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Recent Reviews
Jenny Offill
Positive The Baffler The novel’s pacing sometimes teases us into concluding it plotless, and Offill threatens to relegate Lizzie to stock-character status—a figurine in some toy rendition of the white liberal world we expect to see portrayed in a particular strain of contemporary fiction. But she complicates this reading of Lizzie with her longstanding, subterranean commentary on womanhood and mothering ... the dance of Offill’s language is also on display ... Lizzie’s constant care-taking offers not only a subtle critique of gendered labor; it is also a crucial component of Weather’s narrative momentum ... The new novel’s paragraphs, too, are short and pithy—what seem at first like aphoristic standalones constellate into some larger meaning. Reading Weather is a constant process of revelation: the \'point\' of any one vignette isn’t always clear, at least not until many pages later, when another paragraph provides some telling detail, winking back to the first ... Ultimately, though, Weather neither casts judgment nor parades as some grand call to action. It articulates instead collective anguish for a sick planet and situates this preemptive mourning within the larger matrix of systemic issues ... Indeed, Weather’s own lack of resolve serves to illuminate the importance of sitting with these emotions, suggesting that they might be confronted communally.
Sarah Moss
Positive The Nation Ghost Wall, then, channels some of the malignant ideologies that threaten to derail the contemporary world’s sociopolitical advances. Though Moss’s book isn’t explicitly a Brexit novel in the vein of Jonathon Coe’s Middle England, it does confront, through allegory, the noxious mix of surging populism and nativism that animates the island’s current crisis ... Ghost Wall’s parabolic approach is a refreshing departure from the fashionable impulse in fiction to relegate political events to the status of inert objects ... At times, the artful ingenuity with which Moss engages the questions of history and politics doesn’t lend itself to in-depth characterization ... Mostly, though, the novel yields a powerful and satisfying indictment of Bill and the harmful bigotry he’s come to represent.