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Recent Reviews
Salman Rushdie
Mixed The New York Times Book Review All this is good fun, up to a point. But René becomes a tiresome companion. Partly because of his incessant film references (sometimes whole pages of them). Partly because of his addiction to celebrity roll calls ... Nero’s sons — Petronius, Lucius Apuleius and Dionysus, as they have chosen to call themselves (Petya, Apu and D, for short) — are all extraordinary characters...Collectively, their story lines are high-octane vehicles for observations on everything from art to gun violence, told with Rushdie’s customary brio and narrative panache, and the reader is happy to go along for the ride. The real weakness, the hollow heart of the novel, is René. The publisher’s description compares The Golden House to The Great Gatsby, and there’s more than one textual reference to Fitzgerald’s novel. Thus we look to René as a parallel Nick Carraway, to restore, perhaps, a moral compass to the proceedings. René, however, though he claims to be 'self aware,' never demonstrates that quality ... Perhaps this is cleverly reflective of 'our age of bitterly contested realities,' in which one man’s morality is another man’s evil. It may not be the novel we long for, but it could, just possibly, be the novel we deserve.
Rachel Cusk
Rave The New York Times Book Review Rachel Cusk’s project appears to be nothing less than the reinvention of the form itself ... It is a risky business, this summing up. Show, don’t tell, say the creative writing manuals. Cusk has torn up the rule book, and in the process created a work of stunning beauty, deep insight and great originality ... Cusk’s novel appears to chime with the Nietzschean concept of self as a continuous process of becoming ... Where other novelists have looked 'deep within,' Cusk seeks to rise above the 'I.' In doing so, she has created from Faye’s 'absence' a palpable, recognizable presence, and constructed a meditation on the nature of self, freedom, narrative and reality. Best of all, she has given us all this in a novel that is compulsively readable.