MixedThe Nation (UK)[The protagonist\'s] aggrievement and complicity make her an apt representative of the vexed role that white women play in contemporary politics ... A chance encounter late in the novel brings Sam face to face with this reality and challenges her to reckon with her own privilege, although it may be too little, too late ... By connecting Sam’s overprotective parenting to the murder she witnesses, Spiotta points to the ways that white women’s imagined or professed fears are used to justify police violence. This subject is worthwhile to explore on its own, but it is also unsettling that Sam’s epiphany about Ally’s relative security is achieved through the death of another teenager ... if Spiotta easily diagnoses and interrogates these disturbing tendencies in her protagonist, readers cannot evade another question haunting the novel: Is there also something monstrous about Spiotta’s decision to make this murder a turning point in her book? ... One can easily imagine a less gratuitous way that Spiotta could arrange for Sam to encounter the violent realities of racism in the United States. But by displacing Sam’s everyday complicity onto the violence of the officer who kills Mapunda, Spiotta lets her character and her readers off the hook; they are not forced to confront the larger system of violence in which that act had taken place ... If fiction is to successfully confront racism and violence in the United States, it must go beyond a simple restaging of them.
Kazuo Ishiguro
PositiveThe NationIt explores many of the subjects that fill our news feeds, from artificial intelligence to meritocracy. Yet its real political power lies not in these topical references but in its quietly eviscerating treatment of love. Through Klara, Josie, and Chrissie, Ishiguro shows how care is often intertwined with exploitation, how love is often grounded in selfishness ... this book focuses on those we exploit primarily for emotional labor and care work—a timely commentary during a pandemic in which the essential workers who care for us are too often treated as disposable ... If Never Let Me Go demonstrates how easily we can exploit those we never have to see, Klara and the Sun shows how easily we can exploit even those we claim to love ... a story as much about our own world as about any imagined future, and it reminds us that violence and dehumanization can also come wrapped in the guise of love.
