RaveThe Cut\"[A] blazingly perceptive new short-story collection surveying loneliness’s rock bottom ... Tulathimutte is an acute chronicler of contemporary loneliness. It’s scary how precisely he re-creates a certain type of group chat, bound by gossip and witty displays of onlineness, which are only tenable if you don’t mistake the intensity of communication for proof of genuine commitment.\
Sheena Patel
MixedThe Washington PostSelf-consciously trendy and youthful ... The book adopts the clichés of buzzy contemporary fiction: There is the fragmentary form and unmoored millennial protagonist, but also the brief, obligatory detour into bisexuality ... The narrative is presented in disjointed first-person entries, feverish Notes App-style confessions with cutesy online catchphrases for titles ... Could it be that some of the other excesses in I’m a Fan are also by design ... But there are too many haphazard elements to be excused as the realistic expressions of an imperfect character, and the book’s deviations into cultural criticism and shopping reportage often distract from its compelling story about the complexities of desire. On social media and on the page, the performance of imperfection can get you only so far.
Rachel Cusk
PositiveSlateCusk is occupied with stories—their flimsiness, their evasions, their necessity for order ... This theme, the possible splintering from a commonly-agreed upon version of events, threads itself through the collection ... At times, her obsession with stories can seem too cerebral, detached from what’s actually at stake ... Nowhere is her abstraction more perplexing than in \'Aftermath,\' an earlier, shorter version of her much-maligned memoir. Justifications for the divorce are muddled, opaque ... \'Aftermath,\' after all, is page after page of her own self-constructed account, one that meanders into tiresome tangents on gender norms to proclaim, bizarrely, that as a woman who abided by her parents’ \'male values\' she is not a feminist but a \'self-hating transvestite\' ... Cusk is best when she exposes her own perspective, letting herself dwell on the uncertainty of its truth ... The magic of Coventry is watching Cusk spin grand insights from topics as mundane as traffic. A larger point always emerges.
