PositiveCanberra Times (AU)Bennett writes many long and very dense paragraphs. Pages go by with no indents. Some of these passages - stream of consciousness, in parts - force one to slow down considerably, with unpunctuated sentences, phrases joined by ideas and white space alone. The technique works ... Checkout 19 could be written off as another difficult literary novel, with allusions and assumed knowledge required of hundreds of novels which preceded it. But it is also a tightly coiled spring of a story, with more life packed into these pages than some books twice the length. The narrator, who remains partly unknowable without so much as a name, is varied and considered. This isn\'t some contrived story but the outline of a life unfurling.
