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Recent Reviews
Justin Torres
Positive The Guardian Torres does write very well. His language has focus and clarity and the occasional wonderful surprise, like the mother being \'a confused goose of a woman\' ... But this is also a very heavy-handed book, far too self-consciously serious in its style, and it lays on its symbolism with unnecessary thickness ... Nor does the novel\'s ending cohere with the rest, as hints about our narrator\'s nascent sexuality suddenly explode in a tempest that feels melodramatic ... Still, there is enormous potential evident in We the Animals. With a lighter touch, Torres could have some very interesting novels ahead of him.
Tom McCarthy
Mixed The Guardian The narrator is haunted by the smell of cordite; there are characters who might not be real; and he begins to fall into catatonic trances brought on by the re-enactments. Is this purgatory? Did he in fact die in the traumatic event? McCarthy wisely lets the question remain open, finding instead a marvellous closing image of a plane flying a figure of eight - which, of course, is also the symbol for infinity. There are some bumps on the way. The randomness of the re-enactments may be philosophically sound, but it drains more momentum than it should. And the final re-enactment of a bank robbery, while asking interesting questions about perceived reality, drifts too far into blunt Chuck Palahniuk territory to be as satisfyingly subtle as what has gone before. Still, this is a refreshingly idiosyncratic, enjoyably intelligent read by a writer with ideas and talent.
Richard Powers
Positive The Guardian If the hallmark of great American writers has always been fearless ambition, then Powers and perhaps the even more scarily cerebral William T Vollmann are the natural next step: they render the novel of ideas as not merely an intellectual exercise, but also emotionally intense and truthfully human ... his writing is so persuasive that you're usually carried along by sheer momentum, only occasionally needing to stop and grab a dictionary ... Powers's one larger failing as a writer, however, is a lack of natural levity. I've now read five of his novels, and I can't recall a single easy laugh in any of them. This is especially felt in The Echo Maker ... It's an odd failing for a writer so otherwise observant, but ultimately even this complaint is subsumed, like the occasional techy references, under the force of Powers's prose and ideas. For this, finally, is a novel of unseemly richness and complexity, never dry or condescending, always weaving its way towards an unsettling emotional climax.
Paul Murray
Positive The Guardian Skippy's collapse doesn't appear where you think it will chronologically, and Murray takes the time to explore the aftermath. There is tenderness, too, and heartache and real pain. Ruprecht even uses string theory to prove that the universe might literally be ‘built out of loneliness,’ which is exactly what adolescence feels like. Is a 661-page boarding-school comedy, no matter how funny or touching, rather too much of a good thing? Perhaps here and there, but for the most part, Skippy Dies is so appealing and surprising that the pages pass with ease.
Colson Whitehead
Rave The Guardian Idea versus performance, though, can be a useful way of overcoming reading prejudices, particularly in a book as boundary-blurring as Zone One by Colson Whitehead ...Whitehead isn't your usual zombie singer. He never overburdens the zombies with allegory or omits the requisite gore, but he does what all artists do: he observes, closely, and reports back what he sees ...does have a tendency to overwrite –– sentences sometimes grow so rhythmical, you fail to take in their actual meaning as the words wash over you –– but he achieves a kind of miracle of tone. A fragile hope permeates these pages, one so painful and tender, it's heartbreaking.
Nicole Krauss
Rave The Guardian Great House centres on a massive writer's desk. Filled with 19 awkwardly shaped drawers, one of which is never unlocked, it is ‘an enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of a room.’ The desk has come to be vitally important, if sometimes obliquely, to four different characters, who each tell their stories in portmanteau style … The plotting here is subtle and fractured, almost demanding a second reading to put all the pieces together. Mainly, though, Great House is a meditation on loss and memory and how they construct our lives. It takes its title from a talmudic idea of Jerusalem after the Temple was destroyed by the Romans, a ‘great house’ that was burned … Great House is a smart, serious, sharply written novel of great care and yearning.