PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleDaniel Handler’s novel All The Dirty Parts takes the blunt and constant presence of a male teen’s sexuality and considers it with utmost seriousness. The 17-year-old narrator of Handler’s book, Cole, eschews fleshing out a world for a world of flesh, and the resultant text reads like an object lesson in unbridled teen-on-teen horniness, in all of its joys and consequences … Handler’s book isn’t pornographic. There is the expected and regular onslaught of genitalia, but the book is made up of short fragments — things happen too quickly, and there are no great, immersive accumulations of experience designed to please the everyday reader of erotica … While All the Dirty Parts is the dirtiest of the six novels published under his own name, it’s largely by virtue of excision: What’s not dirty is left out. Here, life is the impediment.
Joshua Mohr
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleWhat’s good is that Mohr is too smart to show the journey of self as a simple before and after ... Mohr’s self-lacerating interiority is often at odds with reality. Others have a different perception of him, and Mohr is at his best when he shows an interplay between his reality and theirs ... Sirens gives a picture of Mohr’s life as a balancing act with real danger and consequences. In many ways the book feels incredibly alive. The prose moves fast. There’s nothing at all calcified or fossilized here, and Mohr makes himself likable and compelling and charming, with a real ear for fast-moving unsentimental language.
