PositiveZYZZYVAMatthew Specktor explores the pulls—and perils—of chasing success in Always Crashing in the Same Car, an eloquent account of dark nights of the soul that mirrors the writing of his early idol, F. Scott Fitzgerald ... The other snapshots here are equally adept, combining melancholy with the saving graces of humor and hard-won perspective.
Scott O'Connor
RaveZYZZYVA... enthralling ... a spooky, sometimes sepulchral portrait ... plot summaries do not begin to do justice to the author’s measured invitations to join him into the vertiginous worlds his characters inhabit. It’s a combination of a literal ghost story—O’Connor is also an accomplished television writer, and his story arc training serves him well—and a metaphysical attempt to question the ground on which we stand, the air we breathe. What is real? he asks, providing no answers ... Not the least of his technical accomplishments is writing the tale largely through the point of view of Jess and Isabelle without raising questions of gender—or breaking a sweat. Like Alice, they fall into their dreams of life, and we are there for the journey ... the creation of his anti-hero Tanner, a pustular prophet with growths all over his body who nevertheless has a mesmerizing effect on those he entices into his orbit, is an amazing achievement ... an awful, completely convincing creature of our times, worthy of Dostoyevsky (or Stephen King).
Madison Smartt Bell
RaveZYZZYVA... [a] his masterly new biography ... He takes a deliberately flat, noncommittal approach to describing Stone’s addictions to alcohol and painkillers ... It’s a reconstruction, not deconstruction, of the life and works of this resolutely realistic author ... despite the tenuous position of acting as anyone’s Boswell, particularly a close friend, Bell reserves judgment. The result is a book that serves as an act of friendship, scholarship, and devotion.
Matthew Zapruder
PositiveAlta... eloquent ... Zapruder combines the vernacular ease of the New York Poets with an appreciation for the pleasures of living on the rim ... He misses occasionally: poems addressing Paul Ryan and Roseanne Barr are directed at too-easy targets. But when he soars, he’s unmatchable ... It’s the reach, the attention to daily life and the dream world we simultaneously inhabit, that gives Zapruder’s work its distinctive force.
Ann Beattie
PositiveZYZZYVA... may bear an outward resemblance to the kids in The Dead Poets Society or A Separate Peace. But the author is stalking bigger game, offering pitiless status details with deadpan reserve.
Don Winslow
MixedSan Francisco Chronicle\"Winslow, a former private eye and insurance investigator, clearly knows the drug trade inside and out. This level of detail can’t be faked ... Unfortunately, too often The Cartel lacks [Elmore] Leonard’s snap, crackle and pop — or the wit that marked Winslow’s earlier novels ... the zesty, lubricious energy of The Power of the Dog is absent here, along with the lightness of tone of the earlier books, and it sometimes feels as if the author is putting together plot points in the service of the narrative, rather than the other way around ... And yet Winslow’s depiction of appalling conditions that we ignore at our peril is without peer.\
Seth Greenland
MixedSan Francisco ChronicleGreenland takes up the realistic torch in his new novel, The Hazards of Good Fortune — be assured, they are plentiful — which casts a satiric eye on the inconvenient intersections between late-stage capitalism, racial politics and the unintended consequences of technology ... [Greenland\'s] portrayal of race is more nuanced than that of Wolfe, who too often lapsed into stereotypical patois while rendering his version of black dialogue ... He deserves props for taking on a broad canvas — controversies of the day, from Black Lives Matter to Occupy fading in the rear view as we respond to the latest tweets. But what he gains in width, he too often lacks in depth ... He has a weakness for plot twists that get his characters off the hook — no spoilers; read it and see — and The Hazards of Good Fortune is no exception ... Greenland deserves credit for taking on our increasingly dysfunctional republic. Stalking the beast is no mean task. But in the end, Gladstone, no less than Gatsby, has to come to terms with the accident, and hazards, of fortune.
Joan Didion
PositiveThe San Francisco Chronicle...exemplify Didion’s signature brand of reportorial haiku — her pitiless camera eye, razor-sharp wit and telling techniques of self-deprecation that only bring the reader — at least this reader — further along for the ride ... She has an unerring ear, for the cliched, the false, the overstated ... 'There is no real way to deal with everything we lose,' Didion has written. But it may be that what we make of that loss is what makes everything else matter.
David Grossman
MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleHere, well translated by Jessica Cohen, Grossman seems to be channeling Philip Roth, circa Portnoy’s Complaint, with a colloquial voice that badgers, bullies, berates and beseeches as the hapless narrator tries to come to terms with the primal wound of his past ... Lazar’s presence at the club feels like a false construct, made more to enhance plot points than emotional engagement ... Grossman’s tragic vision never leaves him, even if the vehicle here is more reminiscent of Laurence Olivier’s performance as the failed actor in John Osborne’s The Entertainer than the fictional landscapes we are familiar with from this author.
Richard Russo
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleRusso writes old-fashioned novels, the kind with characters and plot development, not asterisks or moody ellipses. And his subjects are old-fashioned people who live in the kind of blue-collar small towns where everyone knows everyone else’s business, but (usually) reserve judgment ... Russo’s compassionate heart is open to the sorrows, and yes, the foolishness of this lonely world, but also the humor, friendship and love that abide.
