PanThe New YorkerJane...searches for self-knowledge in a woebegone key ... Liars makes the rot in this marriage visible from the beginning ... John’s version of events—his intentions and perspective—is entirely absent. Jane does not seem to entertain them, nor does Manguso. There is a strange lack of motive in the book ... What is this vision of womanhood, of sexually indiscriminate infants running households? For all her subtlety, Manguso has always evinced a tendency to make broad, sometimes crude generalizations, to break the world into types ... This book, in its blazing assurance, tells a thin and partial tale, frayed by silences that feel more like blind spots than like the canny omissions of old ... The finality of such diagnoses stunts Manguso’s account, keeps it from becoming a more persuasive story, where we would genuinely feel for and trust the protagonist, experience the full measure of her loss and exploitation.
William Viney
PositiveThe New YorkerA handsomely produced anthology of twin representations.
James Ellroy
MixedThe New YorkerTo pick up a James Ellroy novel in the year 2023 is to know the score. We...do not arrive expecting much in the way of lavish scene-setting, characters who confound us with complexity, or commas. We are here for the short, stabby sentences and percussive rhythms. Stories are sheared down to bare-bones plot, almost stage directions, almost, at times, demented square-dance calls ... Beyond the syntax, beyond the quick, greasy fun, there’s a world view shaped by personal tragedy ... What does it mean to embrace such men? For Ellroy, this is literary vision—to see the world for what it is, to love it as it is without flinching, and to see yourself in the same way. In effect, it means that he can never fully abandon his psychosexual plots; they burn at the core of everything he writes ... Repetitiveness, this obstinacy, is a distinctive feature of Ellroy’s writing. His fiction, at its most potent, is driven less by plot than by ritual. He has been canonized and censured; he writes now, in his mid-seventies, on a plane beyond the exigencies of either, enjoying a rare kind of freedom ... Marilyn remains fragmented and removed, strips of celluloid; it’s only Freddy whose body heat we feel ... The Enchanters, which takes place during L.A.’s August heat, is at once panting and sluggish ... What it feels we are left with—the ribs and spine of a book, delivered with strange weariness ... But, for all the novel’s exasperations, its author’s talent for mayhem still has its charms.
Lorrie Moore
PositiveThe New YorkerWhat verdict awaits the diaphanous ghost story that is I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, with its curious, unravelling structure? Too odd, I suspect ... The voice that greets us is a shock ... Slapstick inevitably ensues, but most of the telling unfurls in a language of ravishment and wonder ... Just like Lily, the novel itself begins to come apart. As the pages turn, the story does not build or cohere. It degrades. Subplots and subsidiary characters fall away ... One might say of Lorrie Moore what she said of Updike—that she is our greatest writer without a great novel—but how tinny \'greatness\' can feel when caught in the inhabiting, staining, possessing power of a work of such determined strangeness and pain. An almost violent kind of achievement: a writer knifing forward, slicing open a new terrain—slicing open conventional notions and obligations of narrative itself ... For all her preoccupation with language, Moore’s deeper interest has always been with structure, or, rather, with its limitations; you sense her impatience to break it open, to take inspiration for the shape of a story from music or sculpture ... Moore’s \'radiant turbulence\' will always beckon. You have to stick around for the show.
Jenny Odell
PanThe New YorkerIn Saving Time, with moss as muse, Odell deepens her approach and amplifies her pitch ... Odell approaches these matters with acute sensitivity and feeling. And yet a larger question persists. Why does a book so concerned with the looming issues of our day, and possessed of such an urgent authorial voice, feel like such a time sink? ... Odell marches us along, gesturing to choppy outlines of the books she consults to piece together the story. Her own thinking feels curiously muted ... Her collages produce not surprise or poignance but a sense of cutting and pasting, of breathless summary ... Why is this book about time in such a hurry? ... Perhaps her hope is to rush past the fact that so many of her observations are commonplaces ... As I read, I told myself that some hidden seams would surely be discovered, fresh evidence brought forth, complacencies unravelled ... Instead, we are led down a path of truisms to a well-padded account of how the capitalist logic of increase squeezes dignity from our days ... A book of hectic history and dutiful structural analysis, every sentence turtled against the arrows of social critique ... It is not an unusual experience to feel that one’s time has been misused by a book, but it is novel, and particularly vexing, to feel that one’s time has been misused by a passionate denunciation of the misuse of time ... Very often, problems of style and pacing are actually problems of thinking, and here is where one difficulty of Saving Time lies. Odell is working with ideas that demand careful, persuasive articulation ... Instead, we receive a relentless synthesis of other people’s work ... The absence of original thought is striking, suggestive.
Sheila Heti
PositiveThe New YorkerPure Colour has been written as if to foreclose literal-minded misapprehension. It is an explicitly mystical book about the creation of art and the creation of the universe, about the death of a father and the death of ego, about the uses and abuses of doubt. And it is written in a register that is so involute and so new for this writer that it demands bespoke criteria. As it happens, the subject of criticism runs through the book, as its hot, live wire. In Pure Colour, as absurd as it may seem (no false modesty here), criticism is summoned as a force that might save or destroy the world ... Mira’s father, a bear, dies and, in Heti’s unsettling description, the universe \'ejaculates\' his spirit into her. The two are drawn into a leaf, where they live and bicker affectionately for a time ... The leaf becomes a beautiful metaphor for grief in its trembling state of suspension between earth and sky ... All of it is sketched swiftly, faintly. This book, so full of argument, feels weightless. I note this with wonder, not censure. The characters seem constructed out of cobwebs. The plot is scarcely more than its synopsis, as if to prevent the metaphysical questions from being brushed away again. This weightlessness, this style that feels like the story—how has this been achieved, and to what end? ... Pure Colour, in turn, dispenses with fiction’s staples, including physical description, characterization, revealing dialogue, appreciable stakes, even basic sensory information. Heti is so parsimonious with details that the few she provides prickle and linger ... That austerity is a function of the challenge she sets herself—to tell a story about humans that is not scaled to them.
Jacqueline Rose
RaveThe New York TimesShe champions a \'scandalous feminism,\' an embrace of all the shameful, derided aspects of our nature, a refusal to fear or shun our own thoughts. Without it, we will continue to outsource our anxieties and aggression onto other people, onto entire other populations (today’s chief targets, she argues, include mothers, migrants, trans people, Palestinians) ... It is on this point that her book turns: how elaborately we conceal our violence from ourselves; how efficiently violence flourishes in those blind spots ... Rose also examines here the relationship between violence and blindness that she has narrated before in her own story ... Rose roves widely in this book. She considers sexual harassment, Harvey Weinstein, student protests in South Africa, depictions of violence in contemporary fiction ... These questions aren’t purely ethical. Rose searches for the modes that allow us to think more clearly and creatively ... For all her attraction to unruliness, Rose’s own sentences are cool, almost enameled in their polish and control. It’s in the movement of her prose, the way she seizes and furiously unravels ideas from her previous books, that we see the vigor and precision of her mind, the work of thinking, of forging new pathways that she holds up as rejoinder to the muteness of violence.
Terrance Hayes
RaveThe New York TimesAmerican Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, the new book by Terrance Hayes, has a claim to be among the first fully-fledged works to reckon with the presidency of Donald Trump — and one of the most surprising ... Each one is distinct: Some are sermons, some are swoons. They are acrid with tear gas, and they unravel with desire ... Hayes loves language; he loves the round vowel and crisp consonant. He loves to stuff a line full of sound (\'the lunk, the chump, the hunk of plunder\'), to write for the ear as well as the eye. His words call to be read aloud, to be tasted.
Arlene Stein
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt feels as if Stein has written this book imagining it might fall into the hands of those who need such a primer — much as she once did — and she wants to give them the fortification she yearned for. She depicts her subjects with warmth and respect, and strains to include as much as she can about the social, emotional, medical and psychological dimensions of transitioning. The result is frantically overstuffed but earnest, diligent and defiantly optimistic ... Stein repeatedly allows herself to be impolitic and wincingly frank, almost using herself as a foil for the limitations of second-wave feminism.
