PanVultureShe has fallen into a rhythm, following each mystically inclined, formally challenging work with a light genre riff more focused on dictating a salient political message than pushing the bounds of art or reality. Unfortunately, her newest novel, The Empusium, only amplifies this pattern ... The novel’s endless conversations [have] a deadly flat quality because the ideas in question are not meant to be substantive. They are feints, leading us back to a fundamental misogyny. The arguments feel cobbled together from external sources because they are ... Crams potentially interesting ideas inside the straitjacket of a basic horror plot ... Space must be made for the reader to make their own associations and draw their own conclusions. Irony, ambiguity, ambivalence: all create a chance for misunderstanding. But they also create the necessary gap between author and reader that creates the space for meaning ... The Empusium is rarely more than it appears and frequently much less.
Jo Hamya
PositiveThe Washington Post\"Rather than assigning a particular voice to each character, Hamya deploys a fluid prose style, toggling between participants as emotional states become unglued. What is real, what is imagined, what is performed: In Hamya’s confident hands, it all becomes productively confused. The result is a novel about how writers attempt to mediate their lives through art, and the necessarily incomplete nature of that attempt ... There is both more and less nuance in The Hypocrite than that description implies. At its best—and this novel is largely very good — it operates in a zone of dissonance and uncertainty, in which complete but irreconcilable perspectives clash ... suffers when it occasionally wanders beyond its walls to comment on The Way We Live Now. All the references to masks and distancing protocols turn a historic pandemic into mere window dressing ... When it tethers itself to the behaviors and terminology of our immediate past, the book falters; but when Hamya allows her characters to live, breathe, spit and snarl, her fiction soars.\
Adam Ehrlich Sachs
PositiveThe Washington PostSachs... is a clever, self-aware storyteller, and he draws creative tension from his ostensibly childlike narrative form ... The Organs of Sense was a dense book, full of incident, yet always cohesive; at times, Gretel struggles to maintain a similar feeling, following unnecessary paths that can weaken individual stories ... But perhaps this is the point. Where his previous novel expanded our sense of history, Gretel collapses it.
Mauro Javier Cardenas
RaveThe Washington PostOne of the most affecting and inventive English-language novels in recent memory, a playful and experimental narrative about narratives in which the question of who is telling the story — and how they go about doing it — proves the real subject ... No simple narrative of injury and restoration, American Abductions threads together a vast psychic web — a shared imaginary, shaped by both grand policy and petty malice, a pain that seeps into our collective unconscious, haunting even our dreams.
Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. by Michael Hofmann
RaveThe Washington PostSlippery, assured ... Erpenbeck doesn’t reduce their romance to mere allegory. She makes the past feel vital and alive, narrating it all in a loose, fluid, present-tense style that often interweaves Katharina’s thoughts with those of Hans, presenting their dialogues as long, unbroken sentences, the better to highlight their collaborative quality ... Frequently reads like a collage, braiding together art and history and music ... Erpenbeck presents the intimate and the momentous with equal emphasis, so that personal and historical time run on nearly parallel tracks, until they have no choice but to converge ... She has made the past seem like the present.
Benjamin Balint
MixedThe Washington PostHe runs through the facts of Schulz’s childhood and artistic life, but he devotes the majority of the book to Schulz’s life under the Nazi occupation ... The author narrates in detail the discovery, removal and eventual public display of the murals. Balint uses the events to probe questions of cultural and ethnic ownership ... Balint’s reportage on the murals scandal is both briskly written and thorough; his ill-advised flights of pseudo-Schulzian prose are less successful. Yet this new book frequently feels like a missed opportunity. Schulz still does not have his own full-dress biography originally written in English, something he has surely earned. But Balint is more interested in the great writer’s enslavement and the aftermath of his death than in the vast majority of his life.
John Darnielle
RaveThe New RepublicSplit into seven interlocking sections and told over centuries, the novel is an inventive exploration of which stories we prioritize and which we push down, in our popular hunger for narratives of crime, justice, and redemption. Darnielle marshals his many interests toward something approaching social critique ... Devil House is at times an investigation, a memoir, a piece of reportage, and, in its most elusive moment, the story of a British king by the name of Gorbonian, written in the sort of faux–old English favored by writers of low-rent swords and sorcery ... This is fundamentally a novel about whose perspectives we gravitate toward and whose we bury when telling stories about crime and suffering ... The novel’s best moments describe extremes. Darnielle expertly handles the violent scenes, presenting the death and dismemberment in a cool, controlled voice, heightening the horror by his refusal to obscure it ... but I wasn’t sure I’d learned anything new about Jesse at all. He had been consumed entirely by what Parul Sehgal recently termed \'the Trauma Plot,\' that tendency writers have lately taken toward prioritizing suffering in place of characterization ... Jesse is all wound, no person ... Or so I felt until the novel’s final section ... It’s a formally audacious [book], a work of fiction-presented-as-truth nested inside this larger fictional project that serves, ultimately, as an exploration of writing fictionalized reality.
