PanThe New York Review of Books... a pithy screed against France’s bobo elite and what he sees as its shameless embrace of a \'neoliberal,\' \'Americanized society\' and a hollow, feel-good creed of multicultural tolerance ... It would not diminish Guilluy’s broader point about la France périphérique if he acknowledged that victims of structural changes can also be intolerant. Guilluy also regularly recycles anxieties over immigration, often from controversial theorists such as Michèle Tribalat, who is associated with the idea of le grand remplacement, the alleged \'great replacement\' of France’s white population by immigrants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa ... Whether the gilets jaunes will eventually come to agree with him is a crucial question. Like Guilluy, they are responding to real social conditions. But if, following Guilluy’s lead, they ultimately resort to the language of race and ethnicity to explain their suffering, they will have chosen to become a different movement altogether, one in which addressing inequality was never quite the point.
Edmund de Waal
MixedThe New RepublicThis long road to the meaning of white affords a rich narrative, spanning centuries and a great deal of space. But it is also a rambling road, full of lengthy block quotations and repeated sentence structures that become tiresome as the text progresses.
Hannah Rothschild
PositiveThe New RepublicIt is difficult to say which is Rothschild’s main achievement in this sprawling, plot-laden romp of a novel, her first.
