RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWere Whitehead’s only aim to shine an unforgiving light on a redacted chapter of racial terrorism in the American chronicle, that would be achievement enough. What he is doing in his new novel, as in its immediate predecessor, is more challenging than that ... offer[s] an epic account of America’s penchant for paying lip service to its original sin while failing to face its full horror and its undying legacy of recidivism ... feel[s] like a mission, and it’s an essential one ... [Whitehead] applies a master storyteller’s muscle not just to excavating a grievous past but to examining the process by which Americans undermine, distort, hide or “neatly erase” the stories he is driven to tell ... In this writer’s powerful reckoning, those who enable historical amnesia are accessories to the crimes against humanity whose erasure they facilitate ... even leaner than its predecessor and no less devastating ... While Whitehead doesn’t reprise the wholesale magic realism of his previous novel, he does pull off a brilliant sleight-of-hand that elevates the mere act of resurrecting Elwood’s buried story into at once a miracle and a tragedy ... A writer like Whitehead, who challenges the complacent assumption that we even fathom what happened in our past, has rarely seemed more essential.
Zadie Smith
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...On Beauty is that rare comic novel about the divisive cultural politics of the new century likely to amuse readers on the right as much as those on the left ... Here again, we have a baggy, garrulous account of two contrasting, haplessly interconnected families in an urban setting teeming with ethnic, racial and economic diversity ... Because Smith's antagonists are in their different ways outsiders of a sort in white America, even at an institution as ostentatiously all-embracing as Wellington, they allow us to view the wildly overplowed comic terrain of the university from a slightly askew angle ... However funny some of the couplings, the human costs of the betrayals pump blood into what might otherwise be an etiolated campus satire ... For all the petty politics, domestic battles and cheesy adulteries of On Beauty, she never loses her own serious moral compass or forsakes her pursuit of the transcendent. By not taking sides in the Belsey-versus-Kipps debate, she wants to lift us to the higher view not dreamt of in their philosophies. It's too late for burnt-out cases like Howard and Monty, who are both far too jaded and cynical to see past the culture wars to the beauty of culture itself.
Garth Risk Hallberg
MixedThe New York Times Sunday Book Review“The question of whether City on Fire is good does not lend itself to a glib answer. But no one can say it isn’t ambitious, and exceptionally so for a first novel. Hallberg devotes more than 900 pages to his own effort to recreate the face of an entire city in all its confounding complexity, complete with collagelike inserts replicating a coffee-stained manuscript by one character and the dense East Village zines of another. His talent is as conspicuous as the book’s heft.”
