RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThis is one queasy testament to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s talent: You cannot applaud his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, without getting blood on your hands. To enjoy the action is to share in the guilt of the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside at the live-broadcast death matches between prison inmates. Adjei-Brenyah is so good at writing fight scenes that our moral disgust never definitively stamps out the primitive thrill of reading them ... This is also why his book works. It is an act of protest, but it does not straightforwardly preach ... This book is not shy with its allegories ... Adjei-Brenyah...bends the lurid into the lyrical — pretty words about hideous deeds. Some of his best fight sentences sound as if Joe Rogan had fallen into a trance and assumed the diction and rhythms of Toni Morrison. If you recoil at that unholy fusion, that’s kind of the point; and the author keeps pulling off this shock, page after page. Adjei-Brenyah has a fine intuition, an almost spatial sense for what we need to see and what we don’t ... The novel is a thorough display of authorial control; Adjei-Brenyah only ever loses his handle on the pace and tone in a few meandering dialogues ... A writer who was up to the ideological but not the emotional task of such a novel might have settled for thinner characters. But Adjei-Brenyah, flitting from perspective to perspective in brisk chapters, assumes all of them easily and fills the characters’ inner lives to the brim, especially those of the incarcerated.
Ben Mezrich
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Mezrich house style is light on formal quotation: He employs omniscient third-person narratives, rotating chapter by chapter through a stable of characters ... Plotkin and Gill are pretty much the only two characters in this book who verifiably walk the earth. The other major voices appear to be either anonymized or composite characters, stand-ins for the WallStreetBets rabble, motivated alternately by vengeance, fun, desperation, boredom. All these characters can be ventriloquized whenever Mezrich needs to explain a concept in finance; they experience convenient revelations whenever the plot needs advancing ... It’s hard to tell what we are supposed to make of any of the facts we \'learn\' about him or any other figure in the saga, whether we can take them at face value or are better off soaking up the general ambience ... Where a Michael Lewis post-mortem might reflect months of close access and a love of granularity, and a Matt Levine newsletter might be sly and attuned to every absurdity, Mezrich’s piece of financial journalism aims at something different: It could not possibly be made any easier to read. These are 289 frictionless pages, rife with cinematic establishing shots and verbal summaries of memes. Sometimes, in fact, Mezrich’s estimation of his readers hurts my feelings...You get the sense that Mezrich has alarms going off anytime he wades too far into fact. I want to reach out and assure him that I can handle 10 sentences in a row without the word \'goddamn,\' that the facts are OK, and indeed enliven this book whenever they do shyly appear ... Don’t sweat the details. You’re gonna love the movie.
