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Recent Reviews
Jonathan Franzen
Positive The Boston Globe So intricate is the...plot that I can’t connect many dots without revealing perhaps one detail too many. But as with all Franzen’s work, it’s the ambitious means by which the novel reveals itself that makes the book, not the plot ... Reading Purity is pretty heady going, and calls for a willingness to let an avalanche of intellect, politics, psychology, and allusions to high and low culture cascade down upon you ... But that rigor is rewarding in that we come to know, through the book’s dense web of associations, the whole of the lives of the people involved in Pip’s quest, a quest that reveals itself to be a matter of life and death ... The reading experience on Purity, with all the logic-tracing it demands, can be exhausting, too. But as in all Franzen’s novels, and now so very powerfully in Purity, it is the history of his players that matters. Franzen’s exhaustive exploration of their motives, charted oftentimes over decades so as to deliver us to this moment when the plot turns on the past in the seemingly smallest of ways, is what makes him such a fine writer, and his books important. He is a fastidious portrait artist and an epic muralist at once, and the compact passage above, mapping the self-consciousness we all live within, is in micro what this very macro book is all about: human response, for better and for worse, to human response.
Paul Yoon
Rave The Boston Globe ...a haunting world tour of the loss and alienation that war and its aftermath has brought us all over the last century. But a tour that allows the smallest nod, the narrowest glance, at hope. There are only six stories here, each of them stark and atmospheric, the sentences fragmented to reflect the shards left of the lives each tale gives us. But the length of these narratives, their breadth and scope, allow us to experience more fully the lives beyond these shards, the years that pass through them, the change in continents and generations and conflicts and recoveries that are experienced by each story’s protagonist ... if there’s a criticism of the book, it’s that Yoon’s sentences — those tough little fragments — sometimes build one on another until the stories begin to sound alike ... Another criticism might be the cryptic set of objects — and standard archetypes — Yoon seems to have no choice but to employ ... But these issues are forgivable, quibbles a critic feels compelled to register to make certain the appreciation of Yoon’s work hasn’t gone without scrutiny. Believe me: This is a genuine work of art, a shadowland of survivors that is tough and elegant and true. And beautiful.
Rick Bass
Rave The Boston Globe For a Little While, offers ongoing and fresh evidence that Bass continues to be a master of the short story. More than ever, I wish I could write like him...[E]verywhere in this beautiful summary collection is a singular voice, that of Rick Bass and Rick Bass only, a writer whose early promise continues to be an enduring gift to readers. Here’s to 30 more years.
Paul Theroux
Positive The Boston Globe Theroux pulls no punches in his quest to understand this overlooked margin of American life, finding here, yes, a place oftentimes more Third World than First, but also finding in the land and people a dignity that surprises even himself, the seasoned world traveler.