MixedThe Times (UK)Despite his weakness for abstraction and overstatement, [Deneen] is a serious historian of ideas ... So what if anything comes after liberalism? This is where Deneen’s argument becomes incoherent. He is strong on rhetoric, but weak on policy prescriptions and for a conservative can sound alarmingly like a revolutionary ... If for him liberalism is the god that failed, he also remains hopeful, yet ultimately cannot explain how the transformative politics he seeks will come into effect.
Ian McEwan
MixedThe GuardianSolar is a sly, sardonic novel about a dislikable English physicist and philanderer named Michael Beard. He's a recognisable Ian McEwan type, a one-dimensional, self-deceiving man of science. We have met others like him before in McEwan's novels...but none is quite as repulsive as Beard … Solar is very similar in style to the Booker prize-winning Amsterdam, especially in its narrative tidiness, jauntiness of tone and desire to punish foolish men. But Amsterdam was a novella, whereas Solar feels as if it has been stretched far beyond its natural length. Much of the first part, which is set in 2000 and culminates in the death of the student, reads like an exercise in extended scene-setting, to no obvious purpose or effect … What is absent from Solar, ultimately, are other minds, the sense that people other than Beard are present, equally alive, with something to contribute.
Jonathan Safran Foer
MixedThe Financial TimesFoer excels at dialogue, and captures well the voices of the five members of the Bloch family: funny, affectionate, always questing, sometimes enraged ... The whole [Israel section] is, however, woefully under-imagined and reveals a very shaky grasp of geopolitics as the earthquake results in the rapid unification of the 'Muslim world' ... Foer is immensely gifted and he knows it. But he ought to use his gifts more wisely: in this new novel he has overplayed his hand and is ultimately undone by a combination of look-at-me overconfidence and self-indulgence.
