RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksBrinkley offers a consistent geographic setting — New York, mostly the Bronx and Brooklyn ... Brinkley codes the stories with telling details without overdetermining the imagined world around his characters ... Brinkley offers a number of these piercing moments — desire and expectation and misunderstanding shot through American fields of race, power, history, and gender. He renders it all with a humane imagination for what characters miss, what they mean to say, what they might have done ... Among A Lucky Man’s many wonderful accomplishments — the way the length of each story affords its characters room to move; the use of linear, progressive time to knit the individual stories into a social fabric, à la Alice Munro or Wideman — one in particular is genuinely path-clearing. Brinkley offers visions of manhood and masculinity that demonstrate candor without false intensity ... Brinkley’s stories offer the vivid mystery of life.
