PanBafflerThis is a book that takes place upon the flat earth...a world of flat, dull characters who do nothing, say nothing, and feel nothing for each other but a mild and mutual disdain ... Virtually every conversation in the book is borrowed from a familiar word bank of half-remembered Twitter theories ... The novel emerges from its hazy, nightmare repetition ... A provocative commentary on an artistic field reduced to its most superficial and craven impulses ... Each character in this book is so profoundly indifferent to every other that it is at times unclear why the reader should feel any different ... Her eye on...cold calculations can be truly inventive ... At other times, though, the narrator falls into more tired recitations that seem more curated for the market than in criticism of it ... Perhaps this is all a joke—but does Flat Earth actually exist outside the ecosystem of female identity it critiques? ... The novel sits uneasily, constraining itself from strong emotion in either direction, flattening out, instead, into an object of mostly sociological interest ... When art is reduced to mass marketing and pseudo-political recrimination, prose is pointless. Levy is to be lauded for her attempts to show this state of affairs; but it is to be lamented that she falls into it.
Sally Rooney
PanTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Has the form but not the content of a novel of ideas ... Each character has been flattened like the butter on the bread they incessantly eat, turned into a blandly satisfying fantasy of good humour, essentially good motives and good old romance ... While Intermezzo also presents as a novel about \'grief\', the brothers’ father having recently died, he is sketched so vaguely that we must content ourselves with bland and unaffecting sentiment ... It would seem that mainstream publishing wishes to gain the credibility of allusion to the more sullied aspects of contemporary life without depicting anything unsavoury.
Lauren Oyler
PanBookforumThe book was originally to be called Who Cares, and perhaps that title should have been retained. Who cares, really, about any of this? ... Already dated, even before its release ... Oyler is contemptuous of disagreement, quickly bores of research, and rigidly attempts to control the reader’s responses. As a result, the writing is cramped, brittle ... No Judgment displays many of the flaws Oyler once so forcefully identified in others. To begin with, it is often hard to tell what she is trying to say ... Oyler doesn’t want to be a writer of personal essays; she wants to be an erudite critic of the old school. But again and again, she drifts toward personal recriminations and eschews any sustained discussion of literature ... The resulting collection reads like a juvenile burn book, totally uninterested in the world outside her group chat.
Emma Cline
PanThe Telegraph (UK)Many will buy The Guest, then, but I’m not sure many will finish it. It’s a 15-page character sketch stretched to novel length; soon, even Cline herself seems bored. The first few dozen pages are undeniably impressive, as bracing as saltwater ... Unfortunately, Cline’s gift for physical description cannot sustain 304 pages. As the opening – a delirious recollection of a bender – gives way to the main story, the dialogue becomes painful, the efforts at psychology heavy-handed ... Nothing of consequence ever follows from anything, scenes petering out more by exhaustion than design ... No character becomes surprising, or even convincing ... Cline seems torn between minimalism and the plot-driven, romance-plot demands of a bestseller, and not to have decided either way; the effect is less evocative than merely evasive.
Claire Dederer
PanThe New Statesman (UK)\"Dederer, however, does not achieve her goal. I’m not sure how she has spent the past five years, but it is hard to imagine she spent much of it researching this book. Dederer includes some interesting, though mostly well known, biography (did you know Richard Wagner was anti-Semitic?), and a little equally well-trodden interpretation (did you know that Humbert Humbert is an antihero?), but if you’re looking for a book that actually engages with the logic of \'cancellation,\' this isn’t it.\
John Boyne
PanNew StatesmanWith his latest treacly tome All the Broken Places – complete with title so maudlin it preempts all mockery – Boyne has gifted us with a Holocaust novel so self-indulgent, so grossly stereotyped, so shameless and insipid that one is almost astonished that he has dared ... As with the preceding novel, All the Broken Places has a heavy-handed, pedagogical plot ... The dialogue is leaden and expository ... This is not literature ... It is a consummate failure.
