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Recent Reviews
Blake Gopnik
Positive The Globe and Mail (CAN) ... exhaustive ... as [Gopnik] tracks Warhol’s celebrity, his greatest strength is explaining in accessible terms what Warhol’s art achieved and why it matters ... At times, Gopnik expresses a rather modernist triumphalism, pronouncing Warhol a \'genius\' who has overleapt Picasso as the most important artist of the 20th century, but mainly his argument is eloquent, subtle and sharp ... [Gopnik] makes grand and more-or-less convincing justifications for Warhol’s celebrity portraits – they might eventually have been shown as a group, as though recording high society itself – and suggests Warhol’s \'Business Art\' of the 1970s was a legitimate conceptual project. Still, he concedes that late work, from pet portraits to celebrity endorsements, did not live up to the artist’s standards ... As for the biography, riddled with drugs, sycophancy and shopping sprees, Gopnik is deft at telling without judging. He makes fine distinctions between Warhol’s routine use of amphetamines and the addictions of the nasty \'A men\' who came out at night in the Factory after the hard-working Warhol had gone home to have dinner with his mother ... Still, the critic can be too reticent. When Gopnik relates without explanation the actress Viva’s claim that sexual assaults were happening after hours on the set of Lonesome Cowboys, you are left wondering if you aren’t supposed to take her shocking accusations at face value ... Warhol once talked about the celebrity as a half-person, a partial media portrait that misled real people into envy. Gopnik not only establishes the importance of Warhol’s art but also uncovers the whole man.
Jon McGregor
Positive The New York Times Book Review McGregor is a beautiful, controlled writer, who can convey the pathos of a life in a few lines. Despite the large cast of characters, each feels specific and real … McGregor captures a village culture that is simultaneously gossipy and reserved. We are frequently told a character ‘was seen’ doing this or that, but not by whom … The only flaw in this unconventional but affecting novel is that its central metaphor — the girl’s disappearance — remains obscure.