MixedThe New YorkerThe book contains moments of extraordinary beauty and set pieces as powerful as anything Hollinghurst has written ... Too often sex writing is judged merely by how sexy it is. In Our Evenings, Hollinghurst shows how much else it can convey: distraction, estrangement, a fond attentiveness ... For all these strengths, however, the book is oddly lacking in cumulative force; in place of direction and momentum, there is simply an exquisite drift ... Frustrating...especially from a writer who once set his work in that uncertain territory beyond good and evil.
Sebastian Barry
RaveThe New YorkerIt is typical of Barry, a writer of almost Joycean amplitude, that this essentially tragic tale should be packed with moments of comedy and joy ... Barry’s artistry is such that you can read almost the entire book without realizing an essential fact about Miss McNulty and her son: they are ghosts, of a kind ... The best way to understand Kettle may be as an eccentric portrait of Sebastian Barry, a writer of historical fiction who has described himself as a sort of human radio, picking up frequencies from the long ago. In Old God’s Time, those frequencies carry the music of Kettle’s abundant inner life ... Barry’s casually exquisite prose, capable of lyrical expansion but always firmly rooted in the dialect of the tribe, seems to capture them all ... A great demotic aria to existence, which, for all its grief and abjection, he sees as something full of grace.
Ian McEwan
RaveNew York Review of BooksLessons is more than a running commentary on our inflamed present. It is also the story of the postwar world as seen through the eyes of one of its citizens ... Provide[s] something lacking in most rapid-response novels: a sense of perspective ... Without downplaying the nightmare that is our current political situation, McEwan exposes this attitude as a form of historical narcissism. Far from being exceptional, the sense of looming annihilation, of going about our daily business on the edge of an abyss, has been the norm for quite some time ... Lessons is a litany of suffering and grievance that secretly doubles as an ode to life ... McEwan’s longest novel by some distance. It is also his loosest and baggiest. This is no bad thing. Formal control has been McEwan’s greatest strength as a writer as well as his greatest weakness. He works his effects—of suspense, disquiet, or out-and-out horror—with a precision few contemporary novelists can hope to emulate. At the same time, that precision can sometimes come to feel airless and oppressive ... Though the Cornell affair is recognizably a trademark McEwan turning point, it plays out over hundreds of pages rather than in a single bravura sequence. The novel shows how Roland has been damaged, but it also persuasively suggests the damage may be more ambiguous, less decisive, than the traumas visited on earlier McEwan protagonists ... McEwan can sometimes belabor the connections between public and private drama, but he is more restrained when it comes to the connections between Roland’s past and present ... In its commitment to deep characterization and long-haul noticing, Lessons makes an implicit argument of its own—that these are what the novel thrives on and cannot do without. To be sure, it is not a mold-breaking book. It doesn’t forge a new path for the novel or place significant demands on the reader. Nor is it without imperfections. For pages at a time, the prose is merely serviceable, apparently written in haste. It is also overlong and occasionally relies for its cohesion on some dubious plotting ... What makes it better than the other rapid-response novels it superficially resembles, in spite of these flaws, is that it is built to withstand the informational onslaught of the news ... Quite a good novel.
Tom McCarthy
MixedThe New York Times Book Review\"... remarkable, at times exasperating ... As stuffed with characters and subplots as War and Peace, it’s about the making of nothing less than contemporary reality itself ... the new book’s endless motion-capture sessions produce a sort of counterfeit, denatured mimesis ... McCarthy, a formidably gifted stylist, can tease an uncanny poetry from his findings, but he can also smother us in superfluous technical jargon ... self-enamored pedantry is funny in moderation, but moderation isn’t something McCarthy has ever practiced. As I read, I found myself wondering how important it was to the book’s overall effect that we understand the science behind motion capture at the level of detail he throws at us. It often seems that all McCarthy really wants is for us to understand that he understands it ... the real question might be why McCarthy decided to write a novel at all, and not, say, a magazine article ... McCarthy’s work has begun to harden into a conventionality of its own. He’s repeating himself, in a way that’s often unproductive ... This may be a part of his design, but in a book that addresses the creeping usurpation of the individual by technology it feels like an imaginative deficit. At this point, the most radical and surprising path forward for McCarthy would be to write a novel in which human beings are treated with the same dazzling complexity as ideas.
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Cynthia Ozick
RaveThe New YorkerOzick has been a fervent critic of identity politics since the nineteen-seventies ... and yet few have written so well about the inconstant self-esteem of the socially marginalized ... A brisk work of some thirty thousand words, it explores her favorite subjects—envy and ambition, the moral peril of idolatry—in her favorite form. As you might expect, it also has much to say about last things, and the long perspectives open to the human mind as it approaches its terminus ... It’s here, around the halfway point, that Ozick begins to move through the gears of her formidable imagination, introducing a tincture of magic to what has so far been a piece of fairly standard realism ... Ozick’s book about a man ensnared by history is at once a warning against the hazards of nostalgia and an invitation to take a longer view of how we got to where we are. Transfixed by the unfolding spectacle of current events, the modern reader is apt to miss her richest and most subtle suggestion: that we have made an idol of the present.
Shirley Hazzard
RaveThe New York Review of BooksHazzard’s commitment to what she called \'the testimony of the accurate word\' made her acutely sensitive to the inaccurate. We see this in her stories ... In the stories...her sentences are scrupulous and exact, full of diamond-hard images and casually magnificent figures of speech ... Best of all perhaps are Hazzard’s swift pen portraits of boorish minor characters ... In Hazzard’s world, heroism and excellence belong as much to the present as the past.
Martin Amis
PositiveThe New YorkerInside Story is...digressive and centrifugal, its freewheeling structure, which flits among memories nonchronologically, suggestive of what remembering the past is actually like ... his \'destined mood\'...is one of slow-burning happiness, a buoyant wonder at the daily recurring miracle of existence. Some readers will find this all deplorably smug (a charge levelled at Amis on more than one occasion), but the self-pleased protagonist may be no more of a confection than the customary self-loathing one ... it’s hard to shake the suspicion that the author is playing a taunting game of preëmption, puffing up his narrator so as to later tear him down ... the pages on [Philip Larkin] here represent a valuable supplement to an already ample body of criticism ... the book’s hybrid genre, the way it teasingly straddles the fact-fiction borderline, begins to pay off ... Amis has written about love and lust so many times before that in the Phelps sections of Inside Story, vivid though they sometimes are, he seems to be relying on imaginative muscle memory. The same cannot be said about the book’s treatment of male friendship, a relatively novel theme for Amis ... some of the book’s most powerful moments come when we glimpse a simmering competitiveness beneath the tranquil surface of [Amis and Hitchens\'s] friendship ... Such vignettes are a main attraction of Inside Story, whose narrative elements—including the Phelps affair, the gossipy observations and asides, and the lit-crit musings and creative-writing tips—retain, across the book’s five hundred pages, a miscellaneous quality, as if Amis’s grab-bag structure had been masking some measure of creative lassitude, even appetitive excess ... it’s hard to fight the feeling that the novel’s air of achieved ambition has come at the cost of a more substantial achievement. Whatever else it may be, Inside Story is unmistakably the work of a man with nothing left to prove.
Javier Cercas, Trans. by Anne McLean
PositiveThe New Yorker... finely translated ... Most of what Cercas learns about Mena could be summarized in a page or two, but since value—or, in this case, narrative payoff—is a function of scarcity, each new scrap of information acquires the momentousness of a major life event ... a powerful work of D.I.Y. history. It can also be frustratingly elliptical. One understands Cercas’s decision to renounce the fictional resources that served him so well in Soldiers of Salamis, but the experience of reading a book with so many narrative holes is a bit like visiting a museum where half the collection is out on loan ... The result of this self-restraint is a portrait in negative space; if Mena remains little more than an outline, at least the social world through which he moved is painted with vivid and arresting specificity ... will neither flatter liberal pieties nor assuage feelings of collective guilt. It may help Spaniards, and people farther afield, to better understand the lure of Fascism, a pressing task in today’s world.
Jenny Offill
MixedThe New York Review of Books...represents an artistic staying of the course ... Again we have as our narrator a searching, fretful, self-divided woman in early middle age ... again Offill builds her story out of a series of clipped and cutting fragments, though this time, alas, her method lacks the element of surprise ... What’s new is an expanded sense of scale, an attempt by Offill to place her characters within a larger, more vividly congested social world ... If the choppy style of Offill’s last novel managed to distill something of a parent’s frazzled consciousness, in Weather the same style is called upon to register the atmospheric disturbances of our ADD culture at large. It is an audacious and, as it turns out, slightly misbegotten project, like painting a house with a toothbrush, but the problem isn’t simply one of scale. Offill can be witty and effortlessly profound; she can also be schmaltzy and banal. Unfortunately her chosen form leaves little room for error ... In Weather, the quality of attention has slackened ... Offill can’t be faulted for endowing her protagonist with humanly recognizable emotions. What’s disappointing is her failure to go beyond the well-worn repertoire of affective responses to the environmental crisis, not simply to worry but to use her novel to actually think about it.
Amy Hempel
RaveBook PostHempel’s stories are miracles of economy and compression, from which everything expendable has been withdrawn, leaving only a breadcrumb trail of vivid opacities ... With Hempel, we never feel trapped inside narrative; reading her is like being released back into life ... It is not just the sentences themselves but the manner in which Hempel connects one to another that is remarkable. Her stories are full of blanks and omissions, which reveal an invisible architecture. The manner in which Hempel connects one sentence to another is no less remarkable ... In Hempel’s hands, storytelling is a form of seduction that lifts the veil from our eyes even as it enchants.
John Lanchester
PanThe New York Review of BooksThe Wall is a powerful thought experiment ... But a thought experiment is one thing, a novel quite another. Strangely for a storyteller of such poise and intelligence, Lanchester often seems unclear about exactly what kind of book he is writing. Is it a spare dystopian fable...or a work of full-fledged realism with a futuristic (or alternate-present) setting ... There is, on the one hand, a palpable excitement at having hit upon a scenario that so potently distills the existential threat facing humanity ... On the other hand, Lanchester appears to be of two minds about how much reality he ought to bestow on this fictional world, as though a surfeit of descriptive detail might smother the mythic force of his conceit ... The problem is that Lanchester never makes a decision. He is unwilling either to pare his book down into something more haunting and elliptical or to work it up into a narrative of convincing heft and complexity. The result is a sappy humanism conveyed in pale, prefab prose ... Lanchester may be on to something here, but a novel that merely confirms its readers’ progressive social values, however imperative they may be in a time of grotesque inequality and recrudescent chauvinism, is going to test the patience of all but the most ideologically immaculate.
Ben Lerner
PositiveThe New York Review of Books10:04 may be a work of spectacular self-involvement but, happily, the self with which it is centrally involved proves to be one of the most curious and engaging characters in recent fiction … Ben looks at the world with a chilly, illusionless precision. His perceptions of contemporary New York, in all its frantic hedonism and scared hyperactivity, are one of the book’s principal pleasures … If Ben’s political yearnings remain conceptually woolly and, in practical terms, a long way from realization, they point toward another activity in which he has more luck imposing his personal vision on reality—his art … Page by page, it can be luminous, intelligent, poignant, and funny.
