PositiveAir MailMany of the details in the book have been reported elsewhere before by people who were actually friends with Reed...but Hermes invokes them with a current tone that’s favorable toward, but not overly forgiving of, the notoriously prickly Reed.
Cormac McCarthy
PositiveAir Mail... the language is compelling and soulful, even when the voice sounds sharp. Amid esoteric talk of mathematics and wickedness and hideous ruination, there is poetry and the rhythm of song. Sheddan’s lines alone are worth the price of admission.
Julian Barnes
MixedAir Mail... the same characteristics that have made Barnes a master novelist—trenchant insight, economic thoroughness, a surgeon’s poise, and the will to pan for gold in the rivers that connect the ordinary and the exceptional, the human and humanity—also lessen his capacity for surprise. The author of 16 or so works of fiction (depending on how you count), not to mention a handful of nonfiction books and translations, continues to work with the same grand themes: love, death, faith, loyalty, aging, and so forth. It amounts not so much to a flaw as it does to a limitation...Surely, he knows all this, which is why each successive book is more finely styled than the last. In his latest novel, Elizabeth Finch, Barnes’s style is sharper than ever, but the effect is diminished by the course along which he steers the narrative ... he elects for a mix of fiction and straight history that masquerades as plot ... the historical background on Julian the Apostate feels too drawn out, bogging down those crucial middle rounds in a long, lumbering clinch ... a comforting, if a bit slow, read, because it fits the lovely mold Barnes has tooled over the course of his career. It also unwittingly subscribes to its own point: trying to will a connection into existence doesn’t always achieve the desired outcome.
