MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe table of contents alone inspires a certain kind of wonder, bordering on incredulity ... contains many instances of critical insight and neat close-reading, often concealed beneath the cumbersome scaffold of its method. But there were also times when my word-loving heart started to shrivel and die...The facility with which he dispatches text after text sometimes reveals his critical chops, plus a persistent, easy glibness ... What’s most interesting about this compendium is its understanding of imaginative representation as a technology. What’s most troubling is its emphasis on the notion of mastery. Reading can be practiced, he says; practice begets perfection. The problem becomes clearest when the author discusses writers of color ... nuances get left by the wayside on Fletcher’s path to mastery.
Graham Swift
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewSwift describes events long in the past in a way that gives them intense and permanent presentness ... Historical novels are most compelling when they say something about the present as well as the past. Swift shows that the elegance and lyricism of high modernist writing still has value for contemporary fiction, but the book is inconclusive and vague. I wasn’t sure why it was a novella, since Swift’s style and themes are so weighty, but the lush, sorrowful prose gives considerable pleasure.
