MixedThe New YorkerCoates is living the advice he gives to his students in his book. He is casting off what he sees as the white standards of writing and its addiction to \'complexity\' and stating, instead, his version of moral clarity ... I am not exactly sure what to make of The Message, which, more than anything, is about the moral conversion of a famous writer.
Theresa Runstedtler
RaveThe New YorkerA compelling history of the league, and the origins of what we today call player empowerment ... Runstedtler’s feat is showing that the public narratives that emerge about the N.B.A. do not simply come from what fans see on the court, or even what players do in their free time.
Ander Monson
PositiveThe New Yorker... a strange new entry into the problematic-male literary tradition ... Passages like this repeat for about two hundred and fifty pages, which is the meanest thing I’ll say about Monson’s book ... Once he digs up all his toxic artifacts, Monson—with a deep lack of conviction and confidence—holds up a mirror to reflect his findings onto his fellow problematic white men ... This is a risky, almost preposterous literary gambit. Monson presents himself in a fully earnest fashion, rips open his heart to expose all his flaws, and then asks you to care deeply about what is clearly a doomed and ultimately insignificant crisis. The book’s emotional eddies and nostalgic reveries add up to a trite point about media, masculinity, and violence, and still Monson is only partially willing to implicate himself in what he observes, repeatedly reminding us, for instance, that he feels appalled by the January 6th rioters. Reading Predator sometimes felt like reading a tweet thread from the most annoying white people on Twitter—the type who feel the need to very loudly condemn and apologize for their backward brethren ... And yet, against all odds, Monson pulls this off. Predator is not a pleasant read, but its moral oscillations and reveries fully capture white guilt in its most cringeworthy form. This, at least in my reading, is intentional. The book’s premise, its close reads into banal action scenes, and its simple ethics are absurd and ultimately quite funny ... At its best, the problematic-male confessional is an exercise in style, wherein the bombed-out minds of the protagonists offer up a stage upon which authors such as Johnson, Gilbert Sorrentino, or even Raymond Carver can write funny, occasionally grim, and always sentimental sentences ... how do you craft sentences that reflect you at your most depraved? Can the sequence of words you write on the page make the reader love you, despite everything you’re telling him about yourself? I am not sure if I succeeded in that task, but Monson, by spooling out the neuroses of the once violent, but now domesticated liberal man and never shying away from his own lameness, certainly has.
