PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewReboot is an anxious book ... Taylor’s gently comic tone and kinetic prose make this hard-going travel easier, as do his many clever reinventions ... A performance full of wit and rigor freed of the familiar polarizing semantics, making legible something the actual streaming-posting-retweeting world, with its relentless pace and all-too-real stakes, can easily obscure, which is just how much conspiracy theory and pop culture have fused ... The book seems caught between an honest reckoning with dread and an impulse to reassure. There will be blood, but it’s not as devastating as it deserves to be.
Samantha Harvey
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewPoetic ... The book is ravishingly beautiful. It is also nearly free of plot ... It contains the world but fails to reflect it. Harvey lavishes the planet with her considerable rhetorical gifts, but the recklessness and miseries we know at pavement level have been scrubbed from her observation deck. It is all angels above, devils below.
Dan Chaon
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewI did love it. Chaon creates a daring irony in the disconnect between the road warrior’s self-deceit and the reader’s skepticism. The mystery, the moral audacity, the sense that anything is possible in these early pages refreshes not only the hit-man trope but also the world itself. Chaon taps into the prurient thrill of riding shotgun with the unpredictable, and the question dawns: Just how lawless and unhinged will the world of Sleepwalk get? ... This sort of character is usually reserved for revenge flicks and Florida crime blotters, but Chaon, no stranger to genre mash-ups, brings a more literary sensibility to the proceedings, endowing his protagonist with a sweet disposition and a gently comic voice ... If it is a bit of a drag, dramatically, that she never physically appears — a formal necessity to keep the mystery of her true identity viable — Chaon does manage, by way of Will’s self-deluded longing, to turn his antihero into a figure worthy of pity ... What prevails above the plot is the voice, which is consistently winning and — odd for so bloody a tale — unfailingly warm. It’s a comic departure from the straightforward darkness of recent Chaon, and a welcome change. That’s no knock on his earlier books, just an acknowledgment that humane black comedy is a good look on him. He does madcap well and likes his characters, even the killers — especially the killers. Sure, there’s a crap world out there, and if Chaon’s fever dream is actually a forecast, it’s going to get a whole lot crappier. In that case, we’d all do well to affect a bit of Will Bear’s hopeful good cheer.
Joan Silber
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThis is a signature style — the Silber structure. Call it the relay narrative: In book after book, Silber gets things up and running with one character, telling his or her story to its fullest, before leaping into a wholly different life and telling all about it. These narratives are often richly rewarding on their own, but more sublime is what can fall out between any two accounts: some devastating misunderstanding or easily missed opportunity that, heartbreaking as it might be for the characters, rewards the reader with a rare, delectable irony ... Silber illuminates those invisible fissures and inexplicable distances that we sense, however dimly, make up our shared lives with others as much as our formal connections and open battles ... Roundedness is what Silber is after, the insight that comes with a change in perspective, a god’s point of view. I never wonder more at how little we know about how greatly we factor in other people’s lives than I do when reading Silber at her best. She aims, in increments, at the ecstatic ... shows what happens when the Silber structure is spread too thin, its linked characters imperfectly calibrated. There is enough revelation, and resolution, to fill an entire novel in Ethan’s chapter as his father’s double life comes to light; but Joe’s narrative fails to engage with Ethan’s, to qualify or repudiate it. We never learn what Joe knows of Ethan, or what he thinks of him and the father they share, or what differences in background and upbringing the two had and how Joe feels about that. Embittering distances are never measured, destroying depths rarely plumbed ... The narrative strands attenuate and lose sight of a satisfying whole ... rouses but never roars ... What are the secrets of happiness? Money? Renunciation? Duty and loyalty and love? Lacking a strong point of view, Silber offers up each possibility in its turn, but they, too, fade away ... Capable of ecstasy, this time Silber delivers merely something humane, elegant and wise.
Jess Walter
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewJess Walter has fashioned his eighth novel, The Cold Millions, out of the free speech riots that erupted in Spokane, Wash., in the early years of the 20th century ... Walter dramatizes the melee and its aftermath with a lively cast of characters both invented and real ... Walter’s latest novel is more hybrid beast than those earlier books: not quite fiction and not history but a splicing of the two, so that the invented rises to the occasion of the real and the real guides and determines the fate of the invented ... The Cold Millions ends as a eulogy for a certain kind of man: white, fair-minded, nonideological, inclined toward the sidelines. Had Walter inserted a time machine into his book after all, and flown Rye to the current year, it’s hard to imagine even someone so innately neutral looking on passively as history comes for him, too.
Lionel Shriver
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe prospective thrill of a new novel by the iconoclast Lionel Shriver is located here, in anticipating the skewing of pieties, your pity be damned ... Her 15th novel, The Motion of the Body Through Space, is certainly no wilting lily. The dialogue is barbed and the characters immediately at odds ... I am enormously sympathetic to unsympathetic characters, and I greatly admire Shriver’s willingness in the early going to have other characters push back on Serenata’s absurd and caustic misanthropy. But when the exposition shifts out of neutral and into permanent alignment with Serenata’s perspective, the other characters lose their potency as viable sources of objection and enlightenment — and not for Serenata alone. They turn into straw men ... the reader, too, slowly comes unmoored ... The novel is good at establishing the us-versus-them mentality of a long marriage ... Throughout The Motion of the Body Through Space, I was desperate to do one of two things: to extend my sympathies to Serenata, or to watch as Shriver served her up as harshly as Serenata herself would have ... And Shriver’s sympathies, so clearly and uniquely reserved for Serenata, restrain her from real daring ... I kept thinking: Who cares? ... There is a provocative argument running through this unrelentingly didactic book, which posits that extreme sports might be a kind of white sickness ... I found it ironic, and lamentable, that Shriver did not deal as boldly with Serenata as she does with her race.
Daniel Handler
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewNothing is believably conjured to life in Bottle Grove. No spell is cast, no character takes root in the reader’s heart. Captive to Handler’s cleverness, to his allusive play and lack of rigor, the reader tries to make sense of the proceedings, to no avail. Even as Handler stacks elision upon lacuna to paper over his plot holes and sudden narrative swerves, the whole house of cards grows more absurd, irrelevant, cloying and rickety. What’s worse, many developments follow an old sad sexist script. Padgett is a pawn. She is, among a company of literal \'call girls,\' pimped out to the titan. That she doesn’t appear to mind is inexplicable. Handler even suggests that this makes her love Martin all the more ... What on earth is a man justly celebrated for the books he writes under the name Lemony Snicket doing playing at rape? I couldn’t determine. One thing is clear: Throughout Bottle Grove, he is not in control of his larks and allusions. He’s simply having fun at his characters’ expense, and at the reader’s, too.
Don DeLillo
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewI was uncertain as I read these early pages. Had DeLillo created a world of pure abstraction where the reader would be left to float in the zero-gravity chamber of the death fable, everything to think about and nothing to latch on to? But this is only one of several canny feints in the book, which continually shape-shifts and reimagines itself. In the end, it all adds up to one of the most mysterious, emotionally moving and formally rewarding books of DeLillo’s long career.
