PanThe NationQuestions of wealth and class, Jewish identity, and family tensions are compellingly set up at the beginning but then fall away, or become muddled, by the end ... The novel becomes less interesting as the narration changes its focus ... Everything has been rehashed ad nauseam ... Stripped of any uncertainty, Long Island Compromise limps to its drawn-out close, but it really could have ended the moment that poor papa Fletcher was kidnapped.
Lauren Oyler
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewHer sense of humor is present, as is her agile thinking. But fans of blood sport won’t find much here to satisfy their baser appetites. Far from incendiary, the book is cleareyed and grounded ... Oyler is a sharp and confident critic, and some interpretations in the book are outstanding ... The book’s measuredness cuts both ways. While it likely demonstrates Oyler’s growth as a writer...it lacks the boldness of her novel and magazine writing. It is oddly safe ... Luckily, the execution is fresh enough to keep one reading. And the barbs, when they do come, are good.
Lorrie Moore
PositiveThe NationWitty and wounding relationship banter ... Remains enigmatic ... The novel is somewhat uncategorizable: It refuses, almost sidesteps, easy interpretation ... Maybe there is something to be said, in the layering of these two narratives, about continuing to live after devastation; about private and national mourning; about the lies inherent in any official account—but one is left wondering whether the narratives do, in fact, speak to each other at all or even whether they’re designed to. We are reading not only a ghost story but a story that is itself spectral ... One thing in the novel is constant: humor ... Ridiculous ... Tender ... But the humor drive persists throughout, though it is of a heartbroken variety. Even amid all the loss, at least we have bad jokes.
Elizabeth McKenzie
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe plot gallops along, leaning heavily on people going to the hospital ... The zaniness is occasionally exhausting ... If you can bear with it through these high jinks, the heart of the book concerns Penny’s parents ... This is the sweet, yet cautionary note the book ends on. The past is a sinkhole, it seems to say. It’ll swallow you, if you’re not careful, and your Land Cruiser, too.
George Saunders
PositiveThe AtlanticSaunders designs plots that force his characters to choose between their own well-being, dignity, and autonomy and those of another person ... It is perhaps unfair to assess Liberation Day in the context of its exemplary predecessors. It may not be Saunders’s best collection, but that is in part because the field is so crowded.
Michelle Tea
PositiveThe Nation... there’s a feeling of urgency throughout Knocking Myself Up. There’s an unfair pressure to make its story—and other stories about the choices of reproduction—universal, to explain things to those who insist on ignorance. There’s an imperative to try to persuade people (never mind that many are probably unpersuadable) of one’s humanity ... Although she’s not immune to some of the minor pitfalls of the genre, her writing is winning, companionable, and intimate; she has a talent for letting you know her ... One can imagine that this play-by-play would be a balm for someone going through the same process, especially a queer person who has not found much previous representation that isn’t heteronormative. For the general reader, though, while the first part of the story is dynamic, the IVF part becomes stagnant. There’s just not much tension or narrative juice in swallowing pills or in describing who gets shots where or in the question of whether the medical professionals who treat Tea will be brusque (sometimes yes, sometimes no). By necessity, IVF is a cyclical process that’s repeated until the implantation succeeds or the money runs out. So it’s predictable, but still unfortunate, that the book gets a little, well, repetitive ... a book about forging a life for oneself beyond addiction, and the story is told with humor and without pretension. But it also diverges from Tea’s earlier projects in its comparative lack of breadth. Formally, it adheres to the timeline of her attempts to get pregnant, followed by the pregnancy itself, making it less sprawling than her other books—and I wondered, in contrasting it with them, whether something has been lost in this laser focus. The Michelle Tea of the new book has it together...the book is smaller overall, and its stakes feel lower. One gets the sense that the Michelle Tea of Knocking Myself Up will be fine, regardless of the outcome of her pregnancy journey ... Yet something is gained, too, by the book’s confined scope. It gives Tea the space to go deeper, to think about why she wants something as conventional as motherhood after a lifetime of not just living unconventionally herself but of worshiping outsiders ... Does the book capture \'all of life,\' as Tea promises in its opening pages? I don’t think so, but then that’s an unrealistic expectation to place on anyone’s fertility story—and anyway, I think Tea had already come close in her previous work. She’d already located that universality in her stories about growing up poor and weird and in the many interesting things she has written about art. Does she speak for all of us? No—how could she? No one person does. But she speaks for herself, which is all you can do. You speak for yourself and hope the world opens its heart chakra.
Ottessa Moshfegh
RaveOprah Daily... hilarious, poignant, controlled, a little nihilistic, and often disgusting ... Moshfegh’s work resists being read as an allegory. The novel has the texture of a fable—the characters and scenarios are at times broadly drawn—but contains no lesson ... How historically accurate is any of it? It doesn’t matter. Lapvona is not trying to dazzle you with its verisimilitude. There’s no lavishing on of period-appropriate detail. For the most part, it’s blithely free of the attention to fabrics, furniture, custom, or quotidian life that usually characterize a historical work. There is a valet named Clod, a venal and brainless clergyman named Father Barnabas. Pious servants eat only cabbage. The pointless, unrelenting cruelty seems true to life at the time, but the way everyone talks has the zip of modern speech ... just enough anachronism here to amuse without irritating ... Still, your moment-to-moment enjoyment might depend on the strength of your stomach ... I wondered, as I always do with Moshfegh: Must it be this gross? ... The ending of Lapvona seems designed to shock. Perhaps it will if you’re unfamiliar with Moshfegh’s style or have not paid close attention to the lawless world she’s created in the novel. Either way, the ending is, without a doubt, the book’s most repulsive creation. If you’re like me (soft), you might long for a hint of redemption. You might long for some reassurance that people are not so base, so doomed. But then that’s what’s great about Moshfegh: She doesn’t care what we want.
Kaitlyn Tiffany
RaveBookforum... on the one hand, elegantly written, evidence-based, and rational, and on the other, off-kilter, animated by a profound and consuming, almost manic, loneliness. Tiffany’s fandom is not quite at the center of the book—which aims, by using One Direction fans as a case study, to show how internet fangirls have been misunderstood as a cultural force—but it’s enough of a presence to be persuasive ... Tiffany sets readers up to conclude that online fandoms are always microcosms: you could slice into One Direction fandom pretty much anywhere and see a complete cross section of life online. Any niche has its cranks and tricksters, its conspiracy theorists, its dilettantes, its day ones. They’re all here—fragile and wounded and seeking something semi-seriously—and Tiffany portrays them with sensitivity and humor. I have no choice but to stan.
Lillian Fishman
MixedThe New York TimesEve, the narrator of Lillian Fishman\'s Acts of Service, keeps an Eve Babitz quote taped to her wall that she and her roommate reference constantly: \'Any time I want, I can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life\'...In this novel, the \'dinner party\' is a threesome, between Eve—a New York City barista with a \'perfect body\'—and a soigné couple, Olivia and Nathan..The book is smart in its triangulations and tensions, and on the question of how a certain set of politically minded young people are supposed to live now...Unfortunately, despite the nod to Babitz, her mischievousness and humor are mostly absent in this book...The sex is loaded with gravitas...Rooms are portentously underlit.
Dawn Winter
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... knockout ... The prose, like Frances, is sprightly and dry. Crisp. Delivered with a shrug ... There are depths here; it is not all froth ... In the final third, Winter flinches from pure black comedy by redeeming Frances and revealing a traumatic past. She needn’t have bothered. Frances is funny and winning enough, precisely drawn enough, to carry the premise even without a complicated back story. You find yourself rooting for the drugging to go off without a hitch.
Melissa Chadburn
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt is a wild and ambitious conceit, but it succeeds because of the exuberance of the aswang’s voice and the richness of the details ... the women are vivid: their hair and jewelry and clothes, their preoccupations and mannerisms ... The horrors Alex in particular endures are lurid and hard to read. But the book is rescued by a joy evident in the writing, something ablaze at its core. It burns.
Jennifer Egan
PanThe NationMandala’s creations are perhaps outlandish, but they are only half satire. For Egan, they are also a way to explore the present quandaries of an Internet that doesn’t let anyone escape the past ... The Candy House’s narrative is a web of connections, and the threads between them are gossamer thin. Egan’s attention to each of her subjects’ motivations can seem glancing. The novel doesn’t probe in. The reader who neglects to revisit Goon Squad will find herself adrift in a sea of hazily remembered figures doing things that seem loaded with significance, but unable to recall the referents ... Egan’s prose is clean, though sentimental...but confusion abounds at the level of form ... It’s not clear what the experiment is trying to do. It’s a feint toward the problems of technology and their human costs without displaying full understanding of them ... The flashes of humanity are absent here, yet the work asks its readers to be moved by its baffling web of characters. It asks its readers to be wowed by the inventiveness, the virtuosity, of these connections. But we are not all connected in the way that The Candy House proposes ... Instead, the novel misses what does connect us. Birth, death, love, regret, suffering, family, courage, sex, humor, sickness, sensory pleasure, embarrassment, longing, and on and on. The Internet often helps us recognize those connections; in this way it’s neither good nor bad. But these kinds of mundane human connections are barely presented in The Candy House, and when they are, it is with not much depth.
Hanya Yanagihara
PanThe A.V. ClubHanya Yanagihara’s third novel, To Paradise, asks a lot of its readers ... In exchange, they will be rewarded with glimpses of tenderness, the familiar yearning for a paradise that doesn’t exist, and sumptuous descriptions of rich people’s dinner parties ... This book is just boring. Women exist mostly as sidekicks and surrogates. Life’s dramas—its marriage plots and childrearing and apocalypse rescues—are left to the men, the various reincarnated Davids and Charleses. But these reincarnations are not one-for-one. It never becomes clear whether the characters that share names are meant to be distant relatives or the same person ... the gimmick is too silly, too diffuse, for the book to succeed. The loving relationship between this Charles and that David, or that David and this other David, is subsumed by general confusion ... Each section ends with the refrain \'to paradise,\' an enormously corny conceit that undermines otherwise moving scenes. It’s a shame because the idea feels true, the yearning for some imaginary place, some antediluvian world. What’s almost lost in all the noise is that none of the characters ever make it there.
Jonathan Franzen
RaveThe A.V. ClubSorry to Franzen’s haters, but Crossroads is an excellent novel ... The details feel natural and unforced, as lived-in as the Hildebrandt home ... The women of the book are its most compelling characters...Likewise, a long section about the Navajo could have been an embarrassment, but mostly works as a critique of Russ, who sees them as exotic and noble, facilitators of his own salvation ... Franzen brings to this novel a refreshing simplicity. At times, he has shown himself to be over-enamored with the novel form; he has a tendency to connect all his disparate elements back to the whole, even at the expense of credulity. Novelists should strive for coherence, yes, and get mileage out of their inventions. But his novels, at their weakest, bend too much to coincidence, or worse, demonstrate an excessively orchestrated causality. You can see the seam ... the complete narrative might yet prove too neat. But in volume one anyway, Franzen has left behind such machinations. He has jettisoned, also, his impulse to explain how the world works...What remains is Franzen’s gift for interiority, his uncanny ability to take us into minds as fraught and depraved as our own ... This is why Franzen is always worth reading. He articulates the terror of exposure. The fear that people will see you for what you actually are. The flimsiness of the facade, the trembling doubt in every heart.
Natalie Zina Walschots
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... witty and inventive ... Walschots is penetrating ... The novel works well as a piece of office satire but loses its way in the last third as it refocuses on the undoing of Supercollider. Dragged down by long action sequences, and without a glimpse of the outer world — no panorama of civilian desperation, no Gotham on the verge — it becomes less a subversive take on power and more a straightforward comic book story ... Still, the pleasure of the novel is the slow rollout of the rules. Creating a universe involves inventing lots of little problems, and the solutions here don’t disappoint.
