PositiveThe MillionsOften reads like a pandemic novel, illuminating the personal and communal choices illness forces upon us ... That discovery doesn’t usher the sisters into some utopian state: Poppy’s hives persist undiagnosed, and Jules remains lethargic and under-employed into the very last page. But they do start to see the possibility of a life sustained by care, and not just in moments of crisis.
Leonard Cohen
MixedThe Forward... not light reading. In fact, it’s so physically and emotionally brutal that after finishing it, I had to put my copy away for a week. But it’s also an astonishingly deft and confident work of juvenilia that prefigures the themes that would propel Cohen to fame and preoccupy him throughout his life: passion and violence, sacredness and shame ... One of Cohen’s earliest works, the novel is raw and forceful in describing the slippery nature of desire. Few people go around breaking windows at will, but most have confronted impulses that contravene social norms or, worse, personal principle ... does stumble in its chauvinistic attitude towards its female characters ... Unburdened by their own motivations or desires and content to help the narrator through his existential crisis, all three read more like plot devices than fully realized characters. The narrator and the old man inflict extraordinary violence on all three, and because of Cohen’s lack of attention to them, it’s hard to excuse that as gritty storytelling or philosophical allegory. To a charitable reader, these three characters might testify to a kind of callousness common in young writers. To an uncharitable one, they demonstrate a fascination with the abuse of women ... Cohen’s narrator learns the bitter consequences of cruelty, but he never learns to see women as anything other than vehicles for his own self-expression.