RavePopMatters... may be characterized as an incisive exploration of human relationships and loss, as a narrative both funny and darkly claustrophobic, as a truncated same-sex romance, an engaging mystery, and a startling exercise in gothic horror. Overarching these genres is an articulation of the concept of sinking, both in the sea and in life. This novel is both an expertly crafted work of fiction and a transformation fable, a modernist one without a moral ... This novel is much more than high-concept fiction. While anchored by this simple but suspenseful throughline, Armfield expertly takes us on many time-looping, backstory journeys: the history of Miri and Leah and their relationship, their quarrels, their mothers, and their interactions with friends, all of which effectively illuminate these characters ... a tour de force, especially impressive as it is a debut novel, although her book of stories, 2020’s salt slow, has already won her acclaim. Armfield seamlessly weaves dual narratives and blends multiple genres and looping narrative time into a coherent, beautifully written, and often funny whole. In an era of dampening spirits, this novel is an example of escapism, yes, but escapism with a substance that’s well worth sinking your own teeth into.
Missouri Williams
PositivePop MattersPerhaps reminiscent of something that might be served up by the Coen brothers ... The problem here is that the weirdness is not just a patent, surface feature of the world Williams creates. The narrative is all surface all the way down, a static world that is weird through and through, without relief ... a perverse tale of human remnants scratching out a bare survival like a lone pine twisting out of a stony cliff, but is it a tale well-told? Williams is an excellent debut author at the level of her beautifully wrought sentences, virtually all of them crafted with unwavering philosophical and artistic aplomb ... It is at the larger-scale narrative structure that Williams falters. If reading The Doloriad can be said to be a labor of love, it is, yet, a labor. Her paragraphs are lengthy, dense, and daunting, making for a difficult read. But more important is an issue of narrative structure ... Williams does an excellent job of establishing her characters and setting, but from that point on the plot flattens; there is no pulse. The beautifully-rendered gothic grotesqueries lead to a few dramatic set pieces, but there is no action rising toward a climax and resolution. The tale, like Dolores, seems to pull itself along the ground ... Williams may well have envisioned her work as experimental fiction and, if so, we might question whether the experiment, as a whole, succeeds. In the end, it can be said that this imaginative work does succeed, if not fully as stand-alone fiction then as evidence that an excellent new writer has emerged, one with a strong voice, one who is a confident crafter of deep and beautiful language that gives birth to vivid characters and sense of place. Missouri Williams, it is safe to say, is a writer to watch.
Andrew Lipstein
PositivePop MattersLipstein deftly uses the publication of a widely read but critical article reviewing Caleb’s novel to raise an interesting philosophical interpretation of novel-writing as a way to cheat mortality ... The narrator’s extraordinarily rich inner life makes this novel tick but carries with it the risk of pacing his story too slowly between major plot points; there is much ruminating leading to quotidian busyness on the part of the narrator, which might enhance characterization but does not always move the narrative forward ... Lipstein’s treatment of the writing and publication of fiction is refracted through an ingenious lens. The legal wrangling results in the notions of authorial credit and authorial remuneration being split apart, the concept of ‘story’ is set against that of ‘novel’, and ‘character’ distinguished from ‘real person’ ... Although certain turns in the path nearing the novel’s ultimate resolution may strike readers as at times unrealistic (until the reveal of a final, clarifying plot twist), Lipstein presents a richly drawn and clever tale. He is adept at weaving timelines, framing with finesse scenes involving multiple flashbacks. Lipstein is a confident writer, presenting a complex and often funny story involving a panoply of characters under pressure, both social and legal.
J. Robert Lennon
PositivePopMatters... a very good book that serves up what feels like a very bad dream. Imbued with dream-logic, the plot unfolds for the unnamed narrator along a path laden with mercurial transformations, uncertainty, and memories that are always just barely out of reach ... a Kafkaesque tale with attention to minute detail ... This sort of narrative risks going entirely off the rails in a most uninteresting way. Lennon, however, is in control, adept at stringing curious set pieces together to create a dreamlike world that has momentum and logic all its own and that captures the reader in much the same way that a dream ensnares its dreamer. The author is skillful at creating a very willing suspension of disbelief while immersing the reader in a surprisingly coherent experience of the incoherent with a surprisingly satisfying ending.
Betina González, tr. Heather Cleary
PositivePopMatters... a good challenge, its braided strands of storyline forming a convoluted vine. It\'s easy to find oneself lost, sentence by sentence, in its tendrils and tangents, but when viewed from a bit of distance, teh novel can be apprehended as one organic, twining whole ... The difficulty of American Delirium lies not with the plot but rather with its somewhat scattered mode of presentation and in the end, the author\'s tying-up feels a bit engineered and hurried ... On the other hand, and not to be discounted, throughout American Delirium we find characters\' interesting ruminations upon a variety of important matters ... González\'s descriptive writing is very strong throughout and the novel\'s quirky, creative energy is engaging.
Giacomo Sartori
PositivePhiladelphia Inquirer\"As its title promises, it will satisfy readers longing for a narrator who is omniscient (literally) and, at the same time, unreliable ... quirky and ingenious ... Sartori does a beautiful job of describing such spectacular cosmic matters throughout ... The text is rendered into natural, accessible, and idiomatic English, a pleasure to read, by award-winning translator Frederika Randall.\