PanThe New York Times Book ReviewThat Hicks can write isn’t debatable. What is debatable is what, exactly, he’s trying to say, or whether he even knows. Amateurs seems to open as a classic wedding novel, introducing the title’s cast of directionless M.F.A. grads and chronic underachievers — all of them former or current or future friends — during the lead-up to their buddy Archer Bondarenko’s Winnipeg wedding in July 2011. Jumps in time between 2004-5 and 2011, and a fervent dependence on adverbs, will keep all but the most tenacious reader from grasping that Archer is in fact the planet around which this novel’s convoluted story lines orbit ... If the first half of Amateurs is an arduous exercise in seating arrangements, expounding how the characters know one another, or should, the second half is an indiscernible sendup of Archer as a privileged fleecer in what feels less like a deserved comeuppance than a desperate last attempt at plot.
