PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"For readers anticipating a book-length gossip-column blind item — or a score-settling peek into the intimate lives of famous people — Unquiet may be disappointing ... The rueful humor... is typical of Ullmann’s prose, which is plain, succinct and declarative, with currents of intensity flowing beneath the placid surface. The effect, in Thilo Reinhard’s graceful English translation, is almost Didionesque, as the willed, witty detachment of the narrator’s voice at once conceals and emphasizes the rawness of her emotions ... Unquiet is, well, quieter [than Ullmann’s previous novel, The Cold Song], and also more chaotic, finding drama and pathos in its own search for an adequate form and turning its failures into something fascinating and rich. In the process, it creates — or perhaps discovers — two characters who seem stranger, sadder and more real than the actress and the filmmaker we might have thought we knew...\
Martin Amis
MixedThe New York Times Book Review\"Some of the essays, reviews and reported articles collected in The Rub of Time take Amis’s household-name status as an occasion or a theme. But the deep subject of this book, what holds its disparate bits together and makes it worth your time even if you have only the vaguest idea of who its author is supposed to be, is not celebrity at all. It’s professionalism ... He is especially good at literary criticism. The best parts of The Rub of Time are devoted to his two favorite novelists, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow ... But there is some filler to get through ... Amis’s contempt toward the human material in front of him often feels easy, habitual, unearned, a matter of prejudice rather than experience ... Over time, Amis has learned to read the mainstream without a chart, and to steer clear of the dangerous shoals and ledges. He is a nimble navigator, the wind is gentle at his back and the boat, alas, rarely rocks.\
Michael Chabon
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewToo strict a recipe would have spoiled the charm of this layer cake of nested memories and family legends, which have been arranged with painstaking haphazardness ... Chabon constructs a loving, partial portrait of an unlikely, volatile and durable marriage ... He brings the world of his grandparents to life in language that seems to partake of their essences ... Whatever else it is — a novel, a memoir, a pack of lies, a mishmash — this book is beautiful.
