PositiveThe Chicago Review of BooksLike the films of Wes Anderson, the novel revels in its own whimsy, inventiveness, and odd detail (\'…high-heeled black patent leather sandals; a flounced red taffeta skirt, half-calf length; a broad belt of green snake skin…\'). Less interested in being a story about something, The Solitary Twin exudes a near-puritanical joy in just being itself ... The effect of all these stories folded into one another does suffuse the novel with a general flatness in tone. Like a Russian doll, then, the joy comes as much from the unpacking itself as what is unpacked. It’s fun to see how each story relates to one another, and how, as the novel develops, these connections grow more and more urgent, uncanny, and overdetermined. Mathews, like Borges and Barthe before him, places his readers in a playful postmodern conundrum, where first we lose track of the reality of the stories, then the reality of the storytellers, then the reality of the world they reside in, before ultimately axing the reality of the novel (which, of course, was illusory all along). By the book’s end — and after a final-hour shift in perspective — Mathews emerges firmly in charge, the last storyteller left alive. The Greek tragedy that befalls his characters, then, is not so much felt as it is appreciated, like an expert magician’s final trick or an improviser’s out.
