RaveAV ClubKeeping the mystery but losing the murk of her last novel, 1998\'s Paradise, Morrison reveals Cosey\'s story one detail at a time, alternating perspectives among those who knew him–people who, for all his contradictions and disappointments, invariably tend to have loved him, as well. The world he created is both a starting point and a final destination for Morrison\'s intimately drawn characters ... while they can\'t choose the past from which they\'ve emerged, Morrison offers them one clear choice: Make peace with what\'s come before, or remain forever haunted.
Tom Perrotta
PositiveThe AV ClubIn Little Children's Massachusetts suburb of Bellington, the residents all make children priority number one, although not always in the same fashion ...Tom Perrotta directs his attention to the hidden rhythms of suburbia, with its daytime rituals of playground lunches, trips to the pool, and low-key affairs, and nighttime escapes into midnight football leagues, book groups, and Internet porn ...retains his gift for humor, but the laughs keep curdling as his characters' actions draw them ever closer to disaster. Whether they're motivated by selfishness or unhappiness, or whether it matters, they couldn't be more doomed if Thomas Hardy had written them ...the supporting cast is straight out of a central-casting conception of suburban dystopia.
David Foster Wallace
MixedThe AV ClubChronicling a trip to the Adult Video News Awards in high new-journalism style, ‘Big Red Son’ becomes an occasion to discuss not just how sexuality gets packaged and sold in America, but also how most everything gets packaged and sold. It ends up as a more damning (and much funnier) portrait of the porn industry than a moral watchdog could ever hope to write. Few of Lobster's entries capture Wallace's humor as well. An attack on an already-forgotten John Updike novel, for instance, reads as more gratuitous than insightful. (Why don't more people question the ethics of novelists critiquing other novelists?) But the long setpieces demonstrate how carefully Wallace can weave forceful arguments between the digressions.
Peter Carey
RaveThe AV ClubWritten as a memoir from Kelly to the daughter he never met, True History envisions untamed 19th-century Australia in a manner reminiscent of the revisionist American Westerns of the '60s and '70s: as a harsh, uncompromising land where the rudiments of civilization barely mask, and frequently enable, a barely hidden savagery. If anything, Carey exceeds the Westerns. Kelly's early years are occupied with a half-Freudian, half-Darwinian fight for survival … Carey takes a while to get to Kelly's life of crime, which serves his story well. Not only does this leave him time to develop his protagonist—a coarse but generous man whose rough circumstances have yet to erase his youthful naiveté—but it also emphasizes the briefness of the Kelly Gang's exploits and the media's importance in creating the Kelly myth.
Jeffrey Eugenides
RaveThe A.V. ClubThe Marriage Plot frequently subverts expectations...creating suspense that it then dissolves in a single line. It’s as if Eugenides wants to steer readers away from Madeleine’s choices, and prioritize the lives of those involved in that choice, and the way those lives may be changed by being joined … Madeleine remains at the center of the novel, and not just as a prize to be won. She begins the novel driven by love to swoon and pout. She ends it wise with experience, having learned that, constructed or not, we live under the burden of love and must decide how, or whether, to carry its weight.
Cormac McCarthy
RaveA.V. ClubNo Country is a gripping thriller about deals gone wrong, innocent men on the run, and a ruthless killer with a commitment to duty that neatly overlaps with an equally strong commitment to sadism. It's told in McCarthy's unmistakable dry style, even the chapter-ending cliffhangers that demand readers keep the pages turning … It's a strange bait-and-switch of a novel, a first-class airport read that turns into a lyrical, cranky elegy for a vanished America. One aspect should outweigh the other, but McCarthy somehow finds a balance and holds it to the bitter end … McCarthy makes Moss and Chigurh's cat-and-mouse game a gripping struggle between the clever and the pitiless.
