PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Although it jumps about in time and place, the novel is actually small and intimate in scope, focused on a tiny group of connected lives ... There are a great many emotions, betrayals and conversations along the way, and they are related by the author with a light, deft touch ... The images of blossoms and foliage that accompany Kai’s monologues likewise add little significant. Rather, they come across as attempts to give poignancy to emotions that don’t need extra help. Washington is at his best when he keeps feelings unspoken ... Fortunately, such sentimental moments are few ... Bryan Washington speaks for people who have too long been silenced, and the voice he has found for them is defiant, compassionate, decent and profoundly human. This whiteguy, at least, was impressed.
Sarah Manguso
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Disquieting ... Something is wrong with Ruthie, too, or she would connect things better than she does. Her voice is affectless, remote, giving almost the same weight to every experience ... This oblique approach has its risks, because it seems to lack development. Only halfway through the novel...does the voice of the book finally deepen and fill out. Yet even then it continues to tell its story in piecemeal form, one memory overlapping another. For Ruthie, and so for us, the disparate memories keep arriving, never fusing into a plot, simply relayed in a lightweight torrent of details ... Manguso employs a technique normally used by novelists to give background information or to join one scene to another, but here it is the primary mode of narration. It is a brave choice, because the larger picture emerges only gradually ... The writing is skilful and exact, and gives off the sense that its coldness is never truly cold ... [Manguso\'s] passion flashes through in occasional bursts of imagery, with their small emotional charges. Such moments come as a relief, signalling heat under the permafrost ... What has caused this damage, this inability to connect? Just as the question has come at us obliquely, so does the answer, hinted at in shadowy phrases, never expressly said. It is up to the reader to see the pattern in the carpet, because Ruthie never will.
Claire Keegan
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)This small, exquisite book leaves a large impression ... Keegan knows how to weigh and pace her sentences, and her fine judgement delivers many subtle pleasures ... Keegan fully exploits the power of understatement. Most of the big events either take place offstage or happened in the past, and if strong emotion is unavoidable, she displaces it with a verisimilitude in keeping with her characters ... Keegan’s restraint in such moments has an amplifying effect ... The climax of Small Things Like These is deeply moving ... Masterpiece.
Garth Greenwell
RaveThe NationStylistically, Greenwell owes more to Sebald than to Nabokov; his long, meditative sentences, which often veer aside into a seemingly unrelated observations, are powered by reflection rather than feeling. One of the great pleasures of his prose is how profoundly thoughtful it is, even when considering physical needs and passions.
