RaveThe CutDefinitely arguing for something, but its characters don’t always seem up to the task of effecting change. Rather than being aligned in their beliefs, they’re scattered, ambivalent, at odds. That’s part of what makes the book so interesting ... A post-Dobbs novel we’re lucky to have, one that really wrestles with the place of abortion in an imperfect world.
MixedVultureThe gaps are...deep ... Pure Kitamura ... The central question of the book: Can a novel conjure up emotion without stable characters? What happens when the protagonist’s traits are withheld, undermined, and revised again and again? ... Reading a narrative that seems solid and suddenly isn’t, we’re unsettled and horrified too — or at least that’s the hope ... In Audition, the aridity is the point, but it can be hard to stomach. For all their interest in absences and gaps and frustrated desires, her past two novels still kept the reader well fed ... The book is almost all idea. It seems Kitamura wants to say something else about translation and interpretation...but the hat trick doesn’t quite come off ... Who are these people to one another, really? We may not need to know.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
MixedVultureAt times the novel exhausts itself. It can seem a little like a machine that won’t power down even after it has started smoking ... The more time you spend with each character, the more delusional they seem to be, even as a sense of novelistic sympathy wells. Brodesser-Akner’s magpie style, layering a hum of worry with dialogue and voice-mails and scenes from mobile-phone games, has a singsongy appeal, but it can be difficult to sustain such a high-strung voice over nearly 500 pages.
Claire Messud
PositiveVultureIt is earnest, rigorous, and indebted to modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; you could call it a professor’s novel ... There are parts in the middle of This Strange Eventful History that read syrupy slow, and it’s impossible not to catch some of the characters’ weariness and sadness ... It can be very funny ... The idea that literature itself can offer absolution may be as quaint and passé these days as the Great American Novel, but Messud’s steady belief in it is intoxicating.
Tommy Orange
RaveVultureA centuries-spanning epic of a Native family that manages to feel profoundly intimate ... The new book stands on its own; reading it feels like focusing your eyes on one eventful corner of a massive tableau.
Catherine Lacey
MixedVulture\"The Southern Territory and X’s perilous escape are a way for Lacey — who grew up religious in Mississippi — to get at the question of what happens when someone who was raised to believe they live in a world with a god absconds from that world. For all the detail, though, parts of her alternate America feel underrealized...Surely a novel about a South that seceded in 1945 might lend more of its plot to Black communities, and surely the North at that time would have its own intense racism. But those ideas aren’t given much narrative priority here ... she begins a grand tour of 1960s and ’70s America and Europe, exercising a subtle influence over familiar cultural products like an artsy, self-actualized Forrest Gump...At times, it’s exhilarating, but the warped cultural history doesn’t consistently enhance the plot; at its worst, it feels like a distraction, and the point of it all can be hard to grasp ... The chapters in which C.M. makes a reporting trip to the Southern Territory are virtuosic ... But Lacey herself is brilliant. As in her earlier fiction, she is thinking deeply about what we give up to other people when we love them. Under all the narrative scaffolding, the moments in Biography of X that land most reliably have to do with long-suffering C.M., whose mourning — she is \'romanced by grief,\' she says — turns to horror as she unpeels her wife’s layers of secrecy and manipulation.\
