RaveLondon Review of Books (UK)News is a structuring motif in Trespasses: public events shadow private lives, transform them into public property ... This mode of observation, piecing together the big picture from small details, is something the novel asks of its readers too. Kennedy fleshes out her characters’ identities by pointing to meaningful accents, behaviours, interests, tics of speech ... For almost 250 pages, Trespasses is a quiet novel, quiet in view of the place and time it inhabits ... The key question Trespasses asks itself, often framed more or less consciously by Cushla, isn’t ‘what would happen if?’ – we all know what will happen if – but something more interesting and complicated, along the lines of ‘if this is what must happen, how do we get there?’ ... Kennedy’s insistence on context, her way of fashioning characters out of the details surrounding them, catches everyone. In this world, there’s no escaping who you are.
Matthew Sturgis
MixedThe New Yorker... should be commended for resisting its subject’s self-mythologizing; it’s exactly the kind of account that Wilde would have been least likely to compose. But by minimizing discussion of Wilde’s work, and the patterns of thought the work reveals, Sturgis underplays one of the most important means that Wilde possessed for organizing the contradictions of his personality. The refracted versions of self that appear in his writing allowed him to test out real-life modes of being; in turn, the acts of duplicity he practiced in his life generated daring new forms of artistic self-expression.
Jennifer Higgie
PositiveApolloHiggie’s descriptions of the repressive conditions under which women artists have operated can be repetitive and generalising, and in a handful of cases (those of Gwen John and Leonora Carrington, for example) the focus on biography outweighs discussion of the work. But the book’s ‘meandering and personal’ approach, as she describes it, gives us an accessible, sympathetic view of women’s emancipatory use of self-portraiture to ‘reflect the world back on itself’.
Rivka Galchen
PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)It isn’t that subjectivity doesn’t matter in this novel: more that it only matters when it becomes a problem, when it rubs up against traditional categories of identity and associated norms of behaviour ... Given that Everyone Knows is the story of Katharina’s trial, the result seems set to be the climax of the plot. (No spoilers here.) In the event, we learn what happens almost as an afterthought ... Historical events and processes dwarf the significance of Katharina’s trial. The plague runs rampant: a gingerbread seller in Frankfurt tells Simon his village has been wiped out. Habsburg soldiers arrive in Protestant Württemberg, destroying and burning as they go ... There’s a kind of order to this, or at least an inevitability, but it isn’t Hans’s celestial order. And where is Katharina? At her trial, the prosecution argues that there are evils and evils: complicated, faraway evils, such as war, which no municipal ruling can fix, and local, finite evils, such as the malevolent acts of a witch, that can and should be dealt with. But context, especially in a novel, doesn’t work like that, and Everyone Knows is a superb study of context.
Bernardine Evaristo
PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)In place of the formal unity and single protagonists of previous Evaristo novels...this is a whole world, full of variety and contradiction, details that lead nowhere, private tragedies and public unfairnesses that no one is able to redress ... the closer you look the more organized the novel starts to appear. Motifs repeat themselves ... Girl, Woman, Other celebrates the spectrum of black British identity, but it’s full of characters who don’t or can’t, or who see the world as more complicated than that. It’s a novel shaped by intersectionality—12 narratives, each bringing together multiple strands of identity, each informed by multiple social contingencies—but this form is what keeps it in pieces, a complex collection of fragments that aren’t meant to speak as one. What connects them is Evaristo’s insistence on names ... There are, intentionally, too many names, and they make up a fictional world in which—like the real one—you can’t assume everyone is like you, or wants the things you want.
