PositiveThe Brooklyn RailThis idea—sobriety as an arrested plot, the recovering alcoholic’s journey as “a knee-capped bildungsroman”—poses a narrative challenge, one Deagler solves by proposing the couch surfing novel as a version of the road novel.
Megan Nolan
RaveBrooklyn RailA commentary on form—a tabloid story told as a novel stretches and deepens, grows sadder and stranger and less sensational. It is, in this way, a novel in defense of the novel. The difference between tragedies scandalous and standard is more in circumstance and structure than in kind ... The novel is deeply concerned with the relationship between inner privacy and outward appearance, with what it means to be good or bad, and what, in the equation, is the balance between one’s private estimation and the judgment of others.
Kate Zambreno
PositiveBrooklyn RailZambreno offers a catalogue of these kernels, these moments of beauty and flashes of joy. There are things here, she suggests, worth grieving. There are things here worth saving.
