MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksThe novel will not satisfy readers hoping for the McEwan version of cli-fi ... A distinct and disjunctive take on the climate change narrative ... For a novel self-consciously commenting on the need to invent a prose form appropriate to the climate crisis, What We Can Know spends a great deal of time focused on an obscure sonnet sequence ... [The] plot snakes wildly through the two sections, buffeted by the genre-switching and the constant turns to poetry, but still moving to a stimulating conclusion ... There are deeply moving and often lyrical portions of Vivien’s narrative.
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksDeeply troubling ... Oates’s reader must contend with pedophilia and its consequences for almost the entirety of this 649-page novel. For all that, Fox still deserves serious and widespread attention ... Important ... Themes of class mobility and class insecurity are integral to Oates’s novel ... The critique of gentrification and social status evident throughout the novel cannot provide a way out of a capitalist society structured in dominance. Much as the whodunit plot demands a firm sense of closure, so too does Fox insist on the stricture of social containment. Oates ends where she began: in the oligarchic spaces of an exclusive school dedicated to the maintenance of the status quo.
Adam Haslett
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksThe work of a superb craftsman at the top of his game ... Doesn’t completely succeed in this endeavor. Haslett’s representation of bourgeois family dynamics tends to subsume and limit his engagement with issues of social and political belonging ... But interpersonal connection has unpredictable and kinetic power in Mothers and Sons, and Haslett demonstrates repeatedly that Peter finds it hard to maintain the prophylactic detachment that informs both his legal practice and his sexual experience ... Haslett certainly recognizes this guilt and its effect on narrative, and, as Mothers and Sons demonstrates, he is still exploring different ways of diagnosing and representing it.
