RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewTender, exquisitely funny and supremely strange ... Exhilarating ... Spellbinding ... Being with this book requires the same quiet stamina, and its reward is to witness a rapturous and rare kind of truth. Once I surrendered to it, this savage American novel consumed me, as much as I consumed it.
Kate Zambreno
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewZambreno’s writing is sharpest, most emotionally alive, when it drills into that interior landscape ... Woven into these moments are ruminations on natural history, education and the work of other writers and artists ... Readers looking for sturdier insights into what the virus has meant for human history are unlikely to discover them here. But there is comfort and intimacy to be found in the nest Zambreno builds, with lint and marbles and straw, the objects that matter in her tiny universe. Its achievement is as a sustained narrative of noticing.
Christopher Sorrentino
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewAcute, intimate and exceedingly fair, Sorrentino’s memoir is a post-mortem that examines not the causes of his parents’ deaths but the endurance and effects of their confounding marriage ... Vicki is a product of the kill-or-be-killed Lower East Side, and the scenes set there in the family’s early days in the 1960s, before they moved to a brittle, elite art commune in Greenwich Village, are fierce and vivid ... more than resentment or self-pity or even grief, what animates this memoir is the very human curiosity about the psychology of one’s parents and therefore the preconditions of one’s own life ... Sorrentino is wary of leaning on the language of trauma, helpful as it might be, to prescribe familiar roles to his parents, or for that matter, to himself. He is more interested in describing the way it feels to exist in a dysfunctional, sometimes estranged, always paradoxical family—unhappy in its own way—from the inside out, and each description feels truer than the last, closer to the center of the family’s shared nervous system ... he indulges in novelistic and cinematic flourishes—cascading lists, lyrical still lifes—only occasionally. The book’s most deeply felt risks are in the open-veined vulnerability of a line, a stripping away of style ... We may have a greater cultural appetite for eulogies, but an autopsy, in looking directly at the cold corpse of a family in all its gruesomeness and mystery, can be just as profound, and in the hands of a writer as restrained and humane as Sorrentino, just as beautiful.
Brian Castleberry
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThat we aren’t fully initiated into the Vision, that we are outsiders to the exclusive club, isn’t as dismaying as the novel’s lack of moral exigence and, well, vision. The sense of social progress, and the driving dream that unites these characters, remain general. The motivations of both the cynics and idealists are at times diffuse and difficult to understand, let alone believe ... These limitations are partly due to the creative structure of this novel, which could also be called a collection of linked short stories...The strongest of these chapters read as stand-alone pieces, often ending in a moving and artful crescendo. Discovering the nature of the characters’ associations and intersections across the chapters is one of the richest pleasures of the book ... Another pleasure: the detailed portraits of 20th-century American life. Each chapter is a neatly packed and well-researched time capsule, and in the early ones we find automats, hi-fi, Miltown pills, mayonnaise. Before we know it, though, we’ve been steered through the Korean War and into the counterculture, and then into punk, the close-clinging omniscient narration nimbly taking on the voices of each decade ... In this way the novel truly feels like a short-story cycle, its rhythms elliptical, its vantage points orbiting the shadowy subject at the heart of its universe. They circle swiftly, these nine shiny objects, never settling in our atmosphere for long, and their power stays resolutely mysterious.
Bret Anthony Johnston
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...[an] enthralling and skillful debut novel ... the book’s beauty is in its complexity, in its characters’ endless search for the truth, even once their prayers are answered ... The lost child’s return to his family, Johnston illustrates with devastating clarity, is a parent’s brightest fantasy, but it may also be a parent’s worst nightmare ... That we aren’t presented with a full picture of the crime may be frustrating, but it’s also eminently admirable — and uncomfortably revealing. It’s here that Johnston’s management of narrative distance — his choice to keep Justin safe from all interior access, giving us his family’s points of view instead — is intimately coupled with a powerful moral standard, a standard that suggests not just how readers ought to behave, but how authors ought to. In a sea of novelists praised as \'unflinching,\' Johnston chooses to flinch ... What Johnston captures and examines so expertly isn’t the kind of sadistic cruelty familiar to anyone with a television, but a subtler, more quietly menacing variety, the eggshell tiptoeing, the killing kindness we unknowingly inflict when acting out of love and fear ... If there’s any crime worth a novel’s time, it’s this one ... Remember Me Like This isn’t a novel about a kidnapping. It’s not a psychological study of Stockholm syndrome or a victimology. It’s not a thriller, and it’s not even really a mystery, unless it’s an unsolved one, the exquisitely moral mystery of how we struggle to accept and love the people we call family, even when we can’t fully know them.
Michael Chabon
RaveVirginia Quarterly ReviewFor all of the book’s many accomplishments—the engrossing setting; the grotesque characters; the keenly coordinated scenes of adventure; the sly, meticulous chess game of the plot; the slow unveiling of fanaticism, corruption, and betrayal—its most wrenching (and funniest) may be the quiet drama that takes place in a bed Landsman shares, while recovering at Berko’s house from a bullet wound, with this pajama-wearing child ... The voice of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is that of an experienced writer with tremendous skill, who has grown comfortable with what his words can do and, damn it, is going to have a good time ... What we have instead is a detective novel that is somehow Chabon’s most affecting work. It is a work of deep imagination—a truly speculative fiction—that advances the Jewish story, allowing us to carry for a moment the heavy bags of dispossession.
Taylor Jenkins Reid
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewTaylor Jenkins Reid has written a stylish and propulsive if sometimes sentimental novel ... a fairly earnest portrait of the ’70s, though, a mockumentary without the mocking ... It’s a pleasure, then, to see Reid tweaking her own formula in Daisy Jones & The Six while also leaning on her strength, the love story. Narratively speaking, this is easily her most sophisticated and ambitious novel. Which is not to say that all of its risks pay off ... Presented almost entirely as an oral history, the novel reads like the transcript of a particularly juicy episode of VH1’s \'Behind the Music\' ... the script format inherently limits our access to the characters’ innermost selves ... Moments like these are a little cheesy, but maybe that’s the point? I felt the same way reading Daisy and Billy’s lyrics, which perfectly channel the cringey, soulful, not-quite-brilliant but damn-catchy lines of every pop song written in the 1970s ... In the end, that’s the most surprising gift of Daisy Jones & The Six — it’s a way to love the rock ’n’ roll of the 1970s, without apology.
Celeste Ng
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt’s this vast and complex network of moral affiliations — and the nuanced omniscient voice that Ng employs to navigate it — that make this novel even more ambitious and accomplished than her debut. If occasionally the story strains beneath this undertaking — if we hear the squeaky creak of a plot twist or if a character is too conveniently introduced — we hardly mind, for our trusty narrator is as powerful and persuasive and delightfully clever as the narrator in a Victorian novel ... Ng doesn’t miss an opportunity to linger over a minor character, even those we meet for only a moment whose voices might otherwise be rendered in parentheses. At the same time, she offers a nuanced and sympathetic portrait of those terrified of losing power. It is a thrillingly democratic use of omniscience, and, for a novel about class, race, family and the dangers of the status quo, brilliantly apt ... The magic of this novel lies in its power to implicate all of its characters — and likely many of its readers — in that innocent delusion. Who set the little fires everywhere? We keep reading to find out, even as we suspect that it could be us with ash on our hands.
