RaveThe New Yorker... a portrait, in language, of female consciousness, truer than anything written since Sappho’s Fragment 31 ... It’s a difficult book in which to find your footing. There are all sorts of references in it, to Schoenberg, to Vienna, to historical events, not all of which the reader will catch. But once you’re in, you’re in. You’re not decoding. Toward the end, you’re racing along, deep in the rhythms of the narrator’s thoughts, which are bone-true and demonically intelligent—and I mean it would be a real burden to be that mentally acute, it can’t go well for a person to know that much, it can only lead to ill health, drinking, and despair—and then the novel careens over a cliff ... [The narrator] is steeped in a broad lexicon of existential issues that burn her like lit cigarettes. She’s also very funny, especially in the third section of the book, when her mind goes into overdrive.
Denis Johnson
RaveBookforum\"Denis Johnson, in all his work, aimed to locate the hidden, actual face of things. But the new stories build without those miraculous balls of hail, and their truths are necessarily deeper, and more precise, true as you would true a wheel … It feels like the paced vision of a writer who has been made to understand that life is fairly rude and somewhat short, but that the world contains an uneven distribution of grace, and that wisdom lies in recognizing where it—such grace—has presented itself. The stories are about death and immortality, art and its reach, and they ask elemental questions about fiction, not as a literary genre but as a human tendency … These stories ask you to step into the room and listen closely. They are not showy anthems, and in many cases, they have dispensed with hindsight altogether.\
