RaveBarnes & Noble ReviewOttessa Moshfegh hasn’t just walked the literary tightrope that is the existential novel: she’s cartwheeled across. Her new book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is an odyssey of consciousness ... Moshfegh’s performance is all the more impressive because the protagonist she invented is so unlikely ... If this character sounds somewhat familiar, that’s because she’s the type to turn up in stories as a detestable foil to illustrate, oh, name it—rampant materialism, shallow mean-girl posturing, the soulless art scene, frat-house eye candy. She’s practically never a fully realized character ... Subverting the conventional is her calling card ... The material may be heavy, but Moshfegh’s treatment of these many themes is deft and ironic enough that they never feel didactic or obvious ... The humor is so dark that sometimes it’s hard to see at all ... The experience of reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation is not unlike sitting in a deer stand for hours, waiting to catch a glimpse of something other than woods. If you’re patient, a sudden deviation from the norm may offer a flash of insight or emotion.
Gabriel Tallent
RaveThe Barnes & Noble ReviewMartin is so fully realized that the daughter Tallent conjures would have to be remarkable to serve as his counterweight. The half-wild, vulnerable Turtle Alveston, whose conscience is the beacon of this dark book, proves up to the challenge. She has a center of gravity all her own ... Turtle’s awakening, as she continues to hold her father’s love in her heart even as she comes to recognize his ugliness, is the arc of Tallent’s story. My Absolute Darling is full of dramatic events, including a harrowing account of her and Jacob’s self-rescue after being washed out to sea by a giant wave. What makes the novel riveting, though, is Tallent’s gift for describing the psychological terrain Turtle traverses. The dynamics between abusive parents and their children are written about much more often than they are understood by their authors. Tallent captures the nuances ... Tallent has created — to use a shopworn but apt description — an unforgettable heroine, whose greatest challenge is to recognize the good and the bad within her and to choose the good.
Nicole Krauss
RaveThe Barnes & Noble Review...a montage of four haunting human portraits, each so engrossing that the effect is of a spotlight switching from one character to another … Krauss [has an] astounding capacity for creating empathetic and fully imagined characters who, in the few pages allotted them, manage to relay the full spectrum of happiness, anguish, anxiety, self-doubt, and hope that has colored their lives … Krauss excels at incubating moments of human understanding—epiphanies, if you will, though that word can suggest a cheap or easy realization, and Krauss’s epiphanies feel organic and earned—that resonate with readers as much as they do with her own fictional creations.
Hari Kunzru
PanThe Barnes & Noble ReviewThe trouble is that our primary guide through the kudzu of history that White Tears creates is Seth, a young man afflicted with self-loathing and social anxiety, the kind of storyteller who has to resort to college-essay tactics to tackle a big subject ... Seth is so listless that he excites only a cerebral pity. He remains a cipher... He has no context and spends a lot of the book adrift, seemingly so he can be a fly on the wall for Kunzru’s project. Eventually, this function is literalized: He’s simply a tool ... Unfortunately, the characters in White Tears are missing the blood and heart that would bring this important story to life. There’s a painstaking quality to the novel that’s reminiscent of Carter and Seth’s studious reproduction of that old record. An agenda of condemnation appears to have overtaken the curiosity that has allowed Kunzru to imaginatively inhabit so many different people.
Ottessa Moshfegh
RaveThe Barnes & Noble ReviewIn her terrific debut short story collection, her dark vision misses nothing. What Moshfegh sees is often ugly. Her characters are alcoholics, drug users, compulsive skin pickers. They are self-deluded about their lives and their chances at love, capable of casual cruelty and callous judgments. Yet Moshfegh treats this motley crew with compassion and dignity ... Moshfegh’s darkly comic voice — and her willingness to plumb the biological and even scatological in search of what makes us human — set her work apart. Moshfegh’s stories feel like dark rooms in which someone has briefly turned on a light ... Moshfegh’s stock-in-trade are bizarre, marginal characters — those people it might be easier if we just ignored — and yet she’s equally capable of illuminating the poignancy of the kind of people who might fade into the background at a party.
Graeme MaCrae Burnet
RaveThe Barnes & Noble ReviewIn offering us various pieces of the puzzle without any neat, prefab conclusions, Burnet turns his readers into detectives ... The seduction of many crime stories is that they offer all the answers we don’t get in real life. His Bloody Project reminds us that there are other pleasures to be drawn from a superb novel that revolves around the act of murder.
Claire Vaye Watkins
PositiveThe Barnes & Noble ReviewWhile the idea of a bone-dry California may seem familiar, the reality, in Watkins’s fiercely talented hands, is far harsher ... Where many futuristic novels settle for the menace of the unknown, only hinting at the cataclysms that led to whatever grim circumstances they describe, Gold Fame Citrus is intimate with the history of disaster. As in her previous short-story collection,Battleborn, Watkins traces the past onto her landscape and her characters with permanent ink ... Watkins’s imagination and ingenuity are astounding. But at times her cup runneth over. Even the smallest details merit inventive descriptions, which can distract from the larger story she’s telling.
