MixedThe New York Times Book Review... distinctive, stylish and maddening ... long sentences heavy with metaphors and dependent clauses ... nearly devoid of plot, and even seems hostile to it; Williams listlessly moves her characters about like game pieces on a board ... Williams’s prose is fantastically elaborate, presenting itself in long, bricklike blocks of text. At its best, it reads as Faulknerian, sinuous and formal. When well matched with what it describes, it is evocative, and takes on a historical, almost biblical weight...t other times — most times, I’d argue — it’s exhausting and obfuscatory, employing intricate and occasionally tortuous strings of words to express simple ideas ... It’s pretty, it parses, but we’ve been looking at the world it describes for 140 pages now, and don’t require this kind of painterly elaboration. We just want to know, for instance, how a man with no legs managed to drag a corpse several miles back to his moth-infested lair — a thing that is supposed to have happened in the back half of this novel and is never explained ... The book’s prose style doesn’t ebb and flow depending on what it’s describing or whose mind it occupies; it’s a top-down narratorial mandate. This becomes a problem when it’s used to channel the characters’ vile thoughts, which are the only kind of thoughts they entertain. They regard bodily fatness, for example, as grotesque, and repeatedly equate it with stupidity and selfishness. Dolores is, variously, a cow, a larva, a moon, a lump. Are these merely the characters’ views and words? Or the narrator’s, the book’s, the author’s? The unnuanced style and roving third person make it hard to tell, leaving the book’s moral center impossible to identify. (Lost, drowned, reduced to stray iceblink, even) ... is, in all likelihood, frustrating, wicked and obscure by design, and explicitly aims to ignite rage in any advocate of body positivity. And like other gross-out, plot-averse novels with malign intent — Ottessa Moshfegh’s spring to mind — it perpetually deflects all criticism of its shortcomings, sotto voce, in the voice of Pee-wee Herman: I meant to do that ... evokes Beckett’s plays, or, in its static depiction of misery, Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings. But Endgame and The Garden of Earthly Delights are funny and don’t take five hours to get through. Ultimately this book, for all its ambition, isn’t for me. But, who knows, it just might be what your rotten little heart deserves.
Rachel Cusk
PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)Second Place is unlike the [Outline] trilogy but reads very much like a reaction to it ... Although the book’s sparse plot derives largely from interpersonal drama, this is rendered almost entirely in summary, with only the occasional section of dialogue ... The book must have been all but complete before the outbreak of Covid-19; perhaps Cusk’s fictional disaster is prescient, or coincidental. But it’s not difficult to imagine her adding the handful of sentences that refer to this impending disaster as she attended to her page proofs ... Very little happens in Second Place, but the book is alive with movement, as the characters’ roles change and the context of even the most prosaic acts shifts dramatically ... Cusk’s characters are often displaced, alone with the wrong people, blind to (or excessively wedded to) customs and conventions, and lacking in self-knowledge. Second Place seems to me Cusk’s most sophisticated and mature distillation of these elements; it’s not a comedy, but it employs many small mordantly comic effects that function like a jeweller’s steel blade, cleaving faceted gems out of rough stone. It represents a new mode of organising the fragments of perspective that the trilogy exploded: a deannihilated novel, and a very good one.
Samanta Schweblin, trans. by Megan McDowell
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...[a] dark, quick, strangely joyful new novel ... I cannot describe the thrill that ran through me when I realized what the premise of this book was. Of course the idea is timely ... But what amazes me is how studiously Schweblin shuns this low-hanging fruit, pushing the book’s thematic content into the background and spotlighting instead the intensity and specificity of her characters’ inner lives. I cannot remember a book so efficient in establishing character and propelling narrative; there’s material for a hundred novels in these deft, rich 242 pages ... Each story unveils a new implication of the technology, new ways for human beings to love and hurt themselves and others ... The writing, ably translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is superb...the sentences snap like a flag in a gale, especially when deployed to evoke small, vivid details ... a slim volume as expansive and ambitious as an epic.
Kate Atkinson
RaveThe London Review of BooksMany writers practise literary trickery, or investigate the truism that things aren’t always what they seem, but a big part of Atkinson’s appeal comes from her unbridled delight in sleight of hand. Plot reversals, shifts in point of view, leaps in space and time; echoing and doubling, twists and fakeouts, MacGuffins and red herrings: all are deployed with gleeful energy ... It’s tempting to think of Atkinson as a writer of maximalist, conventionally satisfying, carefully plotted fiction that is innovative only in stretching the usual elements of psychological realism to their technical limits. But one of the most exciting things about her books is the way they renege on their own promises. Atkinson’s illusions are performed out in the open: you think you’ve mastered their complexities, but then the chaos of human relations takes over, and people defy their own natures, or the rules of their own stories ... Atkinson is good at presenting ordinariness as nothing more than the state that obtains before disaster occurs; every quotidian observation in Big Sky generates suspense ... The fact that at any given moment hardly anyone actually knows what’s going on is part of the pleasure of this rangy, loping thriller ... Atkinson tells you everything and still takes you by surprise.
Tana French
RaveThe Nation\"... extraordinary ... French is the rare maximalist crime writer who seems unsusceptible to... clichés ... The rest of the book gives us a dazzling series of twists and turns, betrayals and reconciliations, revelations and conflicts; French drops the pieces into place with masterful skill. Just when you think you’re a step ahead of her, she dashes your hopes with a stray observation or a devastating scrap of dialogue ... The Witch Elm offers us a brilliant take on this dreary truth, with the added bonus that justice is actually realized in the end—if only obliquely, unexpectedly, and not through the established channels ... one of Tana French’s best books, which makes it one of the best of its kind, period.\
Laura Van Den Berg
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"If Clare is obsessed with negation and absence, The Third Hotel is eager to abet her: The book enthusiastically (and, I presume, deliberately) derails itself again and again. Scenes begin with clear goals in mind, then are sidetracked; questions, pointedly asked, go unanswered ... What we get instead of narrative momentum is a richness of theme and an abundance of detail. Van den Berg’s previous work, her short stories in particular, are prized for their thoughtfulness and descriptive intensity, and this book seems to me a refinement and intensification of those skills ... The Third Hotel is at its best when it makes no claim to psychological realism. It is in its weirdest passages that a reader is most likely to accept, even embrace, these instances of arch self-consciousness; at these times the book is thrilling ... Don’t take the bait when The Third Hotel starts voguing like a thriller. Instead, read it as the inscrutable future cult classic it probably is, and let yourself be carried along by its twisting, unsettling currents.\
Denis Johnson
RaveThe Nation\'I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere,\' Fuckhead tells us in \'Car Crash,\' a line that also describes what we all desired most: not a sequel [to Jesus\' Son], exactly, but something with that same breezy, epiphanic quality, something both familiar and new, something unexpectedly expected. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is that book. But it isn’t a sequel, or derivative of any of Johnson’s earlier work. It is its own perfect thing, and Lord preserve me, I think I love it every bit as much as I love Jesus’ Son ... Characters act in Largesse with evident conviction, but they don’t understand why; others may or may not be who they say they are ... Johnson has always seemed to let his stories lead him where they want to go; in some of his less cohesive work, these wanderings can be fascinating but unsatisfying. Here, the extra layer of self-consciousness, far from complicating matters, brings them into sharper focus: Johnson’s seeking is the narrator’s seeking, is Miller’s, is Link’s, is ours.
Roddy Doyle
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewSmile sags a little bit in the middle, as Doyle chronicles Victor’s somewhat idealized relationship with Rachel. Though we know it’s destined to end, their romance is a shapely, familiar tale about a poor boy, an underdog, managing to land a beautiful, ambitious and moneyed girl; Doyle gives it a poignant, honeyed glow ... In Fitzpatrick, Doyle has created an extraordinarily creepy antagonist: a bully who plays dumb but always gets under the hero’s skin, a clumsy oaf who nevertheless can disappear like a cat into the darkness. Fitzpatrick’s physical presence is palpable and unsettling, uncanny even ... Smile is something of a departure for Doyle — it’s the closest thing he’s written to a psychological thriller — but it nevertheless showcases his well-loved facility for character and dialogue. His ear and eye are peerless ... The book’s ending, though, is anything but prosaic. It is shocking and disorienting, and literally made me gasp in horror. It does serve to justify and explain some of the roteness of the middle section; nevertheless it’s likely to divide readers.
Chad Harbach
MixedThe London Review of BooksChad Harbach’s highly entertaining, intermittently excellent, unapologetically masculine The Art of Fielding [is] a telephone directory of a novel about scrappy underdogs trying to win it all … The book is a throwback to a bygone, if not universally mourned era when charismatic white male novelists wrote intelligent bestsellers, and one senses that it is intentionally so … Harbach is a solid writer, inoffensively funny, pretty good at character, a prodigy at suspense. The book’s great success, though, is its charm: its eagerness to please, its casual, wholesome seductiveness. Despite predictability in the plot and lapses in the writing, it’s the charm that keeps one going … But it could have been better... Instead, Harbach is too much like the Henry of Chapter 1, ‘bland, almost bored, like … a virtuoso practising scales’.
J.D. Daniels
PositiveThe Guardian...a tightly written, often brilliant, occasionally exasperating collection of essays ... Daniels is a very good writer, and once it’s through with its twitchy throat-clearing, The Correspondence reveals itself to be a very good book ... Indeed, each essay is better than the one before it; the second half of the book dispenses entirely with the cycle of boasting and self-negation that mars the first.
