PositiveChicago Review of BooksCurtis is a keen archivist ... While Curtis’s attention to detail indulges commotion in some places, in most others it fascinates. Specific to biographies of writers is the difficulty of filtering the written word. Surely, there is a line—however thin—between the subject as the writer and the subject as the person outside the performance. Here too it is difficult to see Elizabeth Hardwick outside her occupation as a writer. From Curtis’s account, it is easy to admire the writer and just as difficult to comprehend the person beneath ... Robert Lowell...crowds the biography from the moment he is introduced and long after the point he and Hardwick part ways. In these parts, it is impossible to adore Hardwick, and yet this is perhaps where she is most human. Most vulnerable. These parts made me wonder if Elizabeth Hardwick would have appreciated this exhibition of her vulnerabilities. Perhaps not, Cathy Curtis admits. Curtis has no fear in evidencing Hardwick’s lack of trust and appreciation towards the genre. So, \'why would anyone want to write a biography?\' Maybe, Curtis is also filled with that selfish, almost violent interest that plagues so many of us readers. We all want to know where the novel ends and the person begins. The biography is a curious genre; it demands a voyeurism, an inquisitiveness—from both its writer and its reader—for a micro-history. The genre therefore seems to demand that some very private lives be almost made a public resource—open for examination to assuage our curiosities. But to also record and to remember.
Susan Minot
PositiveChicago Review of BooksIt is hard to describe what this collection is about; the core seems to be elusive, but some themes loosely congregate—broken relationships, love, and loss. Stories reappear in different forms ... In an interview with Donald Friedman in 2002, Minot said that her books are always guided by images. How it looks, she says, is what is most important for her to convey. In a true reflection of that, Minot’s collection is strikingly visual. Here, the light is often white, people’s heads are bullet-shaped, and the littered car of a scoundrel professor is a fish tank. At their best, the sentences are frozen frames peering at the reader, as the reader peers back, peeling new information with each read ... While the stories meander, they also spill with luscious sentences that scintillate...
Jenny Offill
PositiveThe Hindu (IND)It is at times solipsistic, too fragmented, but its self-awareness is sobering. It congeals the peculiarities of the current moment: of coexisting crises, continuities between politics, and a life that isn’t single-issue any more. It is a multi-layered, nuanced portrait of the inner experience of being at the heart of a rumbling world while accommodating within oneself the crisis of living in this moment of the ‘holocene’ ... At another level, Weather is a subtle portrait of a crumbling anthropocentric world of which the domestic life of Lizzie is a part ... Weather runs faster than its ideas, missing out on the granular intricacies of the very ideas it claims to speak to. Towards the end it seems the novel suddenly wants to serve as a survival kit, with Lizzie’s life made into an example. That feels forced, agenda-driven, a gesture towards an easy solution, which it had resisted so far. Perhaps Weather’s flaw and strength both lie in its ambition, its keenness to leave the reader with a narrative that feels relatable ... The novel’s perceptiveness is infectious. It moved me to look outward, outside at the world that is in smithereens as we speak. It is perhaps not the survival novel that we expected or even needed but the one that we have, and I will take it.
