RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The four bickering chronicles are layered, bundled and sold to us like dubious securities. But, quite unlike a wad of dodgy mortgages, Trust is more than the sum of its parts ... Hernan Diaz has produced a charming, glowing novel, best read at least twice. But Trust isn’t merely clever: the bones are lovely, and so is the skin. It is funny. It becomes a family saga, with Andrew and Mildred in every role. It is a polyphonic Russian doll of a narrative that somehow avoids gimmickry and manages to look at itself from every angle, courting self-deception even as it tries to win our trust.
Jonathan Lee
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)There is something Dickensian in the finished article, with its depictions of metropolitan squalor, asinine law and dogged traipsing towards prosperity ... This sort of vignette keeps The Great Mistake speedy and witty. It rarely leaves the tormented, ambitious and solitary Green, but when it does, it is to settle, with great nimbleness, on the shoulder of some walk-on part ... The instability of public record, of memory, of society, nudges Lee’s narrative towards farce. Rather than laying out the tracks it will shortly ride over, The Great Mistake cheerfully saws at the branch it is sitting on ... If the two sides of The Great Mistake fail to engage perfectly, it is the nuts and bolts of Green’s career that fall through the gaps. He was a confirmed workaholic but only the faintest abstraction of his actual work comes across. This is a rare disappointment in a book written by a lawyer whose second novel, Joy (2012), skewered the world of corporate law ... probably won’t be the only exhumation of a New York politician to be published this year, but it is likely to be the most dignified.
Rumaan Alam
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... excellent ...A smug and knowing narrator throws us a few gloomy bones – commuters suffocating in an elevator; a Midwestern mother drowning her children in the bathtub – but otherwise we are confined to the upstate, upscale rental house and its strange bedfellows. It works. The physical containment and convincing dialogue bring to mind a memorable stage play. And rather than employing the blunt instruments of apocalyptic cliché (terror, cruelty, resilience, even love), Alam mines, with disarming plausibility, the brittle rules of contemporary bourgeois society.
Deb Olin Unferth
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Somewhere between two novellas and a novel, Olin Unferth’s sixth book is part-Bildungsroman, part-heist, part-history of industrial husbandry. Non-chronological and ornithological ... With all this jumping about, it’s easy to find yourself looking the wrong way when something noteworthy happens. Stand back to contemplate how weird it is that we eat birds and you’ll miss something small and charming ... When it is explained that the chicken’s eye has multiple points of simultaneous focus, it feels pointed, as if the inattentive reader is being rebuked. Lurking among the quirks and capers are the ethical and logistical dilemmas of activism.
Jeanine Cummins
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)It is a gory and candid account of the escape bid made by thousands of Mexican and South American migrants, related in the \'bleak, bleak journey\' style of Cormac McCarthy or John Williams ... The novel largely takes place on top of the trains. Riding them is cartoonishly dangerous ... Cummins’s intention is ambitious and she pulls it off, expressing the incoherence of the devastated mind that cannot afford the luxury of grieving ... charges of appropriation, plagiarism and inauthenticity...are valid, even if the frenzy isn’t. This is a book about the border that doesn’t touch on the man trying to build a wall there. There is abundant suffering, and little blame. The norteño President is the elephant in the room. The one, brief, unlikely nod to him comes near the end, from a Mexican migration commandant—avuncular, murderous—who parrots the claim that migrants are thieves, rapists and murderers. Frustratingly, irresponsibly, in this account a lot of them are.
