RaveRumpusIt’s the chorus of Everton’s dead that narrate the novel, and their affection for the town and its residents is what softens the stark, brutal reality of the fractured community. Although the novel moves at a brisk pace, its characters carefully and lovingly drawn, its developments surprising and credible, it has the feel at times of a gossip session ... The first-person plural as a narrative device affords moments of lyrical wandering that telescope perspective and time, so that tangents and quirks, the past and the present, all fold into the central action of the story ... What’s special about Hartnett’s chorus of the dead, though, is that they stress the tension between overlapping realities ... At the center of this big-hearted face-licker of a novel is a careful study of how we evolve through the act of caretaking ... This is a big novel doing big things. It bears some similarity to Hartnett’s much loved first novel, Rabbit Cake, which centered on another family in crisis, and also featured lots of animals. It was tragicomic and told in a simple voice that belied its emotional complexity and brio. But Unlikely Animals is a broader, brassier, and even more fiercely tender story. In this, her second novel, Hartnett lands an astonishing leap as a storyteller. She explores how we construct the miraculous after our promise has left us, and challenges us to dream through disillusionment even as suffering derails us.
Emily St. John Mandel
PositiveThe RumpusLeaping from one interrogation to the next, across time and into a surprisingly perky vision of the future, Mandel opens her own tear in the nature of time, fate, and interconnectivity in her most philosophically daring novel to date ... Mandel has also arranged for little treats for her loyal readers, Easter eggs that further her grander designs ... Such moments aren’t merely delightful crossover nerdery; Mandel is indicating a larger fracturing. We doubt ourselves, trying to recall if our memory of the book is accurate. And if we see that we are, is it merely an error of Mandel’s? Something an overworked editor missed? Or is it deliberate? That doubt—or is it coincidence, or is it genius—has a strangely destabilizing effect. And that moment of awareness, drawing my attention to text colliding with text, my reading commenting upon my reading, made me wonder just what is—and what isn’t—a simulation ... Other reviewers have written that this is Emily St. John Mandel’s best novel yet. That’s not my reading, but it is her most searching work. Science fiction is an apt genre for her ambitious philosophical explorations, and Mandel delights in the freedom to world-build in a way her more literary novels disallowed ... But if her novel excels in its use of science fiction tropes, it also suffers from a few of the genre’s deficiencies. Some of the characters are underdeveloped plot devices, used mainly to further develop the already richly imagined landscape. My primary disappointment was the lack of definition in Gaspery’s sister, Zoey, who’s sanded down to all smooth surfaces. She doesn’t get angry at Gaspery’s inconsiderate dreaminess, she’s a workaholic without time for a life, and the subject of her work happens to also be the subject of the novel. Gaspery himself at times behaves in a way that can be attributable to conventional morality, rather than a conscience shaped by his own unique experiences and identity. In fact, when asked about a decision he makes late in the novel that puts his life in jeopardy, he states merely that he couldn’t have chosen otherwise. Although we understand the world that’s been meticulously and inventively constructed around him, the world orbiting inside Gaspery is less well-defined ... But perhaps that’s part of Mandel’s objective. Much of the novel questions what constitutes a life: If it’s reduced or subverted or is itself a simulation, is it still worth living? A lot of us struggled with questions like that during the lockdown of 2020, as we lapsed into boredom and shiftlessness and quiet. Perhaps we’re still considering them. While Mandel’s novel may not provide us with many answers, the profound, surprising manner by which she asks them is itself life-affirming.
Paul Griner
RaveThe Rumpus... vital, arresting ... Griner is too skilled a realist to allow The Book of Otto and Liam to become a simple revenge story. There are indeed moments of exhilarating rectification, but these moments are so deeply grounded in the novel’s moral texture that each victory is balanced by an awareness of what’s forfeited ... The Book of Otto and Liam is a serious and urgent book, with the power to appall, outrage, thrill and make a reader mourn; it is also a very funny book ... Trauma narratives all too often collapse into a kind of torture porn, entertainments akin to the disaster tourism that repulsed the officer at the novel’s opening. But Griner gives us a story that is at once bursting with life and hollowed out by death, that celebrates our humanity and knows all our dirty secrets. The Book of Otto and Liam is a portrait of us in our present moment, battered by a reckless and deceitful government, battling our own inurement to daily horrors, and doing our best to get on with the business of living.
