RaveThe MillionsBit for bit, Beatty is among the funniest authors writing today ... Beatty’s voice is as appealing, erudite, and entertaining as any since Alexander Portnoy’s. It is a lacerating, learned, witty, and vulgar voice — definitely not pejorative-free — brash and vulnerable and self-righteous in its jeremiad against self-righteousness of any kind.
Donald Ray Pollack
MixedThe MillionsIn brief, passions, and portions, are outsized in The Heavenly Table, which gives it an indigestible quality. The fast-moving adventure and gallery of grotesques consistently entertain, but as one shovels down the novel’s 72 chapters, the concentrated flavor of the exquisite opening becomes a distant memory.
Chris Bachelder
PositiveThe MillionsMy distaste for the sport’s phony militarism notwithstanding, Bachelder’s 'football' novel is an eerie, witty work dissecting a modern-day sacrificial (sack-rificial?) ritual. Though the curious rite described herein takes place in a 'two-and-a-half-star chain' hotel off of I-95, it taps into our ancestral roots; the novel’s epigraph is taken from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, a treatise on the 'primacy' and 'sacred earnestness' of play across cultures.
