PositiveCleveland Review of BooksBennett’s latest work distinguishes itself with a peculiar attention to language and detail that is both whimsical and punctilious, colloquial and coy. Tracing the life of a writer from her first encounters with books, Checkout 19 is bursting with anecdote. It is a book telling stories about telling stories—those remembered, retold, written down, and made up—where the line between what’s imagined, what’s happened, why it matters and what matters anyhow is continually teased and obscured ... What occupies most of the book is detail, stringent in its refusal to reveal more than the fact of itself, and extravagant in its profusion and eccentricity ... Throughout, one feels the narrator is creating her stories out of midair and then immediately and insistently convincing herself and the reader of their veracity, sometimes by the expansion of their image and then sometimes by an emphasis on the embarrassing persistence of little words ... Both stories and memories alike take on a hypothetical air, and the reader is often jarred when reminded of their past-ness; that they have either or both happened before and been told already—sometimes even within Checkout 19 itself ... Description is both relished and ironized by the question of its usefulness (to what? Narrative?) ... One a little less dizzily absorbed by the literary world could suppose a book about books a little haughty and insular. Bennett’s ultimate design, though, is not to be read so earnestly. What turns Checkout 19’s screw is the acute self-awareness of how things are said, that everything said is a commentary on how it’s said and not for the proposition that it is somehow right or wrong.
Karl Geary
PositiveZYZZYVAKarl Geary’s first novel, Montpelier Parade, presents us with the fraught experience of first love, told in beautifully doleful prose that sometimes exhibits Salinger-esque sparseness ...a delicate work that treats its subject with great sensitivity, ensuring we experience that same tenderness of feeling that Sonny does, and hear the words on the page like the brutally honest voice of a friend ... A quiet and keen observer, Sonny breaks the reader’s heart in the most banal of ways. The moments of tragedy in Sonny’s life are delivered in the same quietly devastating manner as his mundane experience... By the time Sonny’s two worlds collide –– the world he lustfully imagines and the one that comprises his waking life –– Montpelier Parade leaves us as it leaves Sonny, pondering how life can be both empty and full at once.
