MixedThe New York Times Book Review... uses a Survivor-type reality show called Civilization to pose questions about authenticity, competition and resilience. Unfortunately, the novel often encounters the same problems as the shows it’s criticizing: It’s repetitive, its shallowness resists any close scrutiny, its surface is too cold and shiny for any depth of feeling ... In following the life-or-death challenges the contestants face alone in the extreme wilderness, Braverman ably depicts the exploitative aspects of reality TV, how nothing actually transpires the way it’s presented to the viewer, how the producers have the final say on who are the heroes and villains ... Braverman’s book sheds an important light on the awful offscreen costs to those who sacrifice their privacy for our entertainment. The people who tend to succeed on these shows are those who are content to allow themselves to be fictionalized.
Fatimah Asghar
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe dynamic among them — playful, complex, unsteady — is the novel’s central appeal. As is Asghar’s generosity: A less assured writer wouldn’t allow the monstrous uncle gestures of kindness, albeit occasional and muted. However, as the girls grow up and apart, the narrative shift to Kausar’s coming-of-age and nascent sexuality feels ploddingly familiar ... This section lacks the energy and intensity of those devoted to the girls’ earlier childhoods ... Toward the end, I missed the electricity of the three siblings’ bond; the conclusion feels comparatively rushed, and somewhat incomplete ... Asghar’s fragmented writing style is distinctive, but her lyricism also serves to mask commonplace observations ... Still, Asghar’s book has a sweetness at its core that keeps the story alive on the page.
Ray Nayler
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewExceedingly ambitious ... The dystopia Nayler captures is resolutely believable ... The problems that afflict The Mountain in the Sea are a consequence not of its premise, but of its scope and magnitude: information dumping, the occasional explanatory monologue, story lines that are only tangentially connected to the main arc, and lack the same level of interest ... Regardless, Nayler’s charm lies in his belief in the very human qualities of attentiveness and self-doubt. The result is a novel that is alert, intelligent, open. At a time when we are oversaturated with dystopian narratives, Nayler’s distinguishes itself by being almost devoid of cynicism.
Gwendoline Riley
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)... caustic, unsparing, occasionally funny and always perceptive ... Riley exposes our savage impulses, and the regret that typically follows ... Much has been made of Riley\'s youth – she was 22 when she was first published, and this is her fifth novel – and of the autobiographical elements of her writing. Regardless of what inspired the material, the execution is luminous and dazzlingly brilliant.
Lynne Tillman
PositiveLondon Review of BooksMothercare is, at least on the surface, a straightforward memoir ... It’s in the descriptions of these carers – women who are both inside and outside the family – that Mothercare begins to resemble a typical Tillman novel. She demonstrates the same talent for compression, the same affection for bizarre behaviour, that characterised earlier books ... Mothercare is a peculiarly un-American book, free of self-actualisation or therapy speak ... Reading it, you feel Tillman’s clammy grip on your wrist reminding you not to waste time. She offers a writer’s prescription: examine the world closely, and as only you can.
Keith Ridgway
RaveThe Stinging Fly (IRE)This is a book about houses, flats, rooms, and the people who occupy them, the traces we leave on temporary spaces. It could be described as a ghost story, where everyone is a ghost, but the ghostliness is mostly dictated by economic conditions. It’s a book that’s ruled, refreshingly, by its characters’ circumstances: London-based, renters mostly, lost in clouds of confusion or depression or loneliness ... this isn’t disinfected, hygienic prose ... Ridgway is artistically serious but always funny, never professional. A Shock could be described as frustrating but it’s like life: you might make sense of it if you give it your total attention. The possibility is what is interesting ... I’ve had conversations about the greatest Irish writers ... someone will always say Keith Ridgway. They will say it with total conviction like they’ve finally hit upon the right answer, and that’s because they have. A Shock makes that perfectly clear.
Paul Mendez
PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)Rainbow Milk is a candid, sometimes uneven novel. But at moments it’s electrifying – an algorithmic pop ballad that suddenly transcends itself and sounds different, more affecting, like the opening chords of a Prince song ... Rainbow Milk is a book poised between worlds that skips across time and place ... Mendez is subversive in other ways too: he flirts with tragedy only to sidestep it ... Mendez knows that what you anticipate from a narrative of this kind – including black pain – is the worst news, but things don’t always happen quite like that. There’s suffering here, but it’s subtler and more complicated than readers may expect ... By devoting the same amount of space and precision to making coffee as to administering a blow job, Mendez makes clear the arbitrary and pointless distinctions between types of work. It’s hard not to be wowed by the audacious parts of the novel – but I was just as absorbed by the bits that are deliberately dull. Then again my tolerance for digression is high. Some readers may feel they’re being forced to watch an intolerable art film which intersperses hardcore sex with scenes in which people endlessly straighten knives and forks on a dinner table in order to demonstrate that sex and economics can’t be separated.
Blake Gopnik
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)Blake Gopnik’s Warhol isn’t the most critical entry into an already extensive library about Warhol ... Gopnik prefers a softer approach in his roving biography. Some of the most entertaining and lively sections of Warhol focus on the curious and deranged cast of misfits from his Factory-Viva, Candy Darling, Ondine, tragic Edie, all of them suspended forever in the fading silver decor ... However, it’s in Gopnik’s assessment of Andy’s art that Warhol becomes truly alive and new. Gopnik, the former chief art critic for The Washington Post, treats Warhol’s work not as a mere addition to his celebrity, but the main show. In Gopnik’s assessment Warhol was a serious, consummate artist masquerading as a shallow gadabout ... The Warhol that emerges from Gopnik’s book is far more human, more sensitive and gentler ... Weighing in at a hefty 1000 pages, Gopnik’s careful, insightful biography – clearly the work of many years of detailed research – is for both the devout and the agnostic.
Catherine Lacey
PanLondon Review of Books (UK)The paradox of Lacey’s novel is that for a book about the dangers of judgment it’s remarkably judgmental. The child is used to appraise the town, a ghostly presence who watches and assesses. Pew begins as an object of sympathy, but becomes an instrument of merciless high-mindedness ... Pew is less playful than [Lacey\'s] earlier work and wears its influences, including Ursula Le Guin and Flannery O’Connor, heavily. Pew is like O’Connor in the way a Netflix Shirley Jackson adaptation is like Shirley Jackson—which is to say not very—and its failings are only made more obvious by the similarities ... The real problem with Pew is Pew, whose pseudo-philosophical musings are sometimes intolerable ... Pew is never allowed to be lost but instead becomes a vessel for spiritual meanderings and riddles. I began to feel as if I was babysitting a child ... Lacey seems to have forgotten the greatest weapon of a writer like O’Connor: humour. Every thought Pew has is deeply earnest. Humour would rupture the reverential atmosphere; it would be a hideous distraction from the momentous sense of purpose. Anyone who has ever had a fit of giggles during a sermon knows that religion is funny: it’s funny because it’s treated with such seriousness. Some playfulness wouldn’t have undermined Lacey’s intelligence. What I was really praying for by the end of Pew was one unexpected moment.
Anne Enright
PositiveThe London Review of BooksOn the face of it, Actress shouldn’t be as powerful a novel as it is. It’s full of clichés: the ingénue actress, the bad man, the older, alcoholic actress dosed up to her eyeballs on lithium, the other bad man. But to reduce this novel to its plot components traduces it – like forcing an object into a container that doesn’t fit. Many novels about actresses seem weary of their subject matter, desperate to prove that their interest in celebrity belongs to the deeper, morally righteous trade of Literature. Enright has no such boring qualms and showbusiness is well within her scope. She understands the illusion; she also understands the cost ... depicts an Ireland of the past, but there is, thankfully, no nostalgia here ... Enright, sensibly, doesn’t care if she has your sympathy – she’s too cold, too sharp ... No one understands rage, or the lucid, bleached moments that follow it, better than Enright.
Kevin Barry
PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)Barry’s concerns have changed since 2007, but there has been no slackening off. The male codependents in his latest novel, Night Boat to Tangier, are proudly reptilian. As they announce with indecent pride, they wear excellent fucking shoes. Barry specialises in character pairings—death-driven, addicted to each other—in a way reminiscent of Beckett. ... If There Are Little Kingdoms captured the languor and long afternoons that come with life on the dole, then time is not on the side of the protagonists in Night Boat to Tangier ... Barry has always been exceptionally attentive to the silences of men, with an eye sympathetically trained on their weaknesses, on their secrets, their irritations, their routines, their obsessions, their inadequate responses, the frustration caused by their inadequate responses ... The blank spaces that Barry inserts between paragraphs, the empty gaps in the text, seem to signify accumulated pain.
Kristen Roupenian
MixedThe Guardian\"Amid the noise, one certainty remained: \'Cat Person\' is a good story ... Unfortunately, several of the stories here have the same intention as [the \'Cat Person\' character] Robert’s final correspondence: they want to upset and disturb, at any price ... Roupenian is at her best when she discards shock tactics and levels her gaze at teenage sexuality ... This debut isn’t perfect, but I look forward to Roupenian’s next book and sincerely hope it’s spared the difficulty of being \'topical\' and \'important\'.\
Sam Lipsyte
PositiveThe Guardian\"... while [Lipsyte\'s] target is still the indignity of simply being alive, his new novel is a little crowded ... Lipsyte is at his absolute best, his most crushing and merciless, when his characters are going to pieces. It’s a pure joy to read the diatribe Hark launches at a fictional version of the Web Summit, the largest tech conference in the world ... I’m giving the highest praise imaginable when I say that Lipsyte doesn’t need plot to hold the reader’s attention. In fact, how many writers alive are such good prose stylists that they can discard it altogether and still deliver an entertaining book? Lipsyte’s sentences are so dizzyingly brilliant, so sharp and energetic, that the plot feels like the distraction, the noise you wish you could drown out ... But though I admire his ambition, Hark is slightly unfocused ... A few hours spent offline with Lipsyte is a worthwhile investment.\
