RaveBookforumAn ambitious, high-drama family saga with a surpassingly propulsive plot in no way confined by the novel’s domestic setting ... A novel this action packed risks feeling ungainly, shambolic. But the world of The Bee Sting is spacious and three-dimensional enough to handle it, in part because Murray, in his fourth novel, seems to have at last settled on a balanced theory of the origins of contemporary bourgeois unhappiness ... The Bee Sting’s accomplishment—a major one—is to bring together the family and the economy as truly intertwined subjects, into a double helix of oikos and oikonomia that twists toward dread.
Sam Lipsyte
RaveBookforumLipsyte’s latest novel, the East Village–set No One Left to Come Looking for You, is...remarkably stripped down. Its moments of linguistic flamboyance are outnumbered by an almost screenwriterly tendency toward dialogue, and its characters talk in a clipped, plainspoken style that verges on hard-boiled ... Lipsyte\'s experiment in hard-boiled hardcore manages to take its self-imposed conventions somewhere more playful and less pointlessly nostalgic than have similar genre exercises by his contemporaries ... Lipsyte has updated the detective novel for the billionaire era by lifting his antagonist straight from life. In doing so, he ends on an insight worthy of his theory-spouting protagonists: the real crime is financialized property ownership; the underworld worth illuminating is a rapacious real-estate industry that really did put an end to the market-rate 1990s.
Joanne McNeil
MixedThe Nation... conversational and idiosyncratic ... Alongside this history, Lurking provides richly descriptive narratives of the more familiar and quotidian dramas that generate these platforms’ content ... The result is a fast-paced and sometimes excursive chronicle of online communities and identities that is less interested, for example, in detailing the enormous infrastructure required to take over global CD production than in examining how it felt to come of age on AOL. It’s a story that will be broadly recognizable to many but that, by prioritizing the means by which users have shaped and manipulated their platforms, occasionally passes over the grimmer and more opaque policy decisions and business strategies that allow platforms to shape and manipulate their users ... McNeil has had a hand in much of the better critical Internet writing of the past decade ... some of the strongest parts of the book are written as memoir. She writes movingly and stylishly of the friendships she forged online as a teenager in chat rooms devoted to riot grrrl zines and with lucid humor, then genuine anger, about her experiences with online harassment. But occasionally her intimacy with the material leads Lurking to read less like a diverse and polyphonous people’s history and more like a single person’s history, extrapolated—a warm and often firsthand account of three decades of life online that, viewed from a distance, might nevertheless be considered enormously depressing ... McNeil is a sharp reader and critic, and many of her observations assume the form of a rhetorical analysis or notes on trends in user experience. She’s great with epithets, and her descriptions of the voices and affects that have emerged from platform to platform are by turns damning and sympathetic ... This is McNeil in her best and most persuasive mode—as colloquial and triumphantly invective as a blog post but with better research. Much of her writing, in fact, echoes the formal pleasures and occasional frustrations of prose styles native to the Internet ... Despite Lurking’s attentiveness to affect and user experiences, the book is oddly organized. Associative and loping, it almost mirrors the way one experiences the Internet ... Rapidly expanding and contracting in scope and linked by meandering transitions, the book has a flavor of disorganization that will feel familiar to those of us who have spent many hours browsing aimlessly: digressive, curious, sometimes a little haphazard.
