RaveBOMBThe result is a kind of postmortem on human intimacy, as Catherine Lacey examines, with clinical chill and precision, late-capitalism's perversions of love ... There's a lot going on in this book (Alzheimer's, Eastern spiritualism, cult religion, rape, and viral celebrity gossip populate backstories and subplots), but part of the sheer pleasure of The Answers is that its cultural influences reach high and low—Lacey is as fluent in feminist critiques of 8½ as she is in the most satisfying tropes of genre fiction ... Through the aperture of Mary's ennui, it would seem the 'late-capitalist, late-patriarchy' has already won. It's only when we break out of her point-of-view that The Answers turns wonderfully, nimbly subversive, gaining traction as a genuine satire with emotional and philosophical punch.
Elif Batuman
PositiveGuernica...an uproarious debut that funnels her same academic wit and intellectual earnestness into the overactive mind of Selin, a linguistics-obsessed Harvard freshman ... To truly appreciate the narrative urgency of Selin’s story, one needs to feel, like Batuman, that academic inquiry can be as compelling as a detective story ... Some will—and have—complained that The Idiot suffers from narrative stasis...readers might be forgiven for becoming impatient with the first hundred pages, which cycle through headlines torn from Selin’s internal reportage ... The Idiot provides a flawed but promising model for what the new American 'literature' might look like. While many readers and reviewers—not to mention most of Selin’s acquaintances—are bound to find her sexual inertia and exegetical wheel-spinning maddening, Batuman has succeeded in renovating the psychological novel and the coming-of-age story.
