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Recent Reviews
Zadie Smith
Positive The Evening Standard (UK) \"It’s not hard to build a case against The Fraud. The slave narrative is unforgettable, brilliantly handled – but it arrives too late. The three strands don’t always intermesh. The overlapping time frames can be confusing. The research can feel a bit In Our Time ... But remember the old definition of a novel as \'a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.\' It may not wholly convince, but moment to moment, The Fraud is a delight ... Inconsistent, yes. But a novel full of people, ideas, humor, feeling and something like moral truth – the stuff of life.\
George Saunders
Positive The Sunday Times (UK) At times Saunders\'s commentaries read like exactly what they are, dressed-up lecture notes — perhaps of limited interest to those not hell-bent on getting published in The New Yorker. Often he strains a little too hard to make it \'FUN!!\' ... his strength as an interpreter lies in his non-academic approach. He reads, as Vladimir Nabokov advised, with his back, alert to the shiver down the spine. He interrogates his own responses, asks you for yours, never quite settles for an all-encompassing interpretation ... Suffice to say, the hairs on the back of my neck were alert.
Shalom Auslander
Rave The Times (UK) If you are familiar with Auslander’s writing, there is much that will feel familiar here: the brutal deadpan, the themes of the individual versus the tribe, the destructive lure of victimhood, the irrationality of tradition, the awfulness of mothers. It’s not hard to find other ways to criticise Mother for Dinner too. Auslander can’t — or won’t — do action; the siblings are hard to tell apart; the broadsides at identity politics are predictable ... Does this matter? Surprisingly little. Mother for Dinner works for two reasons. One is that the conceit is inspired, ideally situated on the threshold of dream and reality. Taking his cue from Montaigne’s essay on cannibals, Auslander stretches cultural relativism to its limit. The Can-Ams become an every-minority (Seventh is variously mistaken for a Jew, an Arab, a black person and a Latino); their story becomes an every-story ... The second reason is that it has a terrific motor ... retains the propulsion of true farce right to the end. The stakes ratchet up; the unthinkable becomes inevitable; and by the end, it’s surprisingly moving. Like the cruellest cynics, Auslander proves a sentimentalist at heart ... So what if it’s the same book in a different key? Auslander is like Monet, painting the same haystacks over and over again, or Mallarmé, rewriting the same sonnet. He does one thing, but boy does he do it well. I wonder if his therapist forces him to write these things as part of his treatment every few years? Whatever, we are blessed.
Tamer Elnoury, Kevin Maurer
Rave The Times American Radical is a kinetic (and necessarily selective) account of his undercover career, co-written with Kevin Maurer, who also co-authored the bestselling No Easy Day, about the killing of Osama bin Laden. It’s the first time an active FBI agent has published a book remotely like it — Elnoury has two principal reasons for peeping out from behind the curtain now. The first is practical: the main international terrorism case detailed in the book was declassified for trial ... His second reason for publishing now is that these are challenging times for Muslims in Donald Trump’s America.