RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksUS consumers have, I think, the nearly unfair and delightfully addictive pleasure of reading the quintet of a piece... which is how I read them, how I binged on them, to the neglect of my children, my marriage, and the novel I’m writing, as did most other readers I discussed them with ... For me the cycle reads like one giant novel, this magnificent bildungsroman so supremely post-post-modern in its brand of cutting-edge psychological realism combined with high class taxonomy, each as neatly presented via the formal challenges St. Aubyn sets himself book to book not only to keep the reader on her toes but also to subtract weight from their heavy subject matter (incestuous buggering, adultery, heroin addiction) ... I’m talking about something simpler and, by dint of near-perfect execution, more readable straight through than Ulysses. In the end, St. Aubyn’s novels are just so damn fun, so cuttingly comic, so wicked and quick. So perfectly short ... I couldn’t read anyone else after St. Aubyn for several weeks. Like life after rehab it all seemed so, well, dull.
Claire Vaye Watkins
RaveChapter 16...startling, original fiction ... In the opening story, \'Ghosts, Cowboys,\' she uses the famous Comstock Lode as a sort of Pandora’s Box whose riches give rise to the state of Nevada and unleash its particular brand of evil and folly upon America, hybridizing this already rich historical material with the sins of her wayward father. She’s just as comfortable describing the woes of a couple dealing with their first child as she is a Vegas trip gone bad. Did I mention the collection includes a sixty-page novella set in 1849? Watkins is the real deal.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
