RaveThe New YorkerForty years after its first publication, The Changeling feels at once unprecedented and eerily familiar. Readers who discover it in 2018 may be surprised to feel a primordial déjà vu; a tingling where their own antlers might have been, once upon a time. Every great book shape-shifts with its reader. The Changeling does something wilder still: it generates its own autonomous magic, one that feels wholly independent of the reader and her moment. Critics get a little nervous, I think, when their breath fails to fog up the glass. But The Changeling is not a mirror: it’s a window. It is refreshingly, transgressively uninterested in reflecting the familiar dramas of human life, or in reproducing the conventional grammar of human thinking. The book is concerned, instead, with time’s tyranny—how we live under its sorcery, burdened by our substanceless memories while equidistant at every instant from an imaginary future ... Part of the pain of The Changeling is feeling the years pass. Like no book I have read, it is illumined by the spark of life, the life that wears a thousand skins. Its wisdom is unparaphrasable.
