About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Adelle Waldman
Rave The Guardian (UK) [An] acidic comedy about contemporary American serfs. It’s a kind of communal novel about the people clinging to the bottom of the social cliff ... Perhaps the most impressive thing about Help Wanted is that Waldman manages, in telling her small story, to describe not just the American economic prison but the global one. So: both a novel of manners and a systems novel, a book that shows us, perhaps, how intimately linked these apparently disparate genres were all along. It’s a funny novel, as well as deeply humane and very angry.
Colin Barrett
Rave Irish Times (IRE) Delicate and beautiful ... The crime-caper plot is really just a framework, but Barrett engineers it carefully ... You could do worse than quote some of Barrett’s small miracles of precision, some of them taking the form of a single word ... A sheer joy to read.
Francis Spufford
Rave The Irish Times \"One of the signal achievements of this exceptional novel is the generosity and rigour with which it conjures up Cahokia. Spufford’s creation absolutely feels like a place you could visit, or could have visited, if you happened to be travelling westward across the United States in the year of modernism, 1922. Spufford has imagined a history, a culture, a full suite of territorial and ethnic tensions; he even knows when and where the Cahokian trains run. And every detail is pertinent to his beautifully buttoned-up plot. And there is no clumsy expository dialogue ... As a piece of narrative entertainment, Cahokia Jazz is more or less unimprovable. You sink into it; you are gripped, you are moved, you turn the pages greedily. It has obvious influences...But it also feels new: which is to say that Cahokia Jazz is no mere beguiling bricolage of genre tokens but rather a virtuoso synthesis of popular narrative forms, aspects of religious myth, and deep currents of real history ... Like all great stories, Cahokia Jazz is a story about story itself: about the power of story to tell us, to move us (human beings, those solid objects), to show us who we are, or who we might become. Like all great stories, it is itself a symbol. And it works on you with some of the true symbol’s deep power: to discomfit, to reassure, to mystify, to change.\
Mike McCormack
Positive Irish Times (IRE) McCormack’s quarry...is not genre dazzlement, it is the elusive stuff of consciousness itself .... Operating in a minor key, nudging us coyly towards an eerily personal apocalypse, the new book creates an utterly distinctive, utterly contemporary mood; like Nealon’s own mind, it is prone to \'lateral segues from the present moment into the abstract, lurid reaches of the imagination\' – the two fictional locales, that is, where Mike McCormack feels most at home.
Daniel Mason
Pan Irish Times (IRE) The prose, in these opening pages, clearly wants you to swoon and call it \'lush\'. But it comes on too strong and instead compels you to back away in mild embarrassment ... All very worrying, and we’re still on page four. But park your qualms for now. North Woods is one of those novels that keeps jumping forward in time, switching fictional modes with each leap. It’s the sort of stunt that tests both the novelist’s virtuosity and the reader’s goodwill ... Frustrating, involving, virtuoso, sentimental.
William Boyd
Mixed Irish Times (IRE) Isn’t tedious as such – for most of its distended length The Romantic rattles along in high old melodramatic style – but, boy, does it feel twice-told. No, not just twice-told: thrice-, quadruple-told. The life story of a man who, Zelig-like, manages to be present (or at least loitering nearby) at some of the major events of 19th-century history and literature? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before ... It’s an open question whether the 19th-century novel still needs homaging, two centuries and many prior homages later ... The familiar can be comforting. It can also be boring. The one thing it isn’t is romantic – with or without a capital R.
Nicole Flattery
Positive New York Review of Books The reader starts to become conscious of the strangely generic quality of the world that Mae’s narration evokes ... The retrospective view might give Flattery a certain cover for her curiously generic settings, just as it might release her from some of the traditional obligations of historical fiction ... Almost every paragraph swerves unforgivingly into its own punch line, as in some relentless stand-up comedy routine ... The prose of Nothing Special is less spiky and more traditionally expository than that of the short stories. The nervous virtuosity of the stories has been tamed; the mood is memoiristic. There are gorgeous touches.
Richard Ford
Positive The Guardian (UK) It becomes clearer and clearer that these are, indeed, books about happiness as a project of conscious denial ... Resolutely uncynical, blessed with the perceptual gifts of his creator, Frank Bascombe incarnates an old idea of America, now waning; and he knows it.
Max Porter
Mixed The Guardian (UK) Shy occupies an interzone between fiction and poetry. It tells an essentially novelistic story using some of the tricks and tropes of modernist verse ... Shy focuses on characters in extremis...it is interested in questions of childhood and maturity, cruelty and compassion, art and despair ... One of the interesting things about Porter’s work is that he uses the formal techniques of modernism not to shock the reader into assuming a greater critical distance from the text but rather to cultivate a deeper imaginative involvement in the lives of his characters. His books, for all their expressionistic idiosyncrasies, are hugely readable, even gripping ... It also feels, when you finish it, more than a tad sentimental ... Shy ends in a dollop of pure sentiment. Seinfeld’s no hugging rule is not followed here. We might argue about whether or not such an ending has been earned; some readers will certainly feel that it channels sufficient emotive power to bring the book beautifully home. To my mind it doesn’t; there is, late on, an encounter with nature in the raw that is asked to bear slightly more thematic and narrative weight than it really warrants, and the book as a whole feels unbalanced in various ways.
Brian Dillon
Positive The Irish Times (IRE) Unsurprisingly, Affinities is a bit of a rag-bag; after all, that’s the point ... The affinities aren’t always obvious; or perhaps the affinities you detect, reading, aren’t quite the affinities that Dillon has hoped to suggest. Does it matter? The point is never anything so crude as analysis; the point is mood ... The whole enterprise risks pretentiousness. In fact, let’s be honest: it is, sometimes, definitely pretentious. On the other hand, when it comes to this kind of criticism, nothing pretended, nothing gained.
Eleanor Catton
Mixed The Guardian (UK) Another virtuoso performance: elaborately plotted, richly conceived, enormously readable. It might seem like cavilling to suggest that what it lacks is an original or surprising sense of our riven world. But without this kind of vision – without insight that reaches beyond good and evil – you risk creating only a superbly polished mirror, one that shows us the world as we already know it ... The first half of the novel...is hugely entertaining. Catton, you think, can do anything fiction requires: she can write funny social satire; she can stage a convincingly self-defeating fight among leftist radicals ... But instead of ushering us into a world of surprising insights, Birnam Wood relies – no spoilers – on a finely spun web of misunderstandings and coincidences to drive its increasingly thrillerish second half. The fictional craftsmanship is above reproach. But it’s hard not to feel a bit disappointed.
Colm Toíbín
Positive Irish Independent (IRE) Tóibín does something interesting with the illness memoir here: he seeks no lessons; he tries only to be good company on the page. (He succeeds) ... His eyes are always alert; the guest at the feast is always watching closely.
Bret Easton Ellis
Positive The Irish Independent \"The Shards...is a big old plot-and-feelings machine. It’s a page-turner — a thriller, no less, even a love story. It’s got characters. It’s got subplots. It’s got emotional depth. If you’ve read Less Than Zero and American Psycho and Glamorama and suspected that beneath the chilly surface of Ellis’s numbed-out prose lurked the hot heart of a sentimental moralist, then The Shards will prove you right ... Except that it won’t; not really. Like American Psycho, on which it constitutes a kind of gloss, The Shards is actually a trap. It invites you to read it naively; it wants you to read it cannily.\
Louise Kennedy
Rave The Guardian (UK) Plotwise...we’re in traditional territory ... Technique, too, is traditional. The point of view is third person. The prose is in the past tense. This is not a book that is interested in performing radical aesthetic surgery on the realist novel. In fact its mode is what you might call low-realist ... Trespasses is a novel distinguished by a quality rare in fiction at any time: a sense of utter conviction. It is a story told with such compulsive attention to the textures of its world that every page feels like a moral and intellectual event ... Kennedy is also quietly great at the smaller details ... The prose manages both to surprise and to delight without ever calling undue attention to itself. Of course, prose pyrotechnics would be beside the point. Kennedy’s real interest is in the evocation of character and context, and these she approaches with a fearsome attentiveness to emotional nuance and a powerful sensitivity to gesture and speech that makes each scene feel impressively alive ... Trespasses may be a novel built along conventional lines. But it thrums throughout with the passion and poise of mastery.
John Banville
Rave Irish Independent (IRE) The Singularities is a book overtly written, a book, therefore, about writing, and therefore about the writing self ... I might as well say at this point that The Singularities will in all likelihood prove near-incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t already familiar with Banville’s previous novels; this, too, I suspect, is part of the joke ... Gorgeously written and superbly choreographed, The Singularities in its unapologetic complexity and brilliance seems similarly unlikely to please the crowd. On the other hand, isn’t two a crowd, under certain circumstances? Writer, reader: who else do you need to play the supreme game?
Lionel Shriver
Mixed Dublin Review of Books (IRE) Lionel Shriver is not a troll. For one thing, she has no sense of humour – at least, none that is evident from her work. For another, she is indeed a boomer – self-described. And for another, she enjoys thinking of herself as a contrarian ... Her introduction conveniently adumbrates some of her unpopular, indeed downright dangerous, opinions ... It’s canny of Shriver to depict the novelist as a grubby outlaw, respecting no bourgeois pieties. It reminds us of the genre’s semi-reputable roots in hoax, impersonation and journalism, and makes a claim for fiction’s power to speak across boundaries. But it’s also one of her standard moves. Actually, in many ways, it’s her only move ... Shriver is not really very much fun to read – her invariant hectoring tone palls after twenty pages or so. But as an example of what has happened to liberalism in the early decades of the twenty-first century, she bears thinking about.
Ian McEwan
Positive The Irish Times (IRE) ... gathers up its author’s dazzlements and remixes them – gives them shape and lustre. Not enough shape, perhaps. But plenty of lustre. It mixes modes – realism, political essay, social history, memoir. It is capacious, chock-full. It constitutes a late argument in favour of the mainstream realist novel as a tool for thinking – the mainstream realist novel, which, at is best, both represents and interrogates consciousness itself. Consciousness here defined as the feeling of what happens; McEwan’s true subject, throughout his corpus ... there are some chore-like patches here – dead spots, plodding interludes. But this is oddly true of even quite short McEwan novels...It’s also true of life ... The prose swerves from lyrical intimacy to flat historical accounting – from Roland writing a poem to Previously on The Crown ... here he leavens George Eliot’s chatty essayism with microdoses of Virginia Woolf’s riverine inwardness. Like Saul Bellow’s, McEwan’s is a tamed modernism, brought to heel by the conventions of realism ... therefore works partly via thrillerish plotting and partly via the associations of memory; McEwan knows that our pasts do not sit neatly filed inside us in chronological order but seem jumbled, ordered less by simple time than by some hidden principle of emotional contiguity. It is Roland’s hidden principle – his affair with Miriam Cornell, in all its shades of moral and ethical ambiguity – that gives Lessons its own loose order ... It’s excellent; or mostly excellent. But McEwan is almost always excellent. His reputation among younger readers now seems shaky – he is too old, too white, too straight, too middle-class, too aesthetically traditional… His rational humanism, his luminously precise high-formal prose, his intricately ensnaring plots: all of these things are now out of fashion, as we re-embrace mysticism, plain style and fiction as radical political posturing. His loss or ours?
Colin Barrett
Rave Independent (IRE) Whether or not Colin Barrett is a great short story writer (after two slender collections, it’s still too soon to say), he is certainly a natural short story writer — that is, someone who thinks brilliantly in and with the short story form ... we’re fully and firmly in Colin Barrett Country now, which is perhaps, after all, contiguous with Barry Country, but which has its own rhythms and moods, its own feel for the human comedy, its own sense of the human tragedy ... He is clearly a prose tinkerer, a stylist, an artist in pursuit of the nuance, of the brilliantly fugitive detail ... He does what Chekhov does — that is, he makes you forget you’re reading a short story — though his beginnings are sometimes stiff in the classic short-story way. But then, after a paragraph or two of slightly cramped prose, the characters come alive, the story moves ... Homesickness is short — 213 pages — but rich. The odd stray patch of stiffness aside, it’s the work of a writer who is both a gifted stylist and an intuitive storyteller, and if Barrett isn’t quite Chekhov (but then who is?), he’s now definitively himself — and the future awaits.
Douglas Stuart
Pan Irish Times (IRE) The prose of the novel is flat...a plodding, low-realist style that shades frequently into unintentional hilarity ... The adventures of poor Shuggie...constitute a parade of misery ... The point of the fishing trip is, according to Mo-Maw, to \'make a man out of ye\'. In a way it does; but poor Mungo has to suffer quite extensively before we get there. And so does the reader. Art, let me say at this point, is only partly about what you represent. It’s also very much about how you represent it. In other words, style matters ... Young Mungo has the aura of a deeply felt book; it often achieves a sombre pathos; but more often it wobbles messily back and forth across the unforgiving line that separates pathos from bathos.
Louise Nealon
Rave The Sunday Times (UK) ... a warm-hearted book: several degrees warmer, in fact, than the work of Sally Rooney, to which it has already been compared ... intimate, chatty, immensely readable. There’s an original and distinctive voice here, and a strong sense of character and place ... a loosely plotted book in which events arise from character rather than from any imposed structure — all the more impressive, therefore, that it’s such a pacey read. Character is Nealon’s great strength. Uncle Billy, with his cluttered caravan and his barely concealed loneliness, is a wonderful creation; but it’s Debbie, so convincingly rendered as a volatile mixture of vulnerability and determination, who most fully engages ... a novel about how it feels to be young, uncertain and troubled; it conjures this condition with honesty and precise observational skill. Nealon has a nice ear for the apposite simile ... Some parts of the book feel a bit undercooked. Xanthe, for example, veers towards caricature at points, and certain narrative threads aren’t fully tied up. Yet this is excusable in a debut novel, especially in one that contains so many riches. Snowflake is an auspicious beginning.
Colm Tóibín
Rave Irish Independent (IRE) The Magician restores or completes our understanding of a great gay writer who could speak about his sexuality only indirectly: as symbol, as coded theme ... Line by line, Tóibín’s prose is simple. He is interested in creating, by the remorselessly patient accumulation of small actions, a fully rounded portrait ... Tóibín moves swiftly. Where Mann was essayistic, Tóibín prefers action—and in his novels, thinking, too, always feels like action ... The Magician stands as one of the richest and most perceptive novels ever written about the inner life of an artist. Colm Tóibín has already written several truly extraordinary novels. The Magician may be the very best of them.
Sally Rooney
Mixed The Irish Independent (IRE) ... if the emotional temperature of Conversations with Friends and Normal People was medium-cool, in Beautiful World, Where Are You it tracks closer to zero, at least for the first three quarters of the book. (In the last quarter, things warm up emotionally and the book sort of collapses.) The novel alternates between chapters composed in a chilly third-person objective mode and chapter-length emails ... The third-person chapters subject the characters’ fortunes to a deadpan gaze. The emails—by far the best bits of the book—allow Alice and Eileen to talk about ideas ... the low-temperature prose and the resolutely limited point of view are designed to frustrate the sort of easy identification with character that the earlier novels invited ... It’s probably cavilling to point out that the novel states its Big Themes (climate change, civilisational collapse, inequality, the possibility of religious belief) but doesn’t really dramatise them ... There is a fascinating undercurrent of hostility towards the reader. This novel wants both to satisfy and to alienate its audience: both to scare off the plain folk who wept over Connell and Marianne and to create equally vivid characters in the frame of an equally moving love story ... What’s good about this novel? Many things. Alice and Eileen are convincingly real. Rooney writes about sex superbly well. The book is full of interesting ideas. Its various unreconciled elements (the soapy ending; the fact that Felix and Simon are wish-fulfilment figures rather than believable characters), jostle fascinatingly alongside the richness of its ideas, the stray pleasures of its prose and the complexities of its ambition. The faults of gifted writers are often more instructive than the competencies of bad ones. Accordingly, Beautiful World, Where Are You is not just worth reading. It’s worth thinking about.
Richard Zenith
Rave Dublin Review of Books (IRE) Zenith’s account of Pessoa’s life is illuminating, surprising, intimate, and very obviously a labour of love. It is always a relief to discover, after the first few hesitant pages have stumbled by, that a biographer has fallen in love with his or her subject—to the point, in this case, of a fruitful over-identification. The point of literary biography isn’t really to examine the outer life of a writer dispassionately, but rather to recreate the inner life, insofar as such a thing can be done. In this, Zenith superbly succeeds. His labours among Pessoa’s chaotic literary remains have been Herculean. His sense of the man, to this neophyte at least, is acute—at any rate, he creates a vivid and compelling portrait of someone who lived almost entirely in his imagination ... I am almost certainly wrong not to get him; and can in rueful conclusion only offer my apologies, both to Pessoa himself and to Richard Zenith, his excellent, and excellently partisan, biographer.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Rave The Irish Independent (IRE) ... a novel about profound feeling ... a masterpiece ... we’re compelled to piece together from Klara’s observations a heartbreaking mosaic of human experiences: hope, need, love, loss, growth ... At its simplest level, Klara and the Sun is a fairy tale about a toy come to life and the lonely girl she seeks to rescue. But atop this simple foundation, Ishiguro has built a superstructure of enormous emotional and intellectual complexity. It is an extraordinarily rich work of art, compulsively readable and dense with meaning ... powerfully moving, gripping, consoling, beautiful. Ishiguro means for us to see what Klara cannot; and to wonder, after we close his novel’s pages, about the things we, too, might tragically have failed to grasp.
Lauren Oyler
Rave The Guardian (UK) It’s a brilliant comic novel about the ways in which the internet muddles all of our interior rivers while at the same time polluting the seas of the outer world, and about how these processes might be one and the same thing ... the descriptive prose is casually great ... a fascinating work of cultural analysis. Every sentence tells ... a prismatically intelligent work of art.
Kevin Barry
Rave The Irish Independent (IRE) These are romantic stories, and Barry is a romantic writer. I mean romantic in the old-fashioned literary sense: mood-haunted, place-haunted, devoted to the themes of love and loss and self-creation ... Romanticism has its risks, of course. Romantic characters risk igniting themselves in the fires of a foolish passion. And the romantic writer risks collapsing into sentimentality, or into the mere performance of emotion. Barry is well aware of this. He knows that if you get romanticism wrong, your story ends up defaulting into histrionics, or banality. But he also knows that when you get romanticism right, it sets off a great depth-charge of emotion in the reader. What makes Barry such an extraordinary writer is how often, and how superbly, he gets romanticism right ... He gets it right particularly in his short stories ... it’s in his short stories that Barry seems most fully and brilliantly himself ... his third collection, is made up of 11 stories, and by my count, six of them are unimprovable masterpieces. Four of the others are merely (merely!) very, very good — better than the average run of short stories by some considerable distance ... a collection otherwise so good — so rich and so flawlessly crafted — that its best stories feel instantly canonical, as if we’ve already been reading them for years ... The densely woven prose summons up Roethke’s own spiky rhythms; it also echoes one of Barry’s great inspirers, Saul Bellow ... The other stories, with their casts of ghost-struck lonely men and not-quite-innocent young women, and with their gorgeous evocations of landscapes and interiors, are comparably gripping and rich. Following his courageous path, Kevin Barry remains the great romantic of contemporary Irish fiction. Like all of the most interesting artists, he gets better with every risk he takes. The courage may be his. But the rewards are all ours.
Ottessa Moshfegh
Rave The New Yorker Death in Her Hands, Ottessa Moshfegh’s intricate and unsettling new novel, appears at first to occupy familiar territory ... Vesta’s speculations are every bit as vivid as Eileen’s ... Death in Her Hands is another tricksy novel. But it makes no real secret of its tricksiness—which is in itself grounds for mistrust. Vesta’s unreliability is flagged so thoroughly in the early pages that you begin to suspect that Moshfegh is playing some kind of higher-order game with narrative tension ... But creating this sort of narrative tension isn’t quite what Moshfegh is up to—or, rather, it’s only a fraction of what she\'s up to. The unreliable narrator, as a technique, appeals to novelists who are interested in the gaps (tragic, comic) that yawn between how we conceive of ourselves and how the world perceives us to be. Moshfegh has toyed with this technique in much of her work ... Moshfegh knows that when human company is swept away, a baroque inner life can often flourish, and Vesta’s increasingly monstrous inner life grows to occlude her view of the world ... it’s a haunting meditation on the nature and meaning of art ... Like a surgeon, or a serial killer, Moshfegh flenses her characters, and her readers, until all that’s left is a void. It’s the amused contemplation of that void that gives rise to the dark exhilaration of her work—its wayward beauty, its comedy, and its horror.