MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewLas Vegas is so gauche, this line of thinking goes, so unabashed about its own vulgarity, that it is a perfect metonym for that original embarrassment, America. The same might be said of this gaseous, bloated 500-page exemplar of narrative sprawl ... The omniscient third-person narrator weaves in and out of their thoughts, along with those of a chorus of minor characters — so many that the book feels fractured and lacks momentum ... The ersatz elements of the Positano raise the question of the book’s own imitative impulses. It somehow unspools like a heist film that is also emulating David Foster Wallace poorly. Many of the sentences are so long that I don’t have room to quote one here, but watching them pinball around is disorienting; you have no idea where they’re headed next. Diofebi is similarly unrestrained when it comes to structure, tossing in email exchanges, footnotes, charts and vlog scripts, most of which feel superfluous and obscure ... It’s commendable that Diofebi addresses class, that great taboo subject, but he seems to have either contempt for his working-class characters or precious little experience with their real-life analogues ... In the end, all the characters, whose story lines obliquely brush against one another throughout the book, converge on the Positano for a dramatic, cinematic set piece that seems written with a Hollywood adaptation in mind. Rather than illuminating the cheesiness of Las Vegas, Diofebi succumbs to it.
Zadie Smith
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"It is exquisitely pleasurable to observe Smith thinking on the page, not least because we have no idea where she’s headed ... How to characterize Smith’s sensibility? Above all, she’s allergic to dishonesty, hypocrisy, sanctimony, cant ... Smith is an appreciator of art, a connoisseur, rather than a stern critic. It’s rare that she writes about anything she dislikes. Indeed, if the book has a subtheme, it is joy, a feeling not often discussed outside of New Age circles. It’s an emotion brought about by giving birth, falling in love, taking drugs — those almost unbearably exquisite experiences that the final essay, \'Joy,\' recounts — but also by art.\
Kathryn Harrison
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewWith startling candor and almost clinical attention to detail, she writes about the sort of behaviors, thoughts and experiences most of us don’t care to recall, let alone lay bare and examine for an audience ... he intimacy, privacy and even the occasional insularity of these essays are precisely what grant them their curious power. One has the sense that Harrison shares the deepest parts of her psyche only with her readers, confining her personal turmoil to the page.
