PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe events of the novel take place circa-Y2K, but Chute’s concerns seem very 2020: how reality is named, created, fragmented, trolled, distorted ... the writing is often wicked gorgeous ... This is a book that doesn’t want you to worry too much about, like, story ... In place of a traditional plot, Chute allows characters to slowly emerge, exert a kind of magnetic pull and then recede. It feels like the literary equivalent of a big choir with occasional soloist ... So there’s a moral in here regarding the delusion of endless growth. And, O.K., sure, maybe it’s ironic that a 2,600-page four-novel cycle seems to have, at its heart, an argument against bigness. But maybe it would be more accurate to say it’s an argument against scale — specifically, the enormous global capitalist scale that tends to flatten things that are complicated and idiosyncratic and human ... Many of the reporters and reviewers who’ve covered Chute over her career have focused — almost fetishistically — on her ruralness...And in this new book, Chute seems aware of — and prickly about — these particular signifiers...so Chute tries to provide that insight, that language — thousands of pages of it, hundreds of them here — reclaiming certain essentializing words like \'redneck\' and \'backwoods,\' clichéd words that obscure reality ... Chute’s epic project is to make all of us, finally, see.
Rebekah Frumkin
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe book isn’t necessarily interested in solving its central mystery; what it wants to do instead is emphatically contextualize it. Frumkin doesn’t simply explain a crime; she examines every life the crime touched. Which means a lot of digression. And this might be tiresome if the digressions weren’t so good, so fully realized and meticulously, skillfully rendered. A weird feature of this book’s structure is that sometimes the new protagonist is someone you’ve never heard of, which creates a moment of disorientation that Frumkin bravely, confidently allows to remain; she trusts her readers ... Rebekah Frumkin can write ... readers hoping for a quick-plotted crime drama might feel a little angry as each chapter backtracks to chronicle some new origin story, but they’ll be missing the real brilliance of this book: In its rejection of any fixed perspective, The Comedown is able to examine the reflexive and sometimes sloppy ways people construct an identity, how that identity changes over time and how that identity is often dramatically different from the way people are perceived from the outside ... it’s a book about crests and troughs, highs and comedowns, joys and brutalities—about how easily our lives are wrecked, but also how powerfully we’re able to survive and rebuild.
