RaveThe New York Times Book Review... fierce and assured ... Majumdar is so far from exoticizing her setting as to be almost too economical, leaving the reader to snatch at clues where she can as to political, social and cultural context. From the moment of Jivan’s arrest, A Burning hurtles along like the unfortunate train finally freed from the station, smoke and flame still pouring from its windows, but its final destination, the terminus of inflexible steel tracks, feeling somewhat ordained ... these slight ties among the three loosen and dissolve as the story proceeds; their fates are not convincingly entwined. What the characters do share, not only with one another but with the novel as a whole, is a quality of embodied and astonishing momentum, of exponential change triggered mostly by chance. It’s a sensation particularly apt to our present global moment, when we’ve already run out of ways to articulate a worldwide convulsion still in progress. Though pandemic is not one of the many contemporary horrors Majumdar unsparingly weaves into the tapestry of everyday life in A Burning, this is a novel of our pandemic times, an exploration of precarity in all its forms ... Majumdar excels at depicting the workings of power on the powerless; for her characters, power is no abstract concept but a visceral assault on the body and its senses ... While the bondage of the subject to power is meticulously portrayed, the bonds between individual characters can feel less developed; for a story so packed with cause and effect, there is little of the emotional variety...moments of reckoning, of the exacting of emotional tolls, don’t come. The primary relationship, for each character, is with fate — but fate has rarely been so many-faced, so muscular, so mercurial, or so mesmerizing as it is in A Burning.
Jeffrey Toobin
MixedBookforumToobin places Hearst’s decades-old memoir, FBI interviews, and trial testimony at the center of his source material, relying on them so heavily that citations of the memoir alone make up close to a third of his endnotes. This is a strange sort of cherry-picking for a writer of Toobin’s stature ... But how does American Heiress add up for the general-interest reader? It’s certainly entertaining, and brisk. Toobin covers all the bases, and if his writing never quite brings his characters to life, he has an eye for the wacky detail, in which this case abounds ... American Heiress never does transcend the level of anecdote to provide those promised insights into American cultural change.
