PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleMaintaining our uncertainty with a virtuosity that makes a short read of a long novel, The Paying Guests frequently references Anna Karenina, casting Frances and Lilian alternately as Kitty and Levin, openly skating their way to domestic bliss, and as Anna and Vronsky, doomed to play out a secret passion that can end only in death … At first it’s easy to fault Waters’ scholarly background for the all-too-realistic pace of the police investigation and courtroom drama that take up the last third of the novel. But the grinding wheels of justice serve to refocus our attention onto Frances and Lilian themselves, resulting in a third act no less gripping than the first. Will the lovers, separated by Lilian’s family and subjected to the uncertainty of a long trial, crack? In The Paying Guests, Waters tilts a mirror toward the decades of gay and lesbian struggle that preceded last year’s landmark decisions.
Edmund White
PanThe San Francisco ChronicleIt’s not clear on what terms White’s novel is attempting to succeed. Guy’s love and career plots are not suspenseful in the conventional sense: Most of his lovers come and go in episodic and overlapping fashion, and after decades spent worrying about when he’s going to lose his looks and livelihood, Guy faces the inevitable offstage ... As Guy lacks insight and faces no significant obstacles, the reader is forced to fall back on his day-to-day mental state, which tends toward polite embarrassment, be it at his own good looks or his avarice.
