MixedNew York Review of BooksThe book offers a through line of old white men fretting that old white men will soon be obsolete, but little sense of the visceral feeling, the lived experience of it ... Maybe only the most daring, or reckless, or naive white writer would undertake such a project these days, but this caution leaves a hollow at the core of The Unfolding, and the novel suffers for it.
Michael Farris Smith
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewSmith intends to give us the B.G. (Before Gatsby) version of Nick, though how well this Nick meshes with the Nick we know from The Great Gatsby is debatable. Farris’s B.G. Nick seems too hard-used by the war to square neatly with the ironic, bantering Nick who will someday, between the covers of that other book, show up for dinner at the Buchanans. But such is the power of Nick that I found myself hardly caring whether one Nick squares with the other ... In all the ways that really matter, Nick is an exemplary novel. Smith delivers a moving, full-bodied depiction of a man who has been knocked loose from his moorings and is trying to claw back into his own life ... Smith creates an elegiac, meditative tone that serves as an apt counterpoint for the story’s through-line of desperation ... We hear echoes of Fitzgerald, of course, but also of Faulkner, Hemingway and a less baroque Cormac McCarthy. It’s a classic American sound, and Smith renders it with sufficient intensity that his iteration of chaos and depravity in 1919, in the wake of war, feels very much alive and relevant to 2021.
