RaveSydney Morning Herald (AU)Hefty ... Smartly plotted, eminently readable and often amusing ... O’Hagan constructs a topical novel full of sharp observations and incorporating an array of representative figures.
Blake Bailey
MixedSydney Morning Herald (AUS)iven that Roth chose his official biographer because Bailey was willing to be non-judgmental about his busy sex life, and given that Roth’s Achilles heel as a writer is widely considered to be his depiction of women, it would appear that, on top of everything else, the biography is a spectacular own goal. Instead of settling some old scores and consolidating his literary reputation, Roth has associated himself with a posthumous scandal that has inevitably drawn attention to the charges of misogyny that dogged him throughout his career, much to his irritation ... It would be something of a betrayal of Roth’s legacy if his authorised biography were to present him as an admirable man − it most certainly does not. Bailey’s generally sympathetic account reveals the considerable extent to which the relentless drive that allowed Roth to create at such a pitch of intensity for such a long time required some unwholesome deformations of character ... Forget the biography; read the novels.
George Saunders
MixedThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)It is that restrained but persistent note of sentimental humanism that is most noticeably illuminated in Saunders’ attentive readings of the Russian masters, though the parameters of the book are set by its practical emphasis. Saunders goes out of his way to present himself as an affable guide. He adopts an informal tone, illustrating key points with anecdotes and humorous analogies that have presumably been refined over many years in the seminar room ... Yet there is no avoiding the fact that A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is essentially a work of applied formalism ... What comes to define the book is the ambivalence with which Saunders approaches his role as mentor ... stabs at delineation are accompanied by advice of a general nature, much of which is standard writing-guide fare: express yourself efficiently, make sure every detail contributes to the overall effect, the better part of writing is revising, try not to bore your reader, and so on. At the same time, however, Saunders is anxious to avoid prescriptivism ... A Swim in a Pond in the Rain makes explicit a moral view that is implicit in [Saunders\'s] stories, which is that he believes people are essentially good ... As a view of human nature, this is debatable (Dostoevsky would certainly not agree). But it also entails its own element of prescriptivism.
Jonathan Franzen
MixedSydney Review of Books (AUS)Purity is a boldly and, in certain respects, preposterously plotted novel ... a kind of social novel, albeit a highly stylised one ... [the] perverse logic of displaced violence draws the novel into some deep and murky waters. It represents a significant, if not entirely successful, attempt by Franzen to extend the psychological range of his fiction ... Freedom was an unusually lachrymose novel, but with Purity Franzen may have outdone himself ... And it begins to suggest what is odd and unconvincing about Purity. Many of these moments do not have the affective power they are presumably meant to have. The crying comes to signify a depth of feeling the writing has been unable to summon, a psychological distress it has not made palpable. Franzen is a patient and often effective writer when it comes to drawing out the complexities of his characters and their interactions on a quotidian level; his satirical eye is often sharp. It is when he tries to portray his characters in extremis...that he starts to hit some odd notes ... Purity regularly tests the boundaries of its surface realism, with its credulity-testing plot twists, its sly parallels and doublings, its patina of dodgy Freudianism ... Purity’s critique of our media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment is so thin ... its argument between traditional journalism and new media is a damp squib ... What Purity seems unable or unwilling to do, however, is distinguish between a material criticism of the world we live in and the novelistic conceit that casts the Internet as the symbol of a psychologically destructive infinity.
Rebecca Giggs
PanThe Sydney Review of Books (AUS)What makes Fathoms a curious work, when viewed from the perspective of its environmentalism, is that even as it is acknowledging the disgrace of these tangible realities, it is preoccupied with nature as an abstraction in a way that remains stubbornly anthropocentric. It argues that the preservation of wild spaces is important, not simply for the sake of the animals who live in them, or for the pragmatic reason that human beings are ultimately as dependent on the health and sustainability of the planet’s fragile ecosystems as any other living creature, but for the sake of our psychological wellbeing ... For a book that presents itself as a philosophical inquiry and not simply a work of natural history, Fathoms is notable for its cultivated air of philosophical naïvety. Its extensive list of sources is heavy on natural history, light on the kinds of literary and philosophical works that might have provided its imaginative explorations with a clear conceptual framework. Its preferred approach, reflected in its impressionistic prose, is to proceed intuitively. This is fine as far as it goes, but it contributes to the sense that there is something under-examined about the paradoxes of its anthropocentric perspective. The occasional impression that the book is unaware of the provenance of its ideas is less significant than the fact that it ends up being a little flaky around the edges ... In its pursuit of wonderment, Fathoms develops imaginative conceits, which invariably circle back to a self-centring humanism. This is a sentence-level, and even a word-level issue, as much as it is an issue of conceptualisation. The quality that most conspicuously identifies Fathoms as neo-romantic is its mannered prose style. It is a book that wants to be admired for its extensive vocabulary, its descriptive prowess, its startling metaphors, its elegant turns of phrase. It arrives generously blurbed as a ‘poem’ and a ‘hymn’ that is ‘beautifully written’ in ‘inventive prose’, and the early critical responses seem largely to have fallen into line with this assessment. It is, however, none of these things, unless one takes ‘inventive’ as a euphemistic acknowledgement that Fathoms is a book to give a grammarian the howling fantods ... The more you read Giggs’ baroque stylings, the more it becomes apparent that, on a fundamental level, she simply isn’t paying attention ... Giggs’ affected style works against her own thesis, neither contributing to our understanding of whales, nor respecting their essential otherness. The tendency to aestheticise the factual information she wants to convey ends up muddying her thought. Her flamboyantly imprecise metaphors become a form of gratuitous ornamentation: linguistic indulgences that succeed in drawing attention only to themselves.
Helen Garner
RaveThe Sydney Review of Books (AUS)Like The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation before it, This House of Grief proceeds from Garner’s first instinctive response. All three books are grounded in the idea that to feel something is a kind of fact. All wonder about the meaning and the status of that subjective fact. In this sense, they might be read as essays that question the concept of rationality ... This is the source of Garner’s somewhat ambiguous and occasionally problematic relationship with the tabloidish quality of her subjects. She co-opts the emotional pull, the primal fascination, but attempts to redirect our attention. Tabloids appeal to and reinforce their readers’ prejudices in order to impose a spurious certainty; Garner, who is the antithesis of a hack, is interested in the prejudicial reaction itself, rather than the conclusion it seeks to impose ... It is part of Garner’s intention...as she closely follows the progress of Farquharson’s trial and retrial, to respect that pure human anguish, to write about it in a language that acknowledges its profound and ineffable core ... she is a brilliant critic: a shrewd observer of people, alert to subtext, always aware that she is witnessing a fragment of a larger human drama that is being attenuated by the formality of proceedings ... she has perfected a kind of negative capability in which she acts a focal point for the book’s themes, which are channelled through her reactions but resonate far beyond them ... The opposition and the religious overtones are explicit; the implication that the battle between the emotions and the intellect is unwinnable. But Garner also implies that it is only by respecting both sides of the argument that it might become possible to understand the deaths of those three small children, for that understanding cannot be found in the facts alone; it also resides somewhere in the book’s deep and abiding sadness.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
RaveThe Sydney Review of BooksThroughout A Death in the Family, Knausgaard catches glimpses of himself in mirrors – a conventional enough symbol for an autobiographical artist – but these moments acquire a more complicated resonance by virtue of the fact that father and son are also reflections of each other ... His observations are often structured in a way that emphasises this uneasy doubling ... Via this process Knausgaard enacts a kind of creative destruction, an overthrowing of literary form that is in fact a rediscovery of form and expression ... A masterpiece of control ... What compels in his writing is its directness, its plain-spoken articulation of a powerful mind grappling with its contradictions, and the hints of fervency and genuine anguish that have been well captured in Don Bartlett’s natural-sounding translation.
