PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)The stakes seem almost comically non-existent – but, Franzen suggests, that’s life ... Not all the ends tie up. Despite its nearly six hundred pages, Crossroads seems unfinished – because it is ... I don’t think Crossroads is very Middlemarch-y, and not only because it’s unconcerned with community life. But Franzen certainly did what we wanted him to do: Crossroads is a family story that’s interested in people, not systems. It’s engaging, and probably the easiest of his novels to read. I cared about the characters, particularly Marion and Perry.
Robert Kolker
PanLondon Review of Books (UK)... the Galvins...wanted...a book about their family because they ‘believed their story had something that could be of comfort to other people who are suffering’. I can’t quite work out why ... If their biography offers any comfort, it’s of the bleakest—almost un-American—kind ... Despite Kolker’s best efforts, the negative symptoms of schizophrenia plus the ‘emotional flattening’ of antipsychotic drugs often has the effect of blurring all the sick Galvin men into a single character ... What is it like to have psychosis? Kolker has spent hundreds of hours with the Galvins, but they can’t tell him.
Margaret Atwood
MixedThe London Review of BooksThere are no black people in The Handmaid’s Tale, even though, as the critic Priya Nair has argued, the story ‘takes from the oppression of black women and applies it indiscriminately to white women’. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it. The narrator is kidnapped and separated from her husband and child; her name is changed and she’s forbidden to read or write; she’s raped in order to have a chance of bearing children, who will be taken away from her ... It is, as they say, problematic. And now: the sequel, The Testaments ... The Testaments is careful, too careful, to defer to the television version of Gilead, and is careful not to restrict the television writers now making Season 4 ... the novel is one long caper: how will Aunt Lydia get her incriminating information, whatever it is, out to the foreign press and bring down the regime? ... I can’t quite work out why it needs to be so complicated ... It might once have been the case that all it would take to bring down a ruler was clear evidence of his corruption. If The Testaments were truly a novel for our times, after Aunt Lydia and her allies had succeeded in getting the documents out, after having risked, as they do in Atwood’s book, discovery and death in almost every chapter, journalists would write about them; and nothing would happen.
John Carreyrou
MixedLondon Review of Books\"Carreyrou’s book tells the story of Theranos and of how he painstakingly took it down, which means that it’s the story of how he painstakingly found sources, and painstakingly persuaded them to talk to him on the record ... Nothing that Carreyrou has uncovered about Holmes’s life before Theranos suggests that she had the makings of a world-class scam artist. The best he can come up with is that, as a child, she was too competitive at Monopoly ... Bad Blood wasn’t written to be a parable for our current moment, but it may as well have been.\
Claire Harman
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThis biography is careful, well-judged, nicely written — perfect if you’ve never read a biography of Charlotte Brontë published after 1857, not quite necessary if you have.
