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Recent Reviews
Alice McDermott
Rave The New York Times Book Review McDermott is rightly celebrated for her granular, nuanced portraits of mid-20th-century life, with a particular focus on Irish Americans. Her fans may be startled, then, to find themselves plunged into 1963 Saigon at the start of her enveloping new novel, Absolution, whose lofty title belies its sensory, gritty humanity ... Leaves the reader in its provocative shadow.
Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Positive The New York Times ... engrossing, eventful ... Zhang has trained her gaze on an area of American history that has gone largely unnoticed in westerns, even revisionist ones: the Chinese immigrants who built railroads and worked in mines — only to be met with racist persecution when they tried to assimilate into American life ... Zhang’s descriptive prose is an arresting combination of earthy and lyric ... moves with nimble economy through Daiyu’s dislocations while poignantly rendering her struggle to maintain a coherent sense of self ... While psychologically sound, these projections at times feel overworked; the original story of Lin Daiyu, told briefly in the novel’s early pages, lacks sufficient potency to bear so much narrative weight ... Throughout the novel, Zhang adopts a stylistic tic of avoiding contractions. The inevitable formality of this device is offset by her exuberant prose, but it hampers her dialogue with a generic stiffness that undercuts the variety and individuality of speakers ... The resonance and immediacy of these barbarous 19th-century events are testament to Zhang’s storytelling powers, and should stand as a warning to all of us.
Elizabeth Strout
Rave The New York Times Book Review One proof of Elizabeth Strout’s greatness is the sleight of hand with which she injects sneaky subterranean power into seemingly transparent prose. Strout works in the realm of everyday speech, conjuring repetitions, gaps and awkwardness with plain language and forthright diction, yet at the same time unleashing a tidal urgency that seems to come out of nowhere even as it operates in plain sight ... affecting ... a brief, swirling account of present-day events that rouse memories of past events and prompt a reckoning ... Marriage is Strout’s subject in Oh William! and she writes about it with brilliance ... The gap between Lucy’s inner and outer landscapes forms the crux of Oh William! As a reader, I experienced this gap uneasily at times, in a disconnect between Lucy’s literary reputation and her occasionally fumbling narrative turns...But the tension between Lucy’s inner voice and her worldly identity turns out to be exactly what Strout wants the reader to track, and what Lucy herself must grapple with in the course of the novel. Oh William! is a testament to the way that making a family — in Lucy’s case through marriage and motherhood — creates a fresh structure of myth and meaning atop the primal one. Strout renders this truth about Lucy’s marriage to William as she did its deficits: through sparkling, incisive details.
Tom McCarthy
Positive The New York Times Book Review C is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of meaning: our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result ... here, he fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in signs and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel that unfurls like a brooding, phosphorescent dream ... For all of Serge’s lust for coherence, C...raises apt questions about the moral and mental hazards of seeking double meanings from the external world. ... McCarthy’s prose strategy in C is not far from Serge’s druggy reveries ... These lectures drag despite their thematic relevance; they feel artificially planted and, at times, alienatingly technical ... Still, the book’s lingering resonance owes less to its strenuous intellectual girding than to the mystery the story nonetheless retains. Like life, which we overinterpret at our peril, this strange, original book is — to its credit — a code too nuanced and alive to fully crack.
Kate Atkinson
Mixed New York Times Book Review Atkinson’s use of comedy in the first half of the novel is unexpected and inspired; even the Dada-esque chunks of Juliet’s transcription are animated by our awareness of her exasperated confusion as she types them ... The overburdened narrative loses focus, and the undisclosed \'horror\' from 1940 asserts itself as a leitmotif in the form of ominous dialogue snippets — \'We’ve had rather a shock\' and \'We must finish her off,\' among others — that float through the text... The deeper problem in the last half of Transcription lies with Juliet. Beguiling as an excitable ingénue, she becomes cipherlike as the book progresses. Her actions seem unintelligible at times, her plucky asides almost perversely frivolous in the face of serious events.
Nick Laird
Positive The New York Times Book Review The characters in Modern Gods traverse oceans, time zones and political situations as part of Laird’s project to pry apart the very structures of worship and locate the systems they have in common, among them storytelling and ritual cruelty ... Laird dazzles ear and eye with his kinetic prose, animating city, countryside and, later, tropical jungle ... Whereas the inner lives of Stephen, Alison, Liz’s parents and the victims of the pub shooting are rendered with deftness and sympathy, Liz remains something of a cipher; her fears, desires and grief — if she has it — remain opaque. This thin characterization becomes manifest in the New Ulster sections of the novel, where we’re confined to Liz’s perception ... Still, the dynamism Laird has conjured in New Ulster — a trill of incipient violence; a mass imbibing of a hallucinogen that leaves the BBC producer prone and vomiting — keeps us reading, and the tragic climax resonates powerfully with the Northern Ireland sections of the novel. Apart from any theory, the events of the story leave a vivid impression of the opportunistic mythmaking, sectarian conflict and pragmatic greed at the heart of these religious systems.
Cormac McCarthy
Positive Slate With only the corpse of a natural world to grapple with, McCarthy's father and son exist in a realm rarely seen in the ur-masculine literary tradition: the domestic. And from this unlikely vantage McCarthy makes a big, shockingly successful grab at the universal … Our literary expectation is that the man's ingenuity will redeem him, but while it's true that he and the boy survive a number of scrapes in The Road, the agony of the novel is that things are getting worse, not better … The existence of a moral structure—the will to do good—is the soaring discovery hidden in McCarthy's scourged planet.