RaveThe Washington Independent Review of Books... 200 or so quicksilver pages ... LeFavour is unsparing in her exploration and interrogation of her characters’ cosseted, if fragile, world of class and privilege. She examines their lives with an anthropologist’s care. Or maybe an anatomist’s ... The author of several cookbooks, LeFavour clearly knows how to cut close to the bone ... In the right light, even acid sparkles, and this otherwise scarifying book does so on every page. A pre-publication blurb cites Cheever and Ian McEwan as comparisons, but the closer one by far is Tom Wolfe, who could learn a thing or two from LeFavour’s searing examination of Alice’s and Peter’s struggle to navigate their world ... If the National Book Awards decides to carve out a separate subcategory for depictions of fights between lovers, LeFavour should take both the prize and honorable mention for two such scenes in this novel. They’re gripping, deftly handled, and deeply satisfying ... I’ll nominate her for one more imaginary award, as well: research. It’s not just the unerring aptness of all those status details mentioned earlier, nor the deep, holistic view of psychiatry from the doctor’s side of the couch (there’s even a brief and funny history of such couches here), but that each character, even Maebell, feels fully real.
Julie Langsdorf
PositiveThe Washington Independent Review of BooksIf it all sounds a bit overstuffed, it is, only happily so. This is the messy, tumultuous stuff of real life, at least as lived in claustrophobically tidy suburbs, where everyone is deeply involved in everyone else’s business ... Author Julie Langsdorf’s greatest achievement in White Elephant is to simultaneously play with caricatures while also exploding them. Everyone in this book is treated to a thoughtful, well-rounded portrait. Much in this novel is oversized, including the house whose nickname gives the story its title, but the measure it takes of various hearts is not, rendered as they are on a deeply human scale.
Jonathan Lethem
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle...one of Lethem’s (many) achievements here is to make readers wonder why cards, and not backgammon, have been literature’s favorite game for centuries ... A Gambler’s Anatomy is as wild a ride as any of his previous novels. Backgammon knowledge isn’t essential — just a deep curiosity to discover what happens when you peel back someone’s mask and find another one, even more mysterious, staring back.
