PositiveThe New Yorker[Diski] consistently steers the narrative away from tidy conclusions. She doesn’t want to fix the story line so much as she wants to see beyond it. And she does not proceed in a linear fashion; she describes her years with Lessing in between scenes of recent hospital visits, memories of her earlier childhood, and digressions on illness and mortality. It can make a reader feel out of place, or as though she’s waiting for a train that’s never going to arrive. We are used to stories in which heightened emotions lead to one catharsis or another. This story just ends...Really, what is different and moving about In Gratitude is not Diski’s refusal of cancer’s clichés so much as the way that she chews on them, wincing, until she finds the unknown in 'the too well known.'
Adam Cohen
PositiveThe New YorkerCohen provides a detailed backstory for each character who appears, wandering sometimes confusingly far afield. But the panoramic view is instructive: one can see these men marching their agendas forward over bridges formed by social connections ... The culminating shock of Imbeciles—a book full of shocking anecdotes—is the fact that Buck v. Bell is still on the books and was cited as precedent in court as recently as 2001. Forced or coercive sterilizations never entirely went away either.
