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Recent Reviews
Hisham Matar
Rave The New York Times Book Review Ambitious and poignant ... The prose is more supple than in Matar’s previous novels, allowing the narration to slide, like adult consciousness, between decades and eras, between appreciation and resignation ... A masterly literary meditation on his lifelong themes. For those who already know his work, the effect is amplified tenfold. In the dark house Matar continues to explore, the rooms are full of echoes: The further in you go, the louder they get.
Joanne McNeil
Positive The New Yorker A leisurely novel of day-in, day-out gig work in the greater Boston area. The most memorable passages aren’t about self-driving cars. Instead, they’re about Teresa’s ruminations on what makes a job a \'good\' one, and whether driving for AllOver counts; about awkward but sweet first hangs that might be dates ... The book is, in other words, a tale of drift in the gig economy—but one you get coaxed into reading by the novelty of its conceit ... Quite obviously not a sci-fi utopia, with self-driving cars helping to produce a radically better society. But it’s also not a conventional dystopia, because nothing dramatically dreadful happens. Instead, everything is wrapped in an air of mournful belatedness.
Nicole Flattery
Rave The New Yorker This description, I’m aware, might call to mind a certain mode of historical fiction that feels awkwardly stuck between narrative art and Wikipedia—the kind of novel where you feel the author’s presence as a tour guide, always nervously looking over their shoulder, dropping more period detail and context to make sure you’re learning what you’ve come to learn. Nothing Special is nothing like that ... Flattery manages to cannily anatomize the famous artist’s powers and appeal while simultaneously pushing the man himself almost entirely out of the frame. It’s a method that the book uses more than once—sneaking up on its subjects from odd angles, as if distrustful of more direct paths ... In Flattery’s first book, the prose sometimes seemed so intent on preëmptively repelling false hopes or unearned optimism that it functioned not just as armor but also as a straitjacket, limiting the registers of feeling the stories we’re able to access. Nothing Special is a richer, more flexible undertaking ... Just as Nothing Special is a great book about Warhol with almost no Andy Warhol in it, so too is it a sneakily moving homage to human kindness, where kindness appears only in quick flashes and never solves anything. The possibility of real connection feels almost hidden, as if Flattery herself were afraid of making too much of it.
Daniel Knowles
Positive The Washington Post It’s well-written, sliding casually between research findings, the historical literature, journalistic observations from across the globe and personal experience. But for better or worse ... the book is a perfect example of a genre I’ve taken to calling the \'liberal problems and policies tour.\' In these books, you are first presented with evidence that the problem exists ... Finally, you’re introduced to policies that, if implemented, would make things better ... I can imagine Knowles convincing some readers that yes, something must be done. But how? We could cross our fingers and hope that American legislators will soon... start acting more like Parisian ones, at least on transit issues. But for more useful, realistic answers, readers will have to look elsewhere.
Kerry Howley
Positive New Yorker The book is full of suggestive swerves and leaps of association, Howley’s attempts at getting us to look again at subjects and stories that might have been shocking once upon a time, but which we’ve grown used to living with ... Wide-ranging ... Human multiplicity, and irreducibility to data points, seems to be Howley’s North Star, the principle that she is invested in more than any other, and is writing to protect ... Howley doesn’t strongly demonstrate how these stories relate to one another or to her stated arguments, which roam far beyond her central point about the state’s digitally supercharged storytelling powers and into the broader culture ... Bottoms Up is peppered with...confident aphorisms, and it’s often hard to tell whether Howley is working to validate these claims or whether she assumes that readers will accept as common sense her descriptions of the world. Focussing on them in isolation, I sometimes felt skeptical ... Bottoms Up proceeds less by the sequential logic of the proof, or of typical journalism, and more by the associative logic of the mood board. And it works. Howley’s prose reminded me of Don DeLillo’s ... Bottoms Up restores the world to something akin to its original strangeness. It’s a daring approach, and an invaluable one: seeing the world anew makes it feel, in some small way, up for grabs, and this feeling is a precondition for real thought. I still haven’t decided whether I agree with at least half of Howley’s arguments, or the arguments suggested by her method.
Rob Delaney
Rave The New Yorker From the start, everything is narrated from a present tense in which Henry is already gone; just as in life, where grief explodes and warps time, everything feels incredibly close one second and unbearably far away the next ... The book can feel like a dagger that stabs you again and again ... But we also get some laughs along the way. Alongside the recounting of panicked hospital visits, scary infections, and breathing-tube struggles, there are comic riffs and asides that wouldn’t be out of place in a Delaney standup set, or on his Twitter feed. These two strands—the grief and the laughs—don’t just sit side by side; they work together. When Delaney gets going about the confusing nature of hospital layouts, or his troubles having his American voice understood by a phone menu designed to respond to Brits, it does a few things at once. It’s a momentary reprieve, however partial, from the book’s unalterable trajectory. It’s a formal embodiment of Delaney’s advice, to other parents of severely ill children, about finding opportunities for immediate delight, resisting the power of disease’s shadow to darken everything. It’s funny. Then Delaney yanks you back to grief. You wonder, guiltily, if you latched on to the reprieve a bit too eagerly ... Sometimes these rapid leaps of register coincide, to powerful effect, with Delaney’s swerves through time ... Early on, Delaney says that he knows evoking his experience accurately will hurt people. Therefore, he writes, he wants to hurt people. But he steers clear of easy sentiment. He knows that he’s writing a tearjerker, and is obviously wary of the genre; he doesn’t want Henry’s life to be just a pile of sadness. On first read, it’s easy to overlook just how strenuously he avoids barraging the reader with details of Henry’s suffering. It’s there, to be sure, but we learn just as much—maybe more—about his passions and enthusiasms: the relationships he made in the hospital, the TV shows and music he liked; his connections with his family members; the dancing and play that filled their apartment when he came home. The pain comes less from horrifying details than from the way Delaney lures us into contact with the very aspects of our lives that are easiest to ignore: our fragilities, our constant proximity to calamity, our powerlessness to control what life brings, or when ... All along, the jokes keep coming, letting you laugh, sometimes just to laugh, and sometimes so you can hurt more, the laughter and the hurt getting increasingly tangled, long past the point where it would be possible to prise them apart.
Kevin Chen tr. Darryl Sterk
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... the literary equivalent of a suitcase jammed full to the point of bursting. Characters, memories, regrets, choices, consequences, secrets, history, politics, real estate, sex: They’re all pressed together close, like unwashed clothes after a long trip. Open the case up even a little bit and the dirty laundry starts spilling out ... The narration has an associative fluidity that mirrors, often to thrilling effect, the mechanics of memory, a common but elusive writerly target ... Each family member along with many others, gets a back story. They unfold so quickly that they sometimes feel thin, more like bullet points than lives ... What did Keith do in Berlin? Why? The answer, when it comes, is tied up with dark trends in German society and politics. It is, by far, the weakest part of the book. All the other components, however rushed, exist in a harmonious artistic circuit, each node supporting and energizing the others. The fact that the characters sometimes feel two-dimensional doesn’t stop their relationships from pulsing with heat and feeling. The story of Keith’s time in Germany is disconnected from this grid. In the book’s flattest moments, his crime feels like a crude lure dangled to coax the reader along. It’s sealed in its own compartment in the overstuffed suitcase, and would have benefited from getting tangled and smushed with the rest. It might have been messier. But, as the rest of Ghost Town shows so well, life gets messy, and Chen is an author who can handle it.
Jessica Au
Rave The New Yorker Slim and sly ... The daughter narrates in calm prose that evokes the sound of a rake carefully tracing a pattern in sand. Along the way, she shares a few memories ... From the start, there are signs that mother and daughter are dancing around something. But it’s hard for the characters—much less the reader—to say what that something might be ... Buried secrets and repressed memories are common storytelling devices, the supposed treasures that many atmospheric novels of consciousness use to entice readers. In otherwise loosely plotted narratives, such treasures keep us digging ... At times, Au seems to be encouraging this very approach ... As a reader, it’s easy to feel...that your own brushstroke-detecting ability is being tested. Like most tests, it isn’t exactly relaxing ... That sense of failure—to see sharply enough, to read closely enough—creates its own peculiar form of engagement ... And yet the novel, at its best, also complicates this metric of success, throwing doubt on the inherent value of uncovering what’s hidden ... If we search relentlessly for pentimenti, we risk missing the actual picture ... Au’s novel is perhaps most masterly in the way it evokes our dissociation from desire—our own and other people’s ... In the end, the trip isn’t a bust, and neither is the book that it yields. The narrator may not have unearthed anything dramatic...from her mother’s past, but she has been alive to, and curious about, the present in that particular way ... We are often prone to see other people...as mysteries we can’t help trying to solve ... Cold Enough for Snow understands this impulse, but makes the quiet case for another approach, one that might be more common in life than our novels tend to allow, and that we might simply call, for lack of any more technical term, being together while we can.
Sjón, Tr. Victoria Cribb
Mixed The New York Times Book Review [A] brisk, slim book ... The chapters move like the prose equivalent of flip-book images, quick and evocative ... Sjón’s story, based on research into a real-life band of Icelandic neo-Nazis, dovetails nicely with current preoccupations about the resurgence of fascism. The main message — made explicit in an afterword — is that most Nazis were people just like you and me, \'normal to the point of banality,\' their actions informed by universal emotions like the desire for belonging ... Unfortunately, Red Milk is too fast-moving to leave much room for banality: Because the total number of incidents is so low, almost all of them are immediately pressed into meaning as another way station on Kampen’s road to Nazism. More than once I was reminded of cheesy biopics, which distort life by including scenes only for their ability to chart a journey the destination of which we already know ... The novel feels boldest when it moves toward embracing the quotidian, letting Nazism drift to the edges of the frame ... But because these moments come so rarely, in the end the novel has a slightness that feels out of step with its themes ... In Red Milk the overall feeling of inadequacy might have less to do with the small number of pages and more with the author’s abundance of caution, born — quite understandably — from his awareness of great danger lurking nearby.
Robin J Diangelo
Positive Pacific Standard The advice in White Fragility is fairly straightforward—which is not, of course, the same thing as easy to act on. DiAngelo wants white people to abandon ideas of racism as a matter of individuals being good or bad, moral or immoral. To accept that we surely have unconscious investments in whiteness—investments we might not yet fully understand. To seek out the perspectives of people of color, embrace the discomfort that might result, and avoid confusing that discomfort with literal danger. To start uncomfortable conversations with family and friends. To breathe slowly. And, perhaps most important, to remember that we should do all this not for people of color, but instead for ourselves, in the spirit of honesty and truth-telling ... It is easy to overstate the value of \'conversations about race\' and, in the process, de-emphasize the need for material change. But it is hard to deny that a great many new conversations are likely needed, particularly within white families and social circles. The number of conversations coaxed into existence by DiAngelo\'s work will be a central measure of its success. I hope it is a great one.
James Pogue
Mixed Pacific Standard Chosen Country, Pogue\'s book-length treatment of the Malheur saga, is an intriguing document of our times ... It\'s a second draft of history, let\'s say, one that captures the author\'s attitude toward his material as it\'s still evolving ... Many an unsuspecting reader will likely be puzzled by how much space Pogue spends on Pogue ... But Pogue\'s presence on the page as a flesh-and-blood character (albeit a frequently annoying one) is not without advantages ... Chosen Country ends on a paradoxically eloquent expression of its own incompleteness.