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Natasha Stagg
Mixed The Los Angeles Review of Books ...some of the cleverest moments in Surveys are riffs on the quotidian absurdities thrown up by digital culture ... The epiphany, when it comes, is an eloquent and damning précis of social media narcissism, and its pernicious symbiosis of egotism and voyeurism ... Stagg deploys a flat, colorless register in order to bring out the mechanical monotony of the process in which Colleen is engaged, showing up the inherent fakery of the spectacle of glamour. Dialogue is pointedly insipid and the narrator’s own adjectival range regressively limited ... The effect, however, is severely diluted for want of consistency: the first-person narrative voice lapses frequently into a different, altogether more self-conscious key. The text flits between sociological rumination and diaristic introspection. The result is a stylistic haphazardness that makes Surveys, for all its topicality and emotional insight, more notable for its thematic interest than its aesthetic qualities.