PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books... the killer-deer-as-avenging-nature subplot is perhaps a little clunky. There is even a consistent critique of the patriarchal nuclear family, an argument that gets bluntly articulated ... These thematic engagements are farcical enough that they contribute to the novel’s overall sense of the absurd—a sense otherwise generated by the gradual accretion of Gonzalez’s whimsical details ... These details are both relentless and intensely pleasurable ... But to focus on the whimsy is to miss what might be American Delirium’s most compelling achievement: its subtle recalibration of the critique of the realist novel. For most narrative theorists, realism is a mode that leans decidedly conservative ... By drawing inspiration from natural history’s mimetic project but rejecting that project’s ideological mission in its wild, absurdist plot, American Delirium harnesses dead and enclosed animals to mount what [Heather K.] Love would call \'new living realities\' ... American Delirium might be seen as performing a kind of speculative taxidermy. In its simultaneous parody of contemporary American culture and its joy in how often the parodic and the real coincide, it both preserves and imagines otherwise. It shifts seamlessly between representing the \'has been\' and the \'might be.\'
Madeleine Watts
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe Inland Sea joins recent efforts like Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Jenny Offill’s Weather ... The narrator’s personal analogies between land and self are often left implicit ... This gendered squeezing is an instance of that classic figurative illusion where inhabited lands become female, empty, inert ... This is a symbolic equation so well established that the feminist critique of the trope has become its own scholarly cliché. The moments of sexual violence in The Inland Sea, when taken together with the historical feminization of terra incognita and the narrator’s implicit parallels between personal and climatalogical disaster, sit in uncomfortable proximity to those old tropes ... One answer might be that The Inland Sea rehearses these tropes with a certain amount of ironic distance ... But the novel, as I mentioned earlier, resists neat generic containment. This means it also resists unitary readings. While the woman/nature trope as a kind of self-flagellating youthful hubris is operative here, mostly I think the comparisons are up to something earnest ... Watts’s novel is best read as a call to start seeing beyond finite empathy economies. It plays with the idea that understanding ecological and personal catastrophes through each other is something cringey and then challenges that cringe’s gendered stakes. The Inland Sea doesn’t assert the equivalence of climate catastrophe and the guy who doesn’t call, but allows them to exist in concert.
