“Good novels are constructed; they may seem effortless in their design, but they are planned as purposely as a well-built house. Good stories have an admirable architecture, and both an apparent and transparent craftsmanship. In a novel, the construction counts. Kevin Wilson knows how to construct a story … Remember ‘Harrison Bergeron,’ that Kurt Vonnegut short story about forcibly handicapping people to achieve equality? And if you’ve read Margaret Atwood’s razor-sharp dystopian novel The Heart Goes Last, you’ll get the feeling — as I did, only three chapters into Perfect Little World — that poor Izzy is in a dysfunctional family experiment … As you might imagine, Izzy’s contact with ‘normal human interaction’ is fleeting. I’m not giving away what happens to the money source behind the Infinite Family Project. I’ll just say you should watch out for matriarchs of family fortunes … It’s a novel you keep reading for old-fashioned reasons — because it’s a good story, and you need to know what happens. But you also keep reading because you want to know what a good family is. Everyone wants to know that.”
–John Irving, The New York Times, January 30, 2017
