PositiveThe New YorkerAs I plodded through The Rhyl Poster, I had the irritating sense that McCarthy was hovering somewhere over my shoulder, chuckling at my dutiful annotations and frequently exasperated comments ... If the experience of reading Remainder was like stepping into the cool and quiet of a gallery, then reading The Rhyl Poster reminded me of stumbling into a junk shop, cluttered and overflowing with the bits and bobs McCarthy has collected throughout his career. I made it to the end and put the book aside. Only then, oddly, did it start to grow on me ... He might never again write a novel as clean and spare—or plainly enjoyable—as Remainder. But the novelist who once found his inspiration in the art world’s curated spaces seems, in these moments, to be finding his way toward another kind of book: one that stops trying to X-ray bureaucracies and institutions and starts, more simply, looking at the world.
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksGarner’s writing is salutary; if you’re heartsick or world-weary, you’ll feel better after a few pages of it ... So it was surprising to drop into Stories and find myself confronted with a different Garner: coarser, colder, and dismayingly hemmed in by the short form ... Closer to outlines or character sketches than to fully fledged pieces of short fiction ... Those written in the first person are typically far more successful than those written in the third ... The \'I\' restores a thrilling specificity lost elsewhere in Stories. Our faith in her candor is renewed. Insight, wisdom, her sharp wit—all seem wrestled out of long experience, hard-won rather than engineered.
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksVegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (1974), is better—funnier, sadder, more appealingly vile—than these other attempts by his contemporaries to pin Sin City to the page ... Dunne found his perfect subject in Las Vegas ... The book’s story is harder to isolate ... At first pass, it feels slightly pointless, a novel-length exercise in New Yorker–style profiles of three oddballs, Dunne indulgently giving free rein to his \'gift for voyeurism\' ... Vegas deepens and broadens in the chapters describing the young author’s education in a series of grubby-sounding boarding schools.
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksGurnah’s penchant for generous scene-setting results in many of Theft’s lovelier passages, but its limitations are noticeable ... Injected with some clunky historical context ... We’re left with Badar, Fauzia, and something rare in contemporary literature: a happy ending.
