RaveThe Rumpus\"With the intense depiction of the narrator’s interior comes a distinctive style. The narrator is well-educated, not shying away from Latinate or complex sentences or style techniques, such as ellipses. As a result, many sentences read like stanzas from a poem ... Because of the gaps, the immense unknowns, the narrator of the story remains in the reader’s mind, restless and haunting. Pond is a refuge, a sanctuary. It is a space in which to slow down and ponder our existence in the physical world, to attend to our interior lives and perhaps experience reverie, which seems to be rapidly disappearing from our plot-driven world.\
Jenny Diski
RaveThe Rumpus[Diski] is sly and wry, with an underhanded humor ... Diski speculates and imagines, but, in the end, there are no answers. This is the power of the memoir, the willingness and bravery (she’d hate that word, I think) to sit in the uncertainty of an unfinished life and ask the questions at all.
Idra Novey
PositiveThe RumpusThe novel starts off comic and wacky but turns menacingly dark. Soon, center stage, there is a kidnapping, an ear in a shoebox, bodyguards and ransom notes. This movement across tones and genres—farce, comedy, mystery, romance—offers plenty of surprises. You can disappear for hours in Novey’s original story.
