RaveThe New York Review of BooksStill breathtaking and shockingly bawdy ... Far more daring for its time than any of the recent literary trends that have had everyone blushing and gasping and scribbling. It is as sexy as novels by Sally Rooney, as druggy as novels by Tao Lin, as gross as novels by Ottessa Moshfegh, as queer as novels by Garth Greenwell, as violent as Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. In most of these respects, it exceeds even the work of that polymath of outrage, Bret Easton Ellis—and he published his first novel, Less Than Zero, in 1985, a year later ... Nettie Jones, now eighty-four, was simply ahead of her time ... described in unflinching detail ... Breathtaking and brutal, disorienting and delightful ... The subject matter of the novel may still seem edgy to the easily shocked, but its style is what feels cutting edge to me: fragmented yet smooth, autofictional though not confessional, somehow both tight and loose ... A masterpiece of narrative voice. Jones knows her way around a metaphor ... But praise the muses that Fish Tales has been brought back to life in this one, so we can appreciate just how avant-garde it was. Its voice is as clear and intimate and alive as it must have sounded to its best readers four decades ago. It reminds me of what it feels like when you’re on the phone with someone, and they start telling you their secrets, and you stay up listening late into the night, into the dawn, utterly gripped right until the moment the line disconnects.
Mohsin Hamid
PanAtlanticEven if you’re unfamiliar with this tradition of stories about race transformation, you’ll suspect what’s coming ... Tone above all distinguishes Hamid from these precursors. Whereas most of these writers bend race transformation toward satire, offering us topsy-turvy and hysterical tales, Hamid is deeply earnest about his conceit. The novel is that wan 21st-century banality, a \'meditation,\' and it meditates on how losing whiteness is going to make white people feel. Mostly sad, as it turns out ... The sex improves; the prose does not ... The novel evinces the worst of Hamid’s style ... As in his earlier novels about social mobility and immigration, romance supplies the plot and casts an aura of \'love\' over the politico-speculative gimmick ... This is the novel’s cure for white despair over the loss of whiteness: Keep calm and carry on ... What exactly is being born—or rather, borne? Darkness in The Last White Man is an ordeal. Those who were already dark have little presence and no internal life in the novel ... If Hamid’s novel were a self-aware satire of this ideology of whiteness and its violent effects, it would be pitch-perfect. But The Last White Man’s structure affords us no way to know if this is what Hamid intends: It includes no higher judgment, no specific history, no novelistic frame against which to measure the reliability of the narration, no backdrop across which irony can dance ... The Last White Man feels like a primer for mourning whiteness, not a critique of it ... It’s one thing for a character to be afflicted with blurred vision or the race \'blindness\' that grants Oona a \'new kind of sight\'; it’s another for the novel to suffer the same confusion of perspective.
Maaza Mengiste
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... lyrical, remarkable ... [the book] somehow manages to solve the riddle of how to sing war now. She doesn’t seek a narrow path between the straits of these artistic and ethical questions. Instead, she encompasses them in all their contradiction, laying them out in breathtakingly skillful juxtaposition ... All these chapter forms are short, if unpredictable, and the reader feels not at the whim of an experimental dictator, but in the steady hands of a master ... There’s no humor in this novel; laughter is bitter, sarcastic, mad and, just once, happy. But we come to realize that these are deliberate poetic choices — for simplicity and sublimity — as even more references to the Greeks emerge ... a surreal penultimate scene that seemed the only misstep in this majestic novel ... I forgave it because, for once, all this grandeur, all this grace, is in the service of a tale of a woman, Hirut, as indelible and compelling a hero as any I’ve read in years. This novel made me feel pity and fear, and more times than is reasonable, gave me goose bumps.
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
PositiveThe New York Review of Books\"Like Charles Dickens or Gabriel García Márquez, Makumbi ranges widely across time and social strata; her knowledge of Ugandan culture seems as precise as a historian’s ... With its progression through generations and its cyclical returns to genetic inheritance—hay fever, twins, madness—Kintu’s structure feels epic ... Kintu cannot but be in some sense the story of a people, the Ganda, and a nation, Uganda. But its politics are personal.\
