PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksIntimate ... Ends blurrily ... Some readers might sour at the inconclusive ending. But in my mind, nothing is more appropriate for a novel about religion’s hauntings, about religion and art and desire overrunning language and all its forms, including the novel. Kwon understands that these stories cannot have clean endings because something always escapes the telling. We end up silent, tense, gesturing, pointing.
Helen DeWitt
RaveThe MillionsDeWitt’s writing has a style: full of mathematical and polyglottal jargon, littered with footnotes, populated by characters with intransigent opinions. And DeWitt’s writing is about style, all those problems of aesthetics and taste ... The English Understand Wool is barely 50 pages long, comprised of short chapters and dominated by white space ... In the context of DeWitt’s work, \'minor\' can never be applied in general ... DeWitt mostly ignores the minor things that obsess so much contemporary literary fiction, all the bits and motes of the natural world, grasses and sunlight and birdcalls ... For DeWitt and her characters, differences are key. In their devotion to aesthetic life, her characters make detailed distinctions and fine judgements of taste. Her work, in turn, attends to the differences between those characters, the circumstances of their lives—which is where all good work, aesthetic and political, major and minor, begins.
K-Ming Chang
RaveSlant... resists words like \'magical\' and \'mythical\' and \'dreamlike\' because it takes magic, myth, and dreams so seriously. Given that so many new books include those words or others (from \'fabulous\' to \'innovative\') on their covers and in their blurbs, when new fiction arrives that really demands them, clarification is needed. No, no…this is the real deal. For better and worse, Gods of Want actually tries to be new, to see what a short story can hold. The collection is, refreshingly, very strange ... Because Chang’s fiction doesn’t really recognize a distinction between the magical and nonmagical, the invisible lines between familiar categories—natural and supernatural, or dangerous and loving—smear and run like watercolors ... Despite Bestiary’s success, Gods of Want’s 16 stories suggest that the short story is the form best suited to Chang’s fiction ... Chang takes so well to the short story because its compression intensifies the effect of her style. The short story’s limitations of size and scope allow things we might consider smaller than plot and character (like voice, setting, or tone) to be a story’s engine, its featured attraction. In other words, the boundedness of the short story works as the taut wire for Chang’s acrobatics of language and image. Like a stage or a playing field, the form of the short story establishes the limited space where things occur. Where Bestiary occasionally sprawls through generations, countries, and magical incarnations, Gods of Want’s best stories narrow their apertures ... In some places Gods of Want works less well, and these moments point to the difficulty of Chang’s highwire act. The stories almost always end the same, with mysterious rituals and shadowy images, everything suspended. Sometimes these endings, their lack of closure, feel appropriate; sometimes they feel a little generic, interchangeable. Occasionally Chang lingers too long, makes one move too many ... Chang’s characters, like all her stories in Gods of Want, are hungry for meat and blood—and for love, identity, a world. None of these hungers is metaphorical. Each is simply, magically, another kind of wanting.
Hanya Yanagihara
PanChicago Review of BooksTo Paradise is boring ... This is the novel’s image of itself: something at first bizarre, and then interesting, but finally vague. Put bluntly, the novel’s sections do not work alone, nor do they work together ... Rather, they feel like beacons we’re meant to triangulate, dots we’re supposed to connect, in order to see in the negative space whatever Yanagihara’s point is. Even though a great deal happens in the novel—for me, keeping track of characters and relationships and histories of the narrative worlds required not-insignificant marginalia—each section feels porous, full of gaps and winks that become deflating rather than beguiling ... Just as the novel begins stories it leaves unrealized, it lays out ideas without saying much about them ... references don’t coalesce into something more complex, a claim or a knot. Imperialism, racism, homophobia, stratifications of class—these structures of power are related, but they aren’t identical, and the novel shifts between them in imprecise way.
Alex McElroy
PositiveThe Kenyon Review... not another Internet Novel. McElroy reproduces a feeling, a vibe, of the internet without making the internet the primary object of attention. The internet is a useful readymade, the smoke machine that produces the novel’s climate, because this climate—a mixing-up of the bizarre, brutal, and banal—fits McElroy’s actual object: white American masculinity ... The novel’s tone is zany, zeitgeisty ... The Atmospherians is best when it declines to psychologize, to reduce the problems of masculinity to the scale of particular traumas. The novel’s sometimes-wackiness helps resist this psychological reduction, as does its conversion of men into archetypes ... McElroy’s doubled, paradoxical voice captures this indistinguishability of masculinity’s mundanity and its viciousness. The novel falters when it falls back on easier answers ... This paradoxical writing of a new masculinity washed white as snow is also a whitewashing of the past, a covering-up. Even when men are separated from the outside world for their own good (like endangered creatures) and for the world’s (like hazardous materials), blood and danger remain stubbornly present, just beneath the surface.
Chang-Rae Lee
MixedThe Rumpus... everything is brimming and overfull, the energy a constant buzz ... It’s a weird novel ... nearly everything has been knocked askew, the frame set just slightly off-kilter ... the novel plucks tidbits from recent literary fiction ... It’s a dizzying catalog of references. If My Year Abroad is a tasting menu, it’s a very long one, and the flavors don’t always fit together—though the attempt is audacious. It prefers the personal to the political, the palate to the protest ... the novel’s heart is not political but sensual. It’s interested in hunger and consumption, specifically Tiller’s, at the expense of all else. The political slides away, and we move so quickly from moment to moment and taste to taste we’re not always given time to savor or ruminate on things as they pile up—especially the instances of trauma, which tend to slip away unprocessed ... in the end, My Year Abroad feels contemporary but not cutting-edge, a well-prepared version of an older recipe.
Ben Lerner
RaveSlantThe Topeka School is the best novel of the Donald Trump era thus far—in no small part because it isn’t much interested in Trump. Rather, it investigates the weird and twisty relationships between Trump’s political context and the state of American language ... some lines in The Topeka School are as fine as any he’s written ... The Topeka School continues this project of redefining identity as a collection of many versions of oneself scattered throughout time. What’s changed is Lerner’s scope ... The Topeka School succeeds, in part, by rejecting uncomplicated constructions of blame or causality ... There’s room to hope that this isn’t, in fact, the end of history, and that things spread out might be called back in again. Maybe the most remarkable thing about The Topeka School is the way it models this possibility by gathering together the apparently distant and unrelated ... sincere and generous.
