RaveThe Boston GlobeRather than convince the reader of a character’s particularities via an exhaustive inventory of details and memories, Dermansky is a master of that slippery thing we might call voice. She conjures rather than describes. Instead of turning the lens of the novel on Allison, she embeds us in Allison’s consciousness until the shape of Allison’s thoughts becomes our own. In this way, Dermansky creates an experience in fiction that is powerfully and unnervingly realistic. How often do I ask myself how I am feeling, what I am thinking, or what I remember that is the key to my buried trauma? ... Allison either wants or does not want, there is no in between. But the span of time between Allison wanting and Allison doing is short. She is a character who does not know what she will want tomorrow or even five minutes from now, but once she knows, she acts. The result is a narrative that lives in a precise kind of now, that feels like the active unfolding of a consciousness. In this way, Dermansky achieves what it really feels like to be a person rather than its literary simulation ... What makes this book so funny? One answer is simple pleasure and delight, as in the elements that make up this novel are almost universally delightful ... dialogue, of which Dermansky is one of my favorite living practitioners, calling to mind the sonic truth of Grace Paley and the delicious weirdness of George Saunders (Paley’s student) ... Dermansky packs a great deal of dramatic action into Hurricane Girl, without straining credulity or sliding into melodrama. She has a particular talent for wedging the mundane and/or logistic up against Big Events ... There is a sense that Allison is profoundly alienated from herself and in some ways uninterested in making her life into any kind of coherent story, which is a fascinating choice for the protagonist of a story to make ... Allison’s story is a powerful comedic indictment and investigation of the darkness of American millennial life, where literally nothing we were told to want is stable, not even a house, let alone a home. The book seems to ask the question: What is a life, a personality, a body, when none of the systems underpinning the things we were taught to want are working the way they should and everything is crumbling?
Mikita Brottman
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewMikita Brottman is one of today’s finest practitioners of nonfiction that explores the uncertain truths revealed when violence crashes into human life ... embarks on an urgent and worthy task. Dispatching with the titular murder, in which a man in Maryland with a schizophrenia diagnosis kills his wretchedly abusive parents, in the first few pages, Brottman offers a precise and rarely seen accounting of American hospitals for the criminally insane ... I wondered how well this claim would hold up to larger-scale reporting or if applied to cases of criminally insane patients who are not physically fit white cisgender men like Bechtold. Yet Brottman never asks this question. In a choice that bummed me out, she shoves her own smart, nuanced and questioning mind to the back seat in this work, giving the wheel over almost entirely to Bechtold’s perspective and judgment ... The result is an answer to an important inquiry that does not always feel journalistically rigorous or emotionally complex ... is most powerful when it shows the compounding injustice that results when the criminal mental health system is layered on top of mass incarceration ... Unfortunately, the book suffers from a similar lack of an engaged arbiter. Nonfiction writing is never objective, but so much of the pleasure of reading literary reportage for me comes from the space between the writer and her subjects, space that allows for the tension of empathy, disgust, distrust, projection, fellowship or hate to enter. I am not talking about clichés of journalistic “distance” but rather the differentiation of one way of seeing the world from another, and the ways that an author can subtly draw a story with integrity, a kind of line of best fit, through the chaotic scatterplot of thousands of human data points. In the absence of this centering vision, what is lost in Brottman’s Couple Found Slain is insight.
