PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"Landfall is a romance — a romance in which the president repeatedly intercedes, rom-com fashion — set against the machinations concerning the administration’s defining failure in Iraq ... Mallon’s portrayals of most of his well-known main characters are flattering. But he’s also entertainingly bitchy ... the [George W. Bush] of Landfall is unbelievably wonderful. He makes charming fun of his reputation for ignorance In this book his biggest problem, which Mallon diagnoses well, is a fundamental uneasiness, the lack of an even keel ... I was surprised how little space such a thoughtful writer devotes in this long novel to the awful particulars of its central catastrophe. He’s too easy on everyone ... But still, Landfall is smart and knowing and absorbing. It is to novels as good studio movies are to movies — extremely well made, satisfying if you have a taste for the genre, occasionally excellent. The prose is a pleasure ... Fiction is supposed to provide glimpses inside people different from us. As a one-of-a-kind artifact of pre-2016 Late Republicanism, Landfall is fascinating.\
Ian McEwan
RaveThe New York TImes Sunday Book ReviewMost big-time novelists sooner or later write a novel or two about books and writers, and this is not McEwan’s first iteration. Its true subject is not espionage but, as in Atonement, the porous boundaries between the imaginary and the real — and, as in Atonement, he’s got a large metafictional trick up his sleeve. In other words, if I may indulge in my own meta-nonfictional swerve, Sweet Tooth is ‘a novel about the powerful influence literature can exert on life’ … McEwan, however, has his cake and eats it, until the last chapter keeping us unaware of the metafictional con under way. Instead of flaunting it, in 20th-century spoilsport fashion, he uses his game to reinforce and deepen the pleasurable illusions of reality, thereby satisfying conservative readers like Serena as well as those like Tom with a taste for the literary fun house.
Jonathan Lethem
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...this one is middle-aged in the best sense: relaxed, happy to be its impeccable, focused, antic but Weltschmerz-y self, slightly old-fashioned but in no way 'postmodern' ... Describing a commemoration of 1960s People’s Park protests, Lethem gives a beautiful nutshell history of the last half-century ... This book shares some DNA with Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s detective novel set in the late 1960s, and with DeLillo’s novels published in the ’70s, when he still fully exercised his knack for humor ... [a] thoughtful, first-rate novel that also happen[s] to be page-turner.
