PanForwardMamet’s conspiracy theories aren’t exactly harm-ful (the only two kinds of people who’ll finish this book are those who already agree with it and those who’ve been paid to review it), but they’re often breathtakingly stupid ... Mamet didn’t drift to the Right, he sprinted ... Even a broken clock is right twice a day, though, and every dozen pages or so he’ll say something blunt and insightful and pretty much true ... Recessional has its share of pleasures, mostly unintentional but pleasures all the same ... Somebody at Harper Collins...made him capitalize \'Black\' — imagining how that Zoom meeting went is almost enough to justify the entire book’s existence.
Emily Hall
PositiveNew York Times Book Review[A] sparkling comic novel about art ... [The narrator is] very funny and also a little terrifying: Their brains are nice places to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there ... The conceptual artist believes in the profundity of art — impressively so, since it seems quite possible that she’s never felt it. Like many serious, driven people, she is scared of not being serious or driven enough. Her narration has some of the same endearing stiltedness as the art historian’s, though there are entire paragraphs of The Longcut that are just plain stilted, like a bad Google translation ... Hall is at her sharpest when she’s mocking artsy academic writing, which, luckily, she does lots of ... In the end it’s hard to say whether the narrators achieve enlightenment or false enlightenment — profundity or some shoddy knockoff. Stuffed to the gills with strong convictions, the novels themselves remain cunningly neutral, less manifestoes about what art should be than inkblot tests.
Jean Frémon, Trans. by Cole Swensen
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal...a brief, nimble portrait of Bourgeois by Jean Frémon, a French gallerist and writer and Bourgeois’s friend of 30 years—could never be mistaken for monumental ... By composing in...expressive, loosely connected observations, Mr. Frémon makes it clear that he’s not trying to offer the last word on his subject. This is his book’s greatest strength. Now, Now, Louison doesn’t aim to encapsulate Bourgeois’s life but at its best evokes a plainspoken, unpretentious side of her, and it does so with a clarity that has eluded many of its heavily footnoted predecessors. The effect, somehow, is both to bring her down to earth and to make her more mysterious ... This is, in other words, one of the rare books that actually benefits from being written in the second person. Throughout the work, the narrator sustains the convincing impression that he is addressing a troubled, ferociously observant woman fixated on events that occurred so long ago they almost seem to have happened to someone else ... That Bourgeois’s life and career were largely the products of a traumatic upbringing is a statement that will shock no art historian. Still, one wonders if Mr. Frémon hasn’t ignored some equally essential parts of her character by foregrounding her childhood ... Mr. Frémon barely touches on Bourgeois’s rise to fame ... Mr. Frémon writes eloquently about Bourgeois the daughter, the wife, the mother, the artist and the mourner, but his protagonist feels frustratingly passive and fragile at times because she lacks one crucial piece: Bourgeois the celebrity.
