RaveThe AtlanticA clear labor of love, both playful and doggedly researched. Ogilvie spent eight years trawling through libraries and dusty archives across the globe.
Rebecca Makkai
RaveThe AtlanticIn just a couple of pages, Makkai sets up the tricky, meta undertaking of her fourth novel: working within a genre that she approaches with skepticism ... I Have Some Questions for You, too, tackles big social convulsions that raise questions about memory, and about how we assign blame. But this time, training a wary eye on our true-crime obsession and on #MeToo revelations, Makkai conveys less confidence that we have useful means of excavating and telling the stories that haunt us ... Makkai isn’t here to adjudicate, but to complicate. She juxtaposes examples and leaves it to us to draw connections and comparisons like detectives layering red string on an evidence board ... As we race through the novel, we’re pulled into playing much the same role as Bodie does: trying to piece together the various stories, eagerly awaiting a verdict. We’re all but sure who did it by the end, but Makkai denies us the satisfaction of a confession or of justice cleanly served.
Kevin Wilson
RaveThe AtlanticWilson’s mission turns out to be outwitting the trauma-plot trap, and doing that with antic energy. In story after story, he takes what would seem like key ingredients for claustrophobia —damaged characters prone to rumination, flashbacks, and inertia—and whips up something utterly inventive and outward-looking. As if he’s never fully outgrown the hyper-self-consciousness and melodramatic aspirations of adolescence, Wilson’s fiction will have you laughing so much that you’re not prepared for the gut punch that follows ... Wilson’s protagonists aren’t scratched records, doomed to replay past terrors for the rest of their lives. They are quirky, fleshed-out figures who seize on second chances to find purpose and connection—often through creative means. Now Is Not the Time to Panic is the heartfelt culmination of many years (and many pages) spent probing the tension between the urge to make a mark on the world and the costs of doing so—and the push-pull between art’s disorienting and generative powers ... Wilson’s witty depiction of a country obsessed with this bizarre contagion—and determined to cash in on it—doubles as a compelling portrait of anxiety ... As teens, Frankie and Zeke naively enacted lofty debates about art, which Wilson captures in pitch-perfect ways ... Like the offbeat figures he writes about, he is caught up in a repetitive cycle of processing difficult events on the page: His fiction is like a set of nesting dolls, the themes and preoccupations of one story feeding into the next, alike in their contours but wonderfully unique in their particulars. If that sounds like a writer in a rut, go read Wilson’s books. You’ll discover one-of-a-kind worlds opening up.
Sayaka Murata, tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori
RaveThe AtlanticMurata displays her gift for scrambling notions of utopia and dystopia to propulsive effect—only this time, her characters are convinced that they’re rebelling, not conforming ... As Earthlings swerves into violent, transgressive, fantastical territory, Murata—ever the good scientist—keeps us in thrall by never putting her thumb on the scale. Her matter-of-fact rendering of wild events is as disorienting as it is intriguing. There is no right or normal, there is a narrator but no clear protagonist. Again and again, Murata frustrates our desire to make judgments or find meaning based on accepted norms. If the book’s ending feels unreal and unsatisfying, perhaps Murata has succeeded in her experiment—and we were her subjects all along.
Kiley Reid
PositiveThe Atlantic... a funny, fast-paced social satire about privilege in America ... Beneath her comedy of good intentions, Reid—in setting these four women on different class and life trajectories—stages a Millennial bildungsroman that is likely to resonate with 20-something postgraduates scrambling to get launched in just about any American city.
