Lacey herself is brilliant. As in her earlier fiction, she is thinking deeply about what we give up to other people when we love them. Under all the narrative scaffolding, the moments in Biography of X that land most reliably have to do with long-suffering C.M., whose mourning — she is \'romanced by grief,\' she says — turns to horror as she unpeels her wife’s layers of secrecy and manipulation.\
