MixedNew Statesman (UK)Not exactly her best, nor likely to be her best loved ... But if Intermezzo is not Rooney’s juiciest novel, it is her meatiest ... Lacks the taut self-assurance of Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), but it is an honourable, tenacious and not unsuccessful attempt to go beyond them, and to leave – indeed to run some distance from – her formal comfort zone ... The new structure of feeling – tender, sombre – is especially evident in the sex ... What makes Intermezzo better than its predecessors is what makes it more imperfect: it is Rooney’s most wholehearted novel but also her most sentimental; her most uninhibited but not her most compulsive; her most likeable but not her coolest; her most highbrow but not her most accomplished ... Not a stylish book ... Rooney has tried to deepen her fiction, and has thrown herself at her task with enough conviction and skill to exorcise the initial self-consciousness that accompanies so conspicuous a departure. In doing so, she earns the liberties she takes.
Mark O'Connell
MixedThe New Statesman (UK)\"O’Connell’s new book...is at once his most classically journalistic and his most personal, as well as his most ambitious and accomplished ... A Thread of Violence reads like a book about a journalist and a murderer written in the disabused aftermath of Janet Malcolm’s influential monograph. Its narrator has absorbed Malcolm’s insights, moral and literary – perhaps a little too thoroughly ... O’Connell’s intelligent, in many ways honourable self-probing gives the book an engaging immediacy. But at times it fogs up the pane through which we might have gained a clearer view of Macarthur. Janet Malcolm’s virtues as a portraitist arose in part from the charged setting conjured by her inscrutable persona. The Superman she fashioned for herself had the superheroic nerve, borrowed from psychoanalysis, to behave as if interpretation only travels in one direction ... O’Connell’s self-questioning narrator is a more humane presence than Malcolm’s, but he rarely provides the wicked satisfactions of brazen scrutiny and barbed insinuation at which Malcolm excelled.\
Pankaj Mishra
MixedThe New Statesman (UK)To make the revelations in Arun’s [epistolary] memoir plausibly revelatory to Alia, Mishra has had to render their relationship insubstantial, or at least make Arun and Alia inscrutable to each other. This is a legitimate theme, but here it stems from narrative necessity, which makes the pathos of their relationship’s disintegration underwhelming. Addressing the novel to Alia seems an act of formal self-sabotage, imposing an inverse relation between the substance of the novel and the substance of the romance the novel chronicles: the less Arun shared with Alia in person, the more there is for him to explain now. And explaining is his dominant mode ... If this novel can seem overly freighted with ideas, its characters at risk of congealing into emblematic case studies, Mishra’s narrators can also seem isolated figures against a world-historic ground, individuals temporarily drawn \'in\' to society but rarely seeming \'of\' it ... It’s as though the rather stringent opposition between engagement and detachment dramatised in the lives of Mishra’s narrators bifurcates his own writing into polemic and introspection, public and inner life, bypassing much of what lies between—social and private life—and so vacating much of fiction’s richest traditional terrain ... Mishra’s narrators are proto-writers, and we are chiefly witness to their writerly reveries, observations, reflections. However acute and riveting, these do not necessarily evoke an autonomous, dynamically individuated personality. First-person narrators naturally monopolise their self-presentation, but Arun’s self-aware, penetrating account of his and his friends’ wayward lives does not elicit the sort of vigilant, ludic attention that readers bring to more devious first-person fiction that allows us to glimpse the intriguing gap between a narrator’s self-portrayal—and self-knowledge—and possible alternative views on their personality or predicament.
Michael Brooks
RaveThe New Statesman (UK)... an alternative textbook that suggests a new way of thinking about maths, and a more congenial way of teaching it – as not simply an abstract science but as a cultural achievement, an indelible and indispensable part of human history.
Vanessa Springora, tr. Natasha Lehrer
MixedThe New Statesman (UK)Springora’s story is literary in the simple sense that writing features heavily ... Springora’s stylised, folkloric narrative befits Matzneff’s formulaic perversion ... The self-dramatising instincts of the young V are compounded by the almost ostentatious storytelling of Springora the adult author. The memoir is built from discrete episodes – remembered scenes – that are either literary or sexual, often both. The marshalling of experience into a montage of telling incident is a feature of most storytelling, but it is so rigorous and heightened here that it can feel that selectivity and order – two of the principles that distinguish life from literature, and make literature out of life – are being fetishised ... The ruthless literary economy also issues in a psychoanalytic neatness that at times becomes lifeless ... A connection between V’s absent father and her vulnerability to G’s predations is drawn repeatedly and sometimes heavy-handedly ... a driven, efficient memoir, and the story of Springora’s recovery from Matzneff’s multifaceted abuse is also the story of her discovery of the will to write about it, and so of the making of its author. Yet to write about literature is not necessarily to produce it.
