PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Lethem has little interest in the technical exposition of what went wrong. His preoccupation is with the social fallout that follows ... Lethem has fun with his fish-out-of-water farce, spinning it in odd directions ... Behind the rebuke about our technological over-reliance, Lethem...[has] a more subtle, and important, message: that American armageddon won’t be the great social leveller. They may be bumbling and inept, but the Clays and Sandys can still expect a pretty cushy apocalypse, the tenured professor holed up with a fund manager and his wine, the screenwriter kept in foie gras in exchange for bicycling duties. They’d call it luck—being in the right place at the right time—but they’ve probably been saying that all their lives.
Matthew Baker
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The stories are a wicked lament against what might be called \'late individualism,\' and every non-hero faces a powerful collective (an extended family, a seceding town, an omnipotent state), which has shifted its portfolio of operations in creeps and bounds ... parallel, near-futuristic Americas vary in outlandishness ... The collection’s greatest satirical target, though, is domestic consumerism. Baker puts the \'list\' back into \'stylist\' with his compelling accounts of the landfill-in-waiting that accumulates in strip malls, and of the hoarded trash in McMansions. Good on people, brilliant on stuff, he is at his most televisual at these moments—evocations not of big budget, scripted blockbusters but of America’s weirdest home movies.
