MixedThe TImes Literary Supplement (UK)The pieces by Mitchell and Saunders are thoughtful about the writing process, and seem like true assessments of the impact of these LPs on their own creative growth. In the case of many of the other writers collected here, though, the claimed epiphanies are harder to digest ... This tone of soaring overstatement is so prevalent in Long Players that you begin to wonder where it comes from, and whether these albums, if they really were as life-altering as is claimed, may have played a part ... It isn’t difficult, in fact, to see a direct line between [Olivia] Laing’s prose and Stipe’s vocal performance on a song like Everybody Hurts: what they share is a sort of forced tenderness, unrelenting and, in the end, slightly dubious. Laing’s voice, like Lockwood’s and Taneja’s, is in a specific contemporary register ... [Daisy] Johnson’s words ring with the familiar sonorities, as well as the jargon, of the rhetoric of personal empowerment. This is a verbal manner that currently seems inescapable: it’s there in the clarion calls of social media activists, in Instagram communiqués designed to bolster self-esteem, and, increasingly, in the op-eds of Generation-Z-chasing media outlets. It’s so rife among the authors here that it’s reasonable to ask how much pop music itself is responsible for its mixture of syrupy boosterism and worn-out lyrical frills. You do worry, reading some of the more emotive pieces in Long Players, about the damage that music may have done to literary writing—to several generations, now, of poets and novelists ... It’s a relief, then, that a handful of contributors remind us what else music can bring to a writer’s repertoire of themes and techniques.
Gabriel Krauze
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)One of the reasons Who They Was is so striking is that characters in contemporary literary fiction – especially male characters, and especially writing in the first person – aren’t really supposed to be like this ... If the narrative is a little episodic and lacking in overall design, we don’t necessarily notice, because the voice has such pulse and swagger as it whips us from one scene of casual cruelty to the next. Whatever damage the tower blocks have done to Krauze personally, they have also, by steeping him in this vernacular, so fertile and yet relatively unheard in fiction, provided him with a huge bonus as a novelist.
