RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Family Man does not pretend to reveal new evidence about the murders or to propose a different theory of the case ... What The Family Man does illuminate to devastating effect is the way the case is emblematic of the direst aspects of contemporary American life: opioid addiction, litigiousness, brazen mendacity (and its bedfellow, gullibility), as well as guns ... At times, Lasdun lays on his meticulous research a little too thickly ... But when the book reaches a crescendo in its stunning final chapters, the elaborate detail becomes the foundation for his chilling distillation of Alex’s crimes ... A lesser writer might lay the blame on the all-purpose abstraction of evil, but The Family Man considers seemingly every possible avenue toward a more satisfactory explanation. Lasdun understands that evil and stupidity can be hard to tell apart.
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIlluminating ... Because How to Be Avant-Garde has no clear conceptual through line, however, context and detail are often missing. World War I haunts the book, as do the politics of communism and fascism, but their effects on the art are never sufficiently analyzed ... It’s a shame that he did not write a book about this: how the fairs, with their one-stop-shopping homogeneity and brazen commodifying, are slowly rotting away the spirit of contemporary art. That would have been truly avant-garde.
