RaveThe New YorkerTo attempt to describe the plot of a Bennett novel is a delightfully doomed venture ... They share a discursive narration that slides between the deliciously forensic and the deliberately opaque ... Doesn’t lament frustrated intimacy so much as revel in the ungovernable force of personal preference. Some novels convey a pretense of collaboration with the reader or salute a familiar world; Bennett’s neither achieves this nor condescends to attempt it. We are the audience for a formidable one-woman show ... Bennett allows the reader to sit in the house with her, without any love, it seems to me, but also without unctuousness or hypocrisy. And what an engrossing house it is.
