MixedThe New StatesmanI suppose we can forgive the author for the multiple infractions she otherwise commits against good linguistic taste ... A hyper-compelling opening act ... Eventually, however, the pacing falls apart ... While Yuzuki is too busy grappling with the themes and the plot, we end up in a banal linguistic universe ... Yuzuki pinballs between the glib and the strange with arresting intensity. It’s a good story, let down at the sentence level.
MixedFinancial Times (UK)The problem with Let Me Go Mad is that we see it through Claire’s eyes — a woman unfortunately afflicted by having very boring ideas about the world ... Characters tend toward stereotype ... The sense, then, is that Let Me Go Mad is a half-finished book ... It is a shame — behind Claire lurks a very good novel.
MixedFinancial Times (UK)This is a thinly disguised polemic. But Proof tries to cover for itself by putting every character up for ridicule, not just the bloodsucking factional Tory right ... And Coe captures some moments well in his famous set pieces: the queue to see the Queen lying in state resonates. But a particular tirade from one of the younger characters—about the unfairness of the housing market, the election of Trump, Brexit, the broken social contract between young and old—could have been found in The Guardian opinion pages in the 2010s. The result is a chronologically discordant universe ... It is a shame that the intellectual scaffolding of Proof is so flimsy ... Because within the tedious polemic there is a great whodunnit. It is almost worth enduring Proof’s tawdry politics for it alone. Coe knows how to write a novel: it is well paced, he makes complex plots look easy, he has a way of marshalling a large cast of characters that never feels contrived, the prose is pleasant and not invasive, and he is—rare for a novelist—funny. But Coe’s skills are thwarted by Proof’s anti-establishment foot stomping.
