MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewQuickly, deftly, Strong lays out the financial, emotional and sexual complexities of the three marriages and draws each of the family members for us. The children are as clearly differentiated as the adults, which is not an easy thing to do ...Part of the sense of life in the book comes from Strong’s distinctive prose style — compressed, telegraphic and gestural, one in which the sharp noticing of what might otherwise seem like ordinary details about a character or an exchange takes on a resonating depth ... Early on, Strong has introduced us to what will become the central issue among these characters ... This issue is resolved fairly easily, though, without high drama, giving the novel, rich as it is, a kind of loose, indeterminate quality ... But Strong has been working against this from the start by stepping away occasionally from the house to take up a very different kind of family living nearby — a druggy, at-risk mother and her young daughter, work clients of Alice’s. Their pointedly out-of-place presence at the edges of these otherwise more familiar domestic scenes seems portentous, and indeed, triggers a series of highly dramatic events that Strong uses to resolve everything ... Though it was hard for me to see exactly how, in part because the events this other family introduces to the novel seem disconnected from the quieter and more convincing dramas that have come before.
Keiichiro Hirano
MixedNew York Times Book ReviewSimply put, it’s a love story with a classic trajectory: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl ... distinguished by the toniness of its particular boy and girl ... It is the obligation of the writer of this kind of story to separate his lovers so that they can find their way back to each other, and Hirano outdoes himself here with multiple impediments to happiness — beginning in that very first conversation, when Makino discovers that Yoko is engaged to someone else. Later, they arrange several meetings — in Paris, in Tokyo — which fall through in increasingly complicated and improbable ways, leaving one or both of them certain that the other has lost interest ... Will there be a resolution to this yearning and mostly unrealized affair? Over to you, dear reader. Of course, all of this has its satisfactions, and I might have yielded to them but for one serious impediment: the book’s translation. Nearly every page is larded with clichés and idioms that distract the reader and undercut the lofty tone Hirano seems to be striving for ... Worse, perhaps, are the less familiar but inept metaphors, some of them involving worrisome internal damage.
Danielle McLaughlin
MixedThe New York Times Book Review\"Danielle McLaughlin is a remarkable writer. Reading Dinosaurs on Other Planets, her 2016 collection of short stories, one is struck by the sheer gorgeousness of the prose, particularly in descriptions of natural settings; by the quick, seemingly effortless characterizations of her often very complex characters; by the elegant and sometimes devastating economy of the narration; and by McLaughlin’s sure-handed sense of the shape of the short story. It’s exciting to read the work of someone who is so clearly gifted. In her new novel, her first, The Art of Falling, we encounter many of these same gifts, but here they’re not offered with as sure a hand. And when they do make themselves evident, they often seem swamped by a tendency to pile on event after event, as if that were the difference between a short story and a novel—the need for more to happen, and even more after that ... It’s hard, too, to hold onto the sense we have of other characters, because their behavior often seems dictated by the necessities of the complicated plot; and this, in turn, makes it harder to hold onto a clear sense of what, exactly, the plot is.\
