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Antoine Wilson
Positive The Chicago Review of Books Although the sections where Jeff tells his story, with their expansive prose and word-for-word memorization of dialogue, strain the pretense that this is a story told second-hand, Wilson does have a real use for his framing device ... This is a compact novel, with only a single story to tell, and Wilson intends to tell it well. I rather like the idea of a short thriller. Dragged on too long, mounting tension loses its power. At every moment, in Wilson’s story, the reader is ready to rush onward to find what will happen next. This makes for great readability, but what is gained in speed is sometimes lost in depth. The novel suggests more than it can flesh out in its 200 pages, and though Wilson spares us red herrings, false starts, and dead ends for the most part, you can see that there are some diversions he could have taken to give us a more complete picture of the world he has constructed ... As Wilson brings his work to its rapid-paced conclusion, he—like a pilot doing everything he can to stick a tight landing—jettisons everything that is not absolutely necessary to the plot so that he can reach his conclusion at the right time, with the right force. I would have preferred to be given a slower, more thoughtful, and more revealing ending, but the one that he provides is powerful and, in retrospect, inevitable. His is a vessel of sleek curves, and the engineering was always in the engine, not in the brakes. These days, not even the rich have time for leisure. This book is an entertainment to be consumed quickly, a postprandial diversion after lunch, the power of the ride it takes us on to be savored only for a few moments before an announcement of evening cocktails.
David Hoon Kim
Positive Chicago Review of Books Although billed as a novel, Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost is actually best read as a trilogy of novellas that take place at different periods in Henrik’s life and which explore his love for three different women ... A fairly long period of Henrik’s life is covered in the novel, roughly the same period it took Kim to write the book. This makes it inevitable that the passage of time should be one the novel’s central themes ... This in-and-out structure of the story is not uninteresting, and a patient and generous reader might find in the book something of the charm of the Up! documentary series in which the audience returns to the same group of people at years-long intervals throughout their lives, seeing how they’ve changed ... Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the book is the way in which Kim’s voice has stayed constant throughout the novel’s long gestation. Kim is an excellent sentence-level writer, eschewing both floweriness and over-simplicity. He treads lightly, but there are never any missteps, and his intelligence shines through in the easy flow of his prose ... yet, I had difficulty connecting emotionally with Kim’s story or any of his characters. Perhaps it’s the influence of Hemingway ... There is indeed a great deal of sorrow in this book. I just wish Henrik had expressed more of it sooner.