‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Molly Keane

Rave The Paris Review \"To solve the whydunit of Good Behaviour, the reader must penetrate its narrator’s protective shell of denial, divining the truth through odd silences and peculiar lapses in the narrative point of view ... Layering Aroon’s past and present points of view with those of characters who haven’t yet been introduced, Keane masterfully reveals the coexistence in Aroon of deep, instinctual knowledge and willful ignorance. After all, she must know enough to know what she must not let herself know. Mrs. Brock’s fate acquires a mythic significance, a prime example of bad behavior brutally punished ... A narrator in denial; a style purged of description; a plot never spelled out; a love that dares not speak its name. Its satire a blade sharpened nearly to transparency, Good Behaviour was Keane at her keenest ... there is something undeniably modern about Good Behaviour. If it’s too quaint to be new, it’s too cruel to be old. Perhaps the perfect time to read it is now, in a global pandemic, when time feels stopped, present and past atrocities knit together on a single stitch. Fueled by an undercurrent of rage yet as taut and crisp and tidy on the surface as a perfectly turned Sally Lunn cake, Good Behaviour is as delectable a horror story as you are likely to encounter. Enjoy every crumb. Mustn’t waste. \

Tiphanie Yanique

Mixed The Chicago Tribune ...you\'ll find that Land of Love and Drowning goes down easy but offers only the lightest buzz, like a rum-and-coke that\'s been left in the sun a little too long. The fictional tale, into which Yanique has interwoven bits of her own family history and folktales, follows three generations of the Bradshaw family on the island of St. Thomas ... As in much magical realism, fate trumps psychology, and characters don\'t change so much as play their inborn tunes over and over, with slight variations according to circumstance ... There\'s a pleasing cacophony to letting the voices jostle up against one another this way, but it\'s hard to tell what motivates the narrative switching, and Yanique rarely explores either the resonances between them or their differences ... If anything, the book doesn\'t go far enough in its risk-taking, as the conventional third-person narrative dominates.

Amelia Gray

Positive The Chicago Tribune Despite the wound referenced in its title, the violence in Gutshot is rarely explosive; rather, it is deliberate, brutal but unrushed, a twisting knife rather than a belly full of lead ... It\'s also gross. Gray lingers on the body\'s jellies, membranes, odors and excrescences with the kind of unabashed fascination that, after childhood, most people only indulge in the deepest privacy ... Gray\'s characters, though frantic to connect with one another, seem unable to experience beauty except through the most brutal violence ... Gray\'s sentences are at once spare and dense, with a bare minimum of the kind of subordinating conjunctions (although, because, unless) that establish logical relationships like causality. The result is a paratactical prose that feels slightly disconnected even at its most benign ... There follows a catalog of every blotch, pimple and drip afflicting the man, every bit of organic matter that might have fallen into the paper, until the page you\'re holding feels indelibly stained with humanity. If there\'s one story Gray is telling over and over again in Gutshot, it\'s about the embodiedness of language, the blood and guts of books themselves.

Dorthe Nors, trans. by Martin Aitken

Rave Chicago Tribune Horror and comedy both require timing, and Dorthe Nors has it. The stories in her newly translated collection Karate Chop are less meditations on human savagery than riffs on it, understated monologues of everydayness through which the horror surfaces like a joke. Blink and you might miss the punch line ... her prose is direct, almost flat, a series of uncluttered and voice-driven sentences that achieve their rhythm through careful juxtaposition and build ... The occasional epiphany, when it occurs, is more likely to be ugly than uplifting ... Nors\' free, indirect style leaves just enough room for the reader to distrust the character\'s perception of events ... the story turns itself inside-out — the title blow dealt to the reader as much as to any character ... In Nors\' stories, narratives about why humans are the way they are dissolve before the simple fact that they are. This is, after all, one of the tenets of comedy, which is only interested in motives to the extent that they are ridiculous ... One hopes Nors\' novels are translated into English soon.

Merritt Tierce

Rave The Chicago Tribune ... [Tierce] adroitly captures both the intense vitality of the milieu and its funny, nasty, often misogynistic vernacular ... more than a brilliant workplace novel, however. It\'s true that the waiter\'s requisite combination of showmanship and hustle makes for memorable characters ... But Tierce also has an impeccable ear, and writes sentences that snap out at you as unexpectedly as a rolled-up towel ... a heart-cracking read ... the prose continually invites the reader to share that double frisson of voyeurism and exhibitionism ... Despite this unrelenting bleakness, however, the novel throbs with a sense of Marie\'s agency, her determination to drown her sense of self matched only by her will to survive the drowning. But survival never looks as much like redemption as we\'d like to think. That Marie\'s grim tumble down the rabbit hole remains gripping, even over the course of such a relatively short novel, is a testament to Tierce\'s powers as a writer.

Nell Fink

Mixed Chicago Tribune The satire, if it\'s satire, loses its edge when it loses its grasp on reality. The one-drop rule was not invented to hand out free lunches. Even the more compelling critique of identity falls apart during a head-scratching happy ending in which order is restored, the world re-sorted into black and white, gay and straight, and Meg\'s lies and Lee\'s sociopathic abuse are either forgiven or forgotten ... There\'s something inexcusably glib about [it] ... Zink obviously has guts, talent and a long career ahead of her, but Mislaid feels muddled.

Elaine Castillo

Rave The Chicago Tribune \"Home is not easy to find anywhere on the map, Castillo seems to say. Nevertheless, as this impressive debut shows, beauty lives everywhere ... It may sound like a small-scale premise for an intergenerational immigration epic, and indeed, many of the book’s most dramatic events happen long before the book begins. Yet the choice to focus tightly on Hero’s comparatively mundane daily existence in Milpitas, where she looks after Roni and gradually becomes a part of Rosalyn’s tight circle of friends, is a strong one that anchors the book’s many wanderings ... A few sections written in the second person from Paz’s and Rosalyn’s perspectives are not, strictly speaking, necessary, and thus a bit distracting. Yet Castillo’s prose is so assured that the detours are fascinating, and Hero’s slow progress is full of surprises both devastating and tender.\

Meg Wolitzer

Mixed The Chicago Tribune \"Wolitzer is at her best when dropping wry but casual observations. The pages are peppered with little bonbons of accuracy as well as more poignant truths ... For all its tongue-clucking over Greer’s snobbery, though, the narrative itself has a strangely snobbish cast. To be given full narrative weight, or even passing approval, characters must be either preternaturally good or hyperintelligent, preferably both ... More seriously, Wolitzer’s prose is oddly resistant to intensity ... [the] trauma feels gravely out of proportion, not because it is implausible, but because the narrative never quite stretches to accommodate it.\

Zadie Smith

Rave The Chicago Tribune \"[\'Getting Out and In\' is] the kind of essay that sheds light on a whole career, and it would justify this collection even if Feel Free didn’t include a handful of more perfectly crafted pieces of prose ... This rhetorical pattern of intimacy and withholding characterizes much of Smith’s best essay writing, and though it can be frustrating, it creates a hypnotic rhythm that is undeniably effective ... the reflections on motherhood and death that cloud even the lightest essays in Feel Free move me to tears.\

Kate Atkinson

Rave The Chicago Tribune The narrative jumps forward and backward between wartime and this unexpectedly long future of Teddy and his offspring, evoking the earlier book's time-traveling without mimicking its alternate-history conceit. Atkinson is a master of the off-kilter chronology, and here it not only preserves a sense of mystery, but also lends a vertiginous air of fragility to the narrative. This is quite a feat, since we know from the start that Teddy survives the war. If Ursula's superpower was rebirth, Teddy's is beating the odds. Yet Atkinson insists that we see Teddy's survival as a fluke rather than a triumph, depicting battle sequences in harrowing detail and larding the narrative with accounts of random deaths in flight training and on the ground, many gruesome and all drawn from real-life sources … Ursula may be ‘the family philosopher,’ but Teddy is the family poet; where her book is speculative, his is achingly beautiful.

Ali Smith

Mixed The Chicago Tribune Perhaps the most radical thing about Smith's addition to the genre of ‘aleatory fiction’ — fiction that incorporates an element of chance into its composition — is its investment in traditional, linear storytelling...If Smith is trying to have it both ways here, providing many of the pleasures of a traditional novel while flattering the reader with an experimental gimmick, the trick is perfectly in keeping with the themes of duality that echo through the book … The trouble with the experiment at the heart of How to Be Both is that a novel isn't a fresco. Images can achieve a kind of simultaneity, or at least, like the duck-rabbit, alternation; but in language, word follows word, and the order of them matters. As much as I may want to, I can't read How to Be Both the other way around, at least not for the first time. I suspect that if I could, I'd be reading a better novel.

Roxane Gay

Mixed The Chicago Tribune At the center of this post-colonial narrative is Miri's father, whose refusal to pay the kidnappers not only prolongs but multiplies Miri's suffering needlessly … In the midst of horrifying poverty, his success is under constant threat by those who didn't make it, and needs constant protecting. To pay is to show weakness … Gay's gift for these intersectional subtleties is undeniable. Her writing is not always as seamless. Occasionally the prose bumps and strains, most often in describing Miri's relationship with Michael, her blond Midwestern husband … As in any story about trauma, the ending only seems happy because the worst has already happened. The body may heal in one lifetime, but hope may take longer to recover.

Philipp Meyer

Positive Chicago Tribune These constantly shifting voices give the book an uneasy, splintered feeling, highlighting the fragmented nature of history rather than its continuities, the jaggedness of each character's identity mirroring that of a state where whites, Native Americans and Mexicans robbed, cheated and slaughtered one another with astonishing regularity for hundreds of years … The success of Meyer's big book lies in its ability to depict its most power-hungry characters as utterly bound by historical circumstance and its least powerful as making small but significant steps toward civilization.

Bram Stoker & Valdimar Ásmundsson, Trans. by Hans De Roos

Mixed The Chicago Tribune It reads like something in between a rough translation and a tale recreated from memory ... It's bizarre and somewhat thrilling to come across these passages interposed among the more familiar scenes. But if they did come from Stoker's preliminary sketches, it's easy to see why they were cut ... More damning — though easily attributable to double-translation — is the fact that the language of The Powers of Darkness has lost the fluid, animal sensuality that makes Stoker's original so startling even today ... Most disappointing to readers of the original will be Asmundsson's reduction of everything that comes after Harker's imprisonment to a scant 40 pages of summary. Probably dictated by the expediencies of serialization, this fast wrap-up means that many characters, including the delightfully eccentric vampire-hunter Van Helsing, are all glossed over. Renfield is gone. Yet for all this, Powers of Darkness does intrigue, if only by adding layers of hearsay to the original.

Zadie Smith

Positive The Chicago Tribune ...[a] mesmerizing novel ... Easily enough understood on their own, these episodes are arranged with disjointedness that increasingly nags ... [Smith] knows how to take us to the brink of these pleasures before undercutting or deflating them, making us realize that our own desire for narrative fulfillment is as naive a function of privilege ... there are compensatory pleasures in the sheer scope [of] Smith's ideas and her audacity in playing them out.

Emma Donoghue

Positive The Chicago Tribune Donoghue, a prolific researcher with a Ph.D. in English, weaves all of this suggestive history into a fable as lean and discomfiting as Anna's dwindling body ... Donoghue keeps us riveted to Lib's perspective throughout, and the close-lipped Irish look hopelessly backward to Lib's educated, colonial-British gaze; yet the shadow of the Irish potato famine, an atrocity perpetuated by the English on Irish subjects, haunts this novel about hunger ... the suspense in The Wonder sometimes resembles suspended animation; only its near-claustrophobic economy makes it hard to put down.

Mary Mann Hamilton

Positive The Chicago Tribune ...despite her stoic cheerfulness, Mary is a blunt and candid narrator, especially when it comes to the relationship at the heart of the book: her complicated marriage to Frank Hamilton ... it's impossible not to root for this woman, who went years without seeing other women or children, and confronted their deaths, as she confronted everything else, alone.

Dorthe Nors, Trans. by Misha Hoekstra

Positive The Chicago Tribune As in Woolf, the beauty of the world in the face of death and decay is very much at stake in So Much for That Winter. That, combined with its repetitions and confessions, gives the book a devotional quality. It's easy to imagine this duo of airy novellas slipped into the purse or beach bag of one of those women who feel invisible, who will perhaps read it slowly on a park bench and be inspired to sing a little louder, take up a little more space, or write a little more freely.

Emma Cline

Mixed The Chicago Tribune If the subject matter is delightfully sleazy, the treatment is high M.F.A., written in dreamy, lyrical flashbacks from the point of view of an older, wiser Evie remembering the summer of 1969 ... The passages from Evie's pre-Suzanne life are particularly satisfying; relieved of the burden of sensationalism, the prose dances through ordinary beats of adolescence with an awkward grace, letting certain details jar the reader in just the right way, like stubbed toes ... Maybe the trouble is that the real-world Manson family was just too interesting, the many biographies and memoirs of ex-members too detailed and gripping. By contrast, the 'girls' of the title remain disappointingly vague, their relationships incoherent ... Despite this type of descriptive lassitude, the pages do turn. The Girls is a reliable poolside read, appropriate for lightly sun-dazed attention, and Cline will have plenty of chances to perfect her blend of tawdriness and sincerity in future books.

Claire Vaye Watkins

Mixed The Chicago Tribune This is fascinating terrain, particularly given Watkins' backstory, but in execution, it's almost unbearably frustrating ... Watkins' seeming inability to imagine any agency for her protagonist adds nothing to the view that a victim is a victim, and a Manson girl a lost cause. Worse still, it makes for boring reading, such that the jumps into Ray's head — he's off on a more typical hero's journey, complete with a passage through the underworld — offer breaths of fresh air ... Watkins remains a master of the expressionistic landscape; in some of the book's best passages, Luz and Ray cross wasted yucca fields, crystalline salt flats, and hellish mine tailings in their car.

Mia Alvar

Rave The Chicago Tribune Each of In the Country's nine stories about the Filipino diaspora has the satisfying heft of a little novel. In precise and patient prose, Alvar reveals the complex patterns of labor migration that structure and define her characters' most intimate relationships ... In the Country remains compulsively readable and even uplifting, thanks to Alvar's expansiveness and her gift for grounded, human-scale metaphors.

Kelly Link

Rave The Chicago Tribune In Get in Trouble, Link continues to inhabit a wide range of voices with an offbeat sensibility that never curdles into kitsch, thanks to her nearly infallible ear ... Link's gift for depicting the arcane insecurities of teenagers means that many of her stories — the ones that don't have sex in them — have been cross-shelved as juvenile fiction. Although Link's oeuvre tends to make any such genre distinctions look impoverished, the young-adult designation seems appropriate in one respect. Most of us fell in love with books during childhood or early adolescence. Back then, you'd open a book and the words would give like a trap door beneath your feet, and you'd fall right through them into the author's world. For a distracted adult reader inured to the tricks of the trade, this experience is vanishingly rare. A new Link collection is therefore more than just a good excuse for a trip to the bookstore. It's a zero-gravity vacation in a dust jacket.

Marie NDiaye, Trans. by Jordan Stump

Positive The Chicago Tribune The Clarisse Riviere section is something of a trial by fog, vague and repetitive, with idiosyncratic metaphors in place of plot points and long sentences full of nesting clauses that, perhaps owing to the translation, have to be read and reread to untangle their meaning ... For those who stick it out, however, there are rich rewards, particularly in the book's long middle section, narrated from the grown daughter Ladivine's point of view in firmer, more grounded prose.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Pan The Chicago Tribune Sittenfeld's inventiveness in modernizing these plot points earns some chuckles and head-nods, but the flipside of such fidelity to the text is not pretty ... It says a lot that in this version of events, foul-mouthed Lydia comes off as not just the only Bennet sister willing to tell the truth, but the only character worth listening to at all. The third-act plot twist involving Lydia is Sittenfeld's biggest departure from Austen's original, and it has the unfortunate side effects of robbing the original plot of its best villain and casting the Bennet family as intolerant fossils. Liz's job is to appease and placate them. This does neither Austen nor chick lit any favors.

Mona Awad

Positive The Chicago Tribune As a portrait of the body-image issues and low-level eating disorders that afflict almost all American women, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is devastatingly thorough, its 13 short stories as addictive as potato chips and as painful as the prospect of eating nothing but 4-ounce portions of steamed fish for the rest of your life.

Diane Williams

Rave The Chicago Tribune Williams has been plumbing this territory for decades — she's published eight books before this one — and her confidence with language is frankly unnerving. She makes it jump through hoops, and a reader had better be willing to follow. Using repetition, juxtaposition, cliche and non sequitur, Williams defamiliarizes the lives and contexts of her very ordinary characters.

Ingrid Betancourt

Pan The Chicago Tribune ...it's Julia and Theo's past, not their future, that brings a sense of urgency to the book. Buried within the weak psychic plot is a harrowingly realistic political novel about the price of personal freedom under an oppressive Latin-American regime.

Mary Gaitskill

Positive The Chicago Tribune The Mare finds a new setting for Gaitskill's emotional interrogations, and some of the rhythms she strikes up there are as fresh as the country air.

Samantha Hunt

Pan The Chicago Tribune Hunt's packed prose writhes with hallucinatory detail. At her best, she lurches from lyricism to cynicism in short, declarative sentences...Hunt seems to get lost in her story at times, repeating plot points and revelations...for all its writhing antics, a deeply normative book.

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November 22, 2024