PanThe New York Times Book ReviewDespite pitching the book as a melding of art history and personal exploration, Moser is reluctant to peruse this line of inquiry. In the pages between the introduction and afterword, details about his own struggles are scarce ... The book reads more like a collection than a single, fluid account. There’s a good deal of repetition from chapter to chapter — each considering a different artist and a handful of his or her works — and together the book presents a fragmented sense of the era’s political and cultural history. In several cases, so few biographical details are available that Moser makes a joke of it ... Too busy theorizing to see the work that’s right in front of him, Moser writes with little feel for the human story in the work, and the ways that looking at art can be enlivening on its own ... Some of his assessments invite suspicion, if not bafflement ... Whatever insight he may have gained isn’t to be found here.
Hernan Diaz
RaveThe New York Review of Books... wondrous ... Diaz is brilliant at dissecting literary conventions and transforming them into something new ... Whereas the novels of Wharton, James, and Fitzgerald anatomize the agony and ecstasy of privilege and affluence but not the details of their accretion, the accumulation of money and its role as a driver of social forces occupy the minds of Diaz’s characters and advance much of the plot ... Diaz has punctured two of the defining characteristics of American history: rugged individualism and the exceptionalism of capitalist enterprise.
Sarah Manguso
MixedNew York Review of BooksIt is difficult to do a lot with a little, and Manguso, a poet as well as an essayist and memoirist, covers quite a bit of distance with a minimum of means ... Manguso’s prose is an uncommon mix of economy and obsession ... Very Cold People stays true to her style...it favors incident and mood over linear storytelling ... Manguso’s language can be exquisitely spartan and laconic ... Manguso captures the bewilderment of childhood in Ruth’s flat observations about situations she doesn’t fully understand, supplemented by feral imaginings ... Some passages beggar belief, and seem calculated for an effect whose significance I can’t quite detect ... Manguso’s descriptions of girlhood make for some of the novel’s best moments ... Manguso is wonderful at the slow fade of this blissful innocence, the way it is supplanted by dangers that infiltrate at the fringes of awareness ... The projection of Ruth’s fantasies onto another woman provides the most generous account of her inner yearnings ... Manguso doesn’t let men off the hook for their actions—which include sexual abuse—but that reckoning isn’t a major part of the novel. Her focus is the way mothers allow shame to perpetuate ... Every girl becomes a victim, as if it were unavoidable, and they grow up to be mothers who are complicit in the perpetuation of that trauma, partly through their silence ... Manguso’s evocation of this assemblage of women suggests a desire to share pain, to recognize one another’s suffering, and perhaps to find a way out, but by couching it in a tradition of lies that extends on and on, without resolution or relief, the trauma seems to erase any distinction between individuals and forgoes any recognition of distinct inner lives ... Manguso illustrates [a] paradox, but she does so at the expense of her characters, who are dispensed with when they no longer serve a purpose ... The very forms of Manguso’s books—fragmentary, aphoristic, discrete, or however one chooses to characterize them—resist clear narrative paths, and in doing so they can invite new possibilities. However, for Ruth, whose future we just glimpse at novel’s end, there is only a hint of what it means to live beyond the damage of her childhood, and Very Cold People stagnates—a story of trauma that does not move beyond its own crisis.
Ceridwen Dovey
RaveBook ForumBlood Kin is a story about power, political and personal, and its dangerous ineffability ... The knit of Dovey’s tale, though seemingly ponderous, is tightly controlled, and her characters reveal only choice bits of themselves in each chapter ... At stake for the chef, barber, and portraitist is their apparent unquestioning loyalty to the president, but with the inclusion of the women’s voices, each narrator is compelled to address his or her complicity in various power structures, particularly in manipulating personal relationships to painfully self-serving ends ... Blood Kin reveals only that those who wield power are just as much its instrument.
Ross Gay
RaveNew York Review of BooksTo catalogue delights and to delight in them at some length, as Gay does, shines a light on otherwise private, intimate moments, and the book that collects this catalogue has the feel of a devotional poem. Because Gay is a poet, it’s hardly a stretch to read his prose as versifying, and an attentive reader will notice moments of overlap between the concerns in The Book of Delights and Gay’s poetry ... it’s not simply that Gay has dedicated this book to a single idea—delight in its many forms—but that in its repetition, in his act of finding delight in rice candy, in music from a passing car, in babies on planes, and in a backyard log pile, it becomes an enthusiastic exercise in observance ... The shock of Gay’s writing—and I wonder if I would have fully understood this if I hadn’t heard the work read aloud by Gay himself—is his seamless shift from breezy, affable observation to sober (and admittedly still affable) profundity ... I want to say that Gay’s writing is magical because that’s the way it feels when I read it. But the essays didn’t come into being with a flick of the wrist, a wave of the wand. Calling it magic undercuts Gay’s craft, the effort that goes into producing literature that feels as fluent and familiar as a chat with a close friend. His voice has integrity, in both senses of the word: a completeness or consistency, true to itself; and an honesty and compassion...so frankly subjective that it produces an incorruptible vision.
Julie Doucet
RaveThe New York Review of BooksLouche, mordant, funny, and surreal, Dirty Plotte comprises a mix of short and long comics—wordless and with dialogue, narrative and plotless, autobiographical and fictional (and everything between)—in which there are no rules. Nor are any subjects off-limits ... these comics are as pertinent and captivating today as when they first made their way into the culture ... Doucet’s parodic depictions of intense violence are still unsettling; her elastic treatment of sex and gender is still daring; and her open-ended treatment of female identity is still vital ... if the environment of Dirty Plotte is acutely Doucet’s own—relying primarily on dreams, fantasies, and imagined scenarios starring a version of herself—it is also freewheeling enough that readers, particularly women, can recognize something of themselves in it ... in calling out her fantasies and fears with words and pictures on the page, Doucet uses transgression to carve out a space of power and freedom. She revels in the joy of unfettered exploration, and her enthusiasm buoys otherwise dark subject matter ... Doucet’s distinctiveness is equally due to her highly graphic drawing style: packed, rambunctious black-and-white panels depicting cramped interiors swarming with bric-a-brac and busy street scenes alive with eccentric humanity.
Emma Reyes, trans. Daniel Alarcón
RaveThe Paris ReviewHers is an incredible biography by any measure, but the book’s most startling element is Reyes’s clear-sighted, unsentimental remembrance of her difficult childhood. The narrative comes in the form of twenty-three epistolary sketches written by Reyes between 1969 and 1997 to her friend, the critic and historian Germán Arciniegas. (He once showed them to García Márquez, who effused about them to Reyes herself; furious with Arciniegas’s breach of privacy, she didn’t write him another letter for some twenty years.) Reyes is gloriously unceremonious in her telling: the memoir begins in a garbage heap and ends with a dog sniffing another’s behind.
