MixedDrift MagThe Raffi essays raise fascinating and thorny questions about children’s rights to digital privacy, and how the internet has influenced our willingness to accept levels of access into people’s lives we would have once found unthinkable and likely grotesque ... I wanted to see Gessen grapple with these questions in Raising Raffi ... But Gessen’s new memoir is strangely devoid of reflection on the ethics of writing about his own child ... \'There was a particular gap, I thought, in the dad literature,”\'he writes. \'In the few books out there, we were either stupid dad, who can’t do anything right, or superdad, a self-proclaimed feminist and caretaker.\' Rather than charting a third course, Gessen sort of combines the two existing options, providing a voice for the voiceless: dads who don’t really know what they’re doing, but are well-educated and extremely involved and sure as hell going to overthink it ... Gessen’s writing about Raffi is sweet and exasperated and often quite funny — I found myself laughing aloud at his descriptions of their squabble ... But I felt sort of strange about it, too, the same feeling that comes over me when I realize I’ve become a little too invested in the Instagram presence of some couples I vaguely know ... Part of the problem here is that Raising Raffi doesn’t quite know what kind of book it’s trying to be ... Gessen’s ambivalence about how much of his culture to pass on to Raffi is the most interesting part of his memoir, precisely because it’s highly specific.
Alexandra Kleeman
PositiveHigh Country NewsThe first few chapters are a funny, if clichéd, send-up of Hollywood...As Patrick and Cassidy embark on a series of investigative forays to marginal warehouses across LA, the novel becomes California neo-noir, tipping its hat to Raymond Chandler and Thomas Pynchon. Patrick is one of the genre’s less-compelling guides: Philip Marlowe if you replaced his grit with petulance, or Doc Sportello minus the loopy charm. But his neurasthenic passivity is an unsurprising response to a world whose ills include not just greed and corruption but a world-historical catastrophe. Kleeman shows how climate change is the ultimate noir subject: Human action and inaction tragically combine to produce a fate as sure as an incoming asteroid ... This third-act upending of both genre and conventional narrative structure elevates the novel into something much stranger and more transcendent than is obvious at the outset. It is here that Kleeman really shines.
Alexandra Kleeman
MixedHigh Country NewsThe first few chapters are a funny, if clichéd, send-up of Hollywood ... Patrick is one of the genre’s less-compelling guides: Philip Marlowe if you replaced his grit with petulance, or Doc Sportello minus the loopy charm. But his neurasthenic passivity is an unsurprising response to a world whose ills include not just greed and corruption but a world-historical catastrophe ... This inexorable slouch toward disaster lowers the stakes of the conspiracy, which comes off as an unsurprising, if nefarious, byproduct of a world with widening inequality and ever-diminishing resources, rather than something in possession of its own propulsive energy. Patrick and Cassidy eventually solve the mystery, but it doesn’t matter ... This third-act upending of both genre and conventional narrative structure elevates the novel into something much stranger and more transcendent than is obvious at the outset. It is here that Kleeman really shines.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksNguyen is a perceptive, scathing, and genuinely funny writer, qualities which suffused The Sympathizer and are somewhat more unevenly on display here. Other artists (Marie NDiaye, Michael Haneke, Kamel Daoud) who have explored the long and brutal legacy of the French Empire have done it more subtly and to more devastating effect. In comparison, the captain’s observations as he arrives to his new place of refuge feel, well, American: obvious and somewhat oversimplified. There are near-constant comparisons between the two countries’ ways of doing colonialism. I felt a little like I was reading Adam Gopnik if he’d been sent to a reeducation camp and forced to mainline Fanon. What these observations are not, though, is sanitized or sentimental. There are no rose-colored glasses to be found here ... Nguyen accurately and convincingly depicts a city that both leans on and marginalizes its immigrant and refugee populations ... The insistence on cycling between pronouns to depict this disintegration often feels more like a gimmick than a convincing literary device. Still, Crazy Bastard remains a fascinating narrator ... the furious pace of this novel rarely let up ... There is almost no respite from this, and thus almost no room for the reader to feel the full weight of the horror that underlies this world ... The moments of pause, when they do come, testify powerfully to this reverberating violence, and to Nguyen’s considerable skills as a novelist.
An Yu
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... unlike Murakami’s whimsical, magical realist plots, Braised Pork’s central journey is interior: the incremental and circuitous process of a human mind trying to come to terms with itself. Reading, I thought not of Murakami but of Freud ... Reading along, you experience the feeling of slowly lowering your body into a dark pool, letting the water rise: now to your shoulders, now to your chin, now — ceasing to breathe — to the bridge of your nose ... This is a haunting, coolly written novel: deeply psychological but utterly lacking in theory or jargon. Yu’s sentences are unadorned, neither lyrical nor terse. Many are awkward, but this didn’t detract from the book’s appeal for me; if anything, I appreciated the rare refusal to mimic the looping sentences of lyrical prose stylists ... Though Braised Pork is not particularly special on the sentence level, individual scenes and descriptions have an impact that seems to bypass language and go straight to feeling ... The novel is also intensely atmospheric. Certain settings remain in my head like filmic images ... Though Yu does a wonderful job conveying the social paradoxes of contemporary Beijing, a trip to Tibet to follow the trail of the fish symbol is oddly shorn of political or social reality...The place feels like a backdrop for Jia Jia’s personal quest, serving merely to provide a sense of difference, and it all comes off as the equivalent of a white backpacker going on a journey of self-discovery to a country their nation colonized.
