PanThe AtlanticGone are the poignant emotional swerves and empathy for sad sacks elicited by The Goon Squad. A journey that had seemed bittersweet, plaintive, familiar yet refreshed by Egan’s singularly convoluted narrative construction—like jazz standards burnished with brilliant arrangements—now sounds depthlessly manic, like sped-up Muzak. It’s as though Egan’s ingenious technique has been streamlined for short attention spans ... The Candy House knows the techniques of The Goon Squad, but doesn’t recognize the limits of their strengths ... The Candy House goes all in on the celebrity fantasia and undermines the ordinariness ... In a novel where almost everyone’s luck has turned good, Egan’s reach for the heartstrings loses its plucking power. To compensate, she introduces satirical diversions that explore technology’s challenge to fiction ... You cannot proclaim the novel a winner, in a cardboard contest between tech and tales, while whirring along yourself on stock elements and toothless satires of bad movies. At her best, Egan has been the inventor of algorithms of rich complexity, stimulating core human yearnings through technical devices. Trying them again, but this time to evoke a triumphal register of emotions, she has proved the pertinence of Silicon Valley gospel to her fiction: To keep her audience spellbound, sitting still won’t work. She’ll have to innovate.
Robert A. Gross
RaveThe AtlanticGross has delivered a second harvest of his career-long work. It is a measured, beautiful volume that brings warm life, accuracy, and complexity to local history, swooping between the bird’s-eye view and the tracery of many individual destinies ... Gross uses our devotion to those familiar heroes to interest us in the ordinary story of a tight-knit town turned unusual birthplace ... Gross’s 600 pages of absorbing narrative, plus 200 more of illuminating notes and documentation, are a refresher course in the birth of a market culture and a mass democracy in the age of Andrew Jackson, followed by the rise of the antislavery cause and stirrings of sectional conflict. Gross gives these grand trends a habitation in 25 square miles of Massachusetts farmland, where he detects a steady erosion of social unity ... puts Thoreau’s experiment in solitude in context ... Gross’s fascinating revelation is that boys like Keyes came under the spell of Emerson.
Louis Menand
PositiveThe AtlanticFor those of us who lived through any portion of this period and its immediate aftermath, the book is a rather amazing compendium of the scholarly research, revision, and demythologizing that have been accomplished in recent decades ... In his erudite account, artistic success owes little to vision and purpose, more to self-promotion, but most to unanticipated adoption by bigger systems with other aims, principally oriented toward money, political advantage, or commercial churn ... Menand is truly one of the great explainers ... He is accurate, he is insightful, and he is not a dumber-downer ... The Free World is a treasury of details. Some complicate myths without displacing them ... Most of the memorable details are just funny ... The paradoxical feature of the book is that its stylish, comprehensive retellings of some of the most famous stories of the most famous individuals, weaving connections between them, made me doubtful and weary of them, and much more interested in minor figures whom we barely glimpse ... Menand is notably excellent on how commercial, regulatory, and technological changes determined which kinds of artwork made it to the public ... Menand’s book bequeaths the sense that the last laugh may truly have been on the self-seriousness of a whole historical period, one that treated its most publicized and successful arts figures far too generously, giving them too much credit for depth and vision, while missing the cynical forces by which they’d been buoyed up and marketed.
Ben Lerner
RaveBookforum... awe-inspiring ... Lerner has hit on something deep, and true, in the portrait of \'debate\' in this book, as what it has long seemed to be—the knightly combat or martial arts of children of the professional-managerial class, where they can practice the linguistic violence they’ll use as adults against real targets in politics, the law, and administration ... The beautiful recollections of childhood in The Topeka School allow for a Portrait of the Artist–type origin story in which Adam’s eventual triumph as a poet, and as the writer of this novel, occurs by the neutralization of the voices of debate and white rap with his mother’s feminism ... The Darren plot seems a way to lend a convention of suspense, familiar from other contemporary novels, to a book that is better than most contemporary novels. Perhaps its virtue is as a reminder of the persistence of exclusion in a progressive civilization—our own—which redeems some new subjects only to despise and scapegoat others.
Zachary Leader
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"This is a superb biography ... [Leader] has managed to write a sympathetic, judicious, 700-page second volume here, which one can recommend on its own merits. I even came to admire Bellow more at the end than the beginning. How on earth did Leader do it? ... I found myself reading for the reappearances of [Bellow\'s sons] Gregory Bellow, Adam Bellow and Daniel Bellow, who are richly realized as characters and emerge as thoughtful commenters on their father’s life ... Equally vibrant are the characterizations of the adult women who intersected with Bellow ... Leader finds Bellow out in his letters, unpublished manuscripts and published books, and pulls gems into the light. The surprise and treat of this book is how much Bellow stayed a master, sentence by sentence, every time he picked up a pen.\
John Kaag
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"The pleasure of this unusual work and the bulk of its pages, belong to short biographical accounts and reflections on the philosophers, poets, novelists and even bygone political figures whose volumes Kaag finds on the Hocking library shelves ... Kaag’s accounts are accurate, engaging and scrupulous. They show profound learning. They’re also genuinely entertaining, recapturing lost details of thinkers’ personal lives without sensationalism ... American Philosophy succeeds, not as a textbook or survey, but a spirited lover’s quarrel with the individualism and solipsism in our national thought.\
