PositiveBOMB\"Loaded down with sub-plot conspiracies, comedic monologues, and mock-histories of archery traditions from the Amazon to ancient Korea, with some bullshit about William Tell thrown in for good measure, Hark does not shoot straight. It buzzes and bobs until it crashes into its target, at which point, the reader might stop to think, maybe the story isn’t the point. Maybe... it’s a book about how language can build and dismantle reality ... You would think this POV toggle would balance the absurdity of the novel. Instead, it makes it all the more inescapable. Through normalization... the resulting diffusion feels a lot like dystopia, a lot like today ... Lipsyte’s language maintains a flexibility, a resilience, that feels quite necessary in a time of oversimplification and duplicity ... In Hark’s final pages, as the story takes on messianic velocity, Lipsyte turns somber. The laughter stops, and the novel becomes, if not profound, then at least elegiac—which is perhaps satire’s bullseye.\
Sarah Sentilles
RaveGuernicaA religious scholar, Sentilles deftly situates Miles’s souvenirs in the tradition of the relic, a tradition which is dependent on disintegration of the whole—be it the memorial whole or the physical ... A religious scholar, Sentilles deftly situates Miles’s souvenirs in the tradition of the relic, a tradition which is dependent on disintegration of the whole—be it the memorial whole or the physical ... The author’s enterprise is to reconstitute a body of human understanding from what is left behind, preserved, or found—be it a grainy record of torture, a bit of text, or a work of art ... The patchwork form of this book, in the vein of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, invigorates in its dissonance. The amount of white space on the page amplifies the effects of each passage, be they concussive or soothing.
