‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel

Rave The Boston Globe One of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling. The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a paean to books, reading, and libraries, an investigation into the relationship between romance and realism, and a timely fable about how relationships, societies, and communities both protect themselves against threats and foster beauty and truth ... A vivid cast of characters ... Meditates on the nature and value of fiction, it also feels like Murakami’s reflection on his own art.

Louise Erdrich

Rave The Boston Globe The book is deliciously strange, entirely captivating, another outright triumph. Daffiness mingles with brutality, high comedy with wrenching tragedy, in a saga involving a close-knit yet deeply divided farming community ... By turns heartrending and hilarious, righteously angry and expansively numinous ... One of Erdrich’s most warm, droll, and hopeful novels.

Elizabeth Strout

Rave The Boston Globe Brings together Strout’s most indelible characters in a rich tapestry, intricately wrought yet effortlessly realized, both suspenseful and meditative ... An achingly moving and exhilarating novel that brings people together across lines of age, gender, profession, political affiliation.

Zach Williams

Rave The Boston Globe A debut book so electrifying, so original, such an auspicious announcement of a major talent, that it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck ... The stories’ subjects seem to have bubbled up from a fertile, teeming, uninhibited subconscious, and yet the prose is precise, musical, and exquisitely calibrated for maximum effect.

Nell Freudenberger

Positive The Boston Globe The story’s structure reveals and amplifies these limits to knowledge, empathy, and imagination by generating a pervasive dramatic irony ... The mystery aspect of the plot, which revolves around Pia and Raffi, isn’t especially interesting and the reveal feels anticlimactic. These flaws and limitations notwithstanding, The Limits is a worthy novel with much to recommend it.

Leslie Jamison

Rave The Boston Globe This one is slimmer, less digressive, more focused on Jamison’s singular experience [than The Recovering]. But it, like its predecessor, makes a particular life ramify more broadly in intriguing and poignant ways ... About the bewildering nature of new motherhood, the implosion of Jamison’s marriage, parenting solo, dating as a single mother, coping with illness and lockdown. But it is also about storytelling ... Though this well of grief and guilt is not dramatized, it is not unglimpsed. Jamison writes around the hole in her story, and we can feel the gravity of its pull in her presentation of herself ... Her ferocious honesty, her stringent refusal to sugarcoat, her insistence on inhabiting and depicting moments in all their evanescence and incandescence make her one of the most compelling and trustworthy memoirists we have.

Sigrid Nunez

Positive The Boston Globe Slim, ruminative, by turns wry and witty, with a reluctantly aging, exceedingly well-read, writer-narrator very like Sigrid Nunez herself, all three novels are marked by their author’s formidable intelligence, refusal of simple answers or reductive pieties, and eccentric blend of profundity and playfulness. All three are stuffed with quotations from philosophers, poets, and novelists, meditate on the writer’s calling and the value of writing in an increasingly commercial world, and address suffering, disappointment, and loss with honesty and humor ... Haphazardly constructed and overstuffed, crammed with news headlines and anecdotes, lines and observations from other writers. After an arresting first few pages about life during the pandemic, we flash back, and almost 70 pages are devoted to a group of old friends reuniting at a funeral for one of their circle and to the childhood memories that surface as a result. Their discussions about cancel culture in particular feel a bit hackneyed ... But once we enter the pandemic in earnest, the novel hits its (ambling) stride ... At 242 pages, The Vulnerables is about 30 pages longer than its predecessors, and the extra weight makes it less nimble. It is a bit less disciplined and a bit less emotionally powerful than its trilogy-mates, and Nunez’s snark about identity politics and \'our brave new cultural world\' feels a bit too querulous and tetchy this time around. But to say that The Vulnerables is the weakest of the three books is merely to say that it isn’t a flat-out masterpiece, so high has Nunez set the bar.

Alice Carrière

Positive The Washington Post Carrière provides a compelling depiction of dissociative disorder ... As Carrière catalogues her troubles, I found myself wanting more authorial reflection on the vagaries of memory ... The account also suffers at times from a lack of self-awareness ... When Carrière sticks to that \"plain language of feeling\" in her narrative, she is a moving and effective writer. But at times \"the flourishes of violent imaginings\" (awkward or absurd metaphors, odd or incorrect word choices) mar her memoir ... The book’s final third is its strongest, in large part because Carrière mostly abandons her attempts at lilting and loftiness, sheds the fussy, metaphor-dazed diction and simply tells us what happened.

Ann Patchett

Rave The Boston Globe A gorgeously told and quietly devastating story of family, love, and identity. The book is unpretentious in its erudition, yet filled with allusions and galvanized by a passion for literature and theater ... Chekhovian atmosphere and elements leave their imprint on every page of Patchett’s novel ... Throughout Tom Lake, art and life intersect, contradict, and implicate each other, both conceptually and textually.

Abraham Verghese

Positive The Boston Globe Sweeping, intimate yet vast, self-consciously hefty ... [The beginning] is the novel’s strongest section, poetically written, tenderly told, and quietly compelling. It ends with a shocking tragedy and a devastating loss that presage the many, many that follow ... Admirable in its ethic, impressive in its research, and interesting in its anecdotes ... But the novel would have benefited from a tighter edit; it feels overstuffed with often exaggerated and contrived incidents. The painstaking descriptions of medical procedures, surgeries, and medical school classes may turn off one set of readers ... his is not a novel that feels psychologically realistic or urgently suspenseful. It is languorous and often lyrical, morally ambitious, astutely aware that we are always landlocked from and inundated by one another. But quantity and a peculiarly garish vividness often override the mythic center — one would have to regard the accumulation of almost absurdist eventuality as an accomplishment in itself to believe the story fully justified its impressive scope. That the book comes as close as it does to fulfilling its vision for itself is perhaps the strongest testament to its measure of success.

Cathleen Schine

Rave The Boston Globe Cathleen Schine has brought her gentle, deft touch and sparkling, often sardonic wit to warm and moving novels of family, love, and identity ... Fairy-tale elements, literary references, and mythological allusions are rife in Schine’s work, but she wears her erudition lightly and blends romance and realism in a distinctively readable style ... Schine depicts the inner lives of Mamie and Julian equally deftly, and transitions effortlessly between their two perspectives ... A tender family story, but it is also a profound meditation on the nature and power of storytelling, inheritance, and legacy, the malleability and perdurability of memory.

Margaret Atwood

Rave The Boston Globe The irreverent title and witty jacket accurately convey the vibe of this marvelously funny and mischievously wise collection ... The collection is nothing if not various, and it provides ample runway, in its myriad surfaces and angles...for Atwood to show herself as nothing if not vital and virtuosic. All her tricks and skills are apparent: She does first person, third person, dialogue, personae, with flawless dexterity. She ranges from the comic to the tragic to the tragicomic, from the existential to the absurd, the contemporary to the historical with verve and poise ... For a collection about aging, loss, and death, Old Babes in the Wood is remarkably buoyant. It zings and zips with energy, crackles with wit, radiates dynamic intelligence and playful charisma ... Atwood writes with an exuberance, precision, and unabashed vitality that writers decades younger would kill for ... Atwood holds objects still momentarily, allowing us to examine them, searches for meanings that are transitory but not inconsequential, finds them in the light of our desire to know, like matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. These stories are sometimes screamingly funny, sometimes wrenchingly sad, but always deeply invigorating.

Rebecca Makkai

Rave The Boston Globe A very different but equally great accomplishment [as The Great Believers] ... It is at once a campus novel, a piercing reflection on the appeal and ethics of the true crime genre, and a story of Me Too reckoning. It is also the most irresistible literary page-turner I have read in years ... Makkai’s most distinctive literary feature is her blend of intelligence, whimsy, and wisdom, an endearing yet bracing mix that characterizes her Twitter feed as it does her fiction ... Makkai’s writing is textured and precise. She gets all the ‘90s details...deliciously right. Her encyclopedic knowledge of true crime informs the novel at every turn ... None of this feels heavy-handed or merely modish. Rather, Makkai tackles thorny questions about the media, the law, gender, race, and class via these emblematic examples ... That Makkai’s ethical, metaphysical, and epistemological deliberations find form in an exquisitely suspenseful and enormously entertaining story makes her work a beguiling reflection of the conundrum it so beautifully anatomizes.

Allegra Goodman

Mixed The Boston Globe A bit of an oddity ... Goodman’s control of the voice strengthens (although a few errors do crop up), but the straightforwardness-verging-on-flatness of the prose remains ... Sam really does feel like YA masquerading as adult fiction. It lacks the mature reflection, dramatic irony, or eloquence that make the story of a child a novel for grown-ups ... I never felt close to Sam or moved deeply by her predicament and evolution even as I admired Goodman’s empathy, wisdom, and commitment to telling the story of one ostensibly simple but ultimately meaningful life.

Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen

Positive The Boston Globe The collection is eccentric, meandering, self-deprecating. This is no bombastic tome or loftily impassioned defense of fiction; it’s a generally charming excursion through the mind of one of the world’s most beloved novelists ... Murakami traffics in rather weakly analyzed platitudes about writers and their personalities ... The strongest essays are those that bring us into Murakami’s own idiosyncratic disposition, his unlikely career path, and his odd routines and requirements as a writer ... It isn’t a book that I’d assign to my writing students or use myself as a source of tips and tricks. It works best as a fascinating backstage pass to Murakami’s process and approach to creating fiction.

Maggie O'Farrell

Rave The Boston Globe The book’s use of present tense rushes us along on the leading edge of her experience. O’Farrell has an uncanny ability to put us in Lucrezia’s very unusual shoes. One experiences, viscerally, Lucrezia’s exhaustion and terror when she is abandoned in a strange place a few hours after her marriage, her giddy excitement and expansive feeling of freedom in the early days of her marriage, her revulsion and fear as her husband’s \'fury and contempt\' emerge, and her certainty that \'some vital part of her will not bend, will never yield\' ... The final twist is so unexpected and so gorgeously executed that it brought this reader to tears. With it, O’Farrell demonstrates fiction’s ability to offer counter narratives to those of received history, to open before us imaginative abundance and a tremulous sense of possibility.

Geraldine Brooks

Mixed Boston Globe Geraldine Brooks is one of our most gifted historical novelists ... Her pellucid prose, quiet yet compelling style, and facility with both nuanced historical detail and vibrant characterization have brought her critical acclaim ... Brooks is herself an ardent horsewoman, and her knowledge of and personal investment in the topic shine through Horse ... Anyone who grew up loving horses, anyone who dearly loves an animal, will find a cornucopia of riches in this novel ... One must admire the good intentions of Brooks’s novel: its commitment to laying bare the horrors of racism, its insistence on animal intelligence, its anger at climate change and man’s desire to control and exploit nature and animals. But the messaging feels at times heavy-handed ... The present-day story is satisfying in parts but unfortunately proportioned. The thrill of historical discovery, the painstaking way that animals are articulated, the detective work Jess and Theo do to uncover what happened to Lexington and the artist who captured him on canvas — Brooks brings all this to vivid and fascinating life ... By contrast, every scene and section with Jarrett is uncannily beautiful, wise, and true. His story, and the relationship between him and Lexington, are the heart of this novel and should have been its clear focus. Ambitious, well-meaning, and beautifully written in stretches, while labored or overwrought in others, Horse is an uneven offering by a great novelist.

Samantha Hunt

Positive The Boston Globe \"It’s a characteristically wild effort that defies genre distinctions, flits from the profound to the mundane with fierce intelligence and searching restlessness, and at its best, delves deep into the recesses of the human heart with courageous abandon ... The Unwritten Book is Hunt’s idiosyncratic version of a grief memoir, an alternately crazed and cool musing on grief, literature, and her late father’s identity as both a man and an aspiring writer ... Hunt astutely parses her father’s words even as she refuses to reduce them to simple explanations, deftly teases out the relationships between his fiction and his life while allowing for mystery to remain, annotates and elaborates and expatiates with charm, wit, and an insistence on her father’s fundamental unknowability ... Hunt’s mind is capacious and supple ... Watching her link wildly disparate topics is part of the fun ... But...some readers will feel lost, confused by its jumble of styles, approaches, and stories ... The Unwritten Book ponders and enacts this art of losing with an intoxicating blend of humor and pathos. \

Anne Tyler

Mixed Boston Globe French Braid, spans over sixty years in the lives of a Baltimore family and displays [Tyler\'s] typically astute attention to how seemingly small moments and insignificant events resonate over time to shape identities both personal and familial ... Because this is an Anne Tyler novel, there is no festering secret, no dramatic wrongdoing or dark mystery to be uncovered. Instead, Tyler will slowly and painstakingly show us how minor hurts and disappointments add up incrementally over long periods of time, how estrangement happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, and how ties thus made fragile nonetheless bind very different people in a family together ... The novel’s plaited narrative perspectives enable readers to observe the characters from multiple vantage points, in effect from within different frameworks of understanding and explanation, so that a figure who first appears to be an X is later revealed to be also or instead a Y. We watch them develop interestingly over time in ways that both confirm and undermine earlier impressions and tendencies. But the technique also requires that we are held at a bit of a remove and prevented from investing in the characters with the fullest enthusiasm ... Despite its many virtues, French Braid is on the whole a rather wan outing for Tyler.

Douglas Stuart

Rave The Boston Globe ... if Shuggie Bain was wrenching, Young Mungo is truly brutal in its exploration of forbidden love, bullying and abuse, and toxic masculinity run amok ... An excoriating study of how violence begets violence, a devastating story of how the abused and victimized become abusers or aggressors, Young Mungo can be almost impossibly painful to read. It lays bare how a rigid code of masculinity and calcified religious prejudice can brutalize selves, both bodies and souls, in ways whose visceral deformation is frankly difficult to witness. As one tragic event follows another, readers may feel overwhelmed with despair, weighed down by the bleak picture Stuart unwaveringly presents. And yet his writing is so magnificent and his young hero so endearingly, vibrantly alive that we soldier on through Mungo’s saga of endurance, weepingly inspired like watchers of a war zone, aching to assuage the survivor’s ache, yearning to rescue him from the predations of his enemies, his vindictive older brother, and finally his own darker impulses

Jennifer Egan

Rave The Boston Globe ... a dizzying and dazzling work that should end up on many Best of the Year lists ... The Candy House” requires exquisite attentiveness and extensive effort from its readers. But the work and the investment pay off richly, as each strain and thread and character reverberates in a kind of amplifying echo-wave with all the others, and the overarching tapestry emerges as ever more intricate and brilliantly conceived. Enacting the book’s dominant metaphor, Egan is presenting a version of Collective Consciousness: the blending and extension of selfhood across shared experience and identity. One of the book’s most fascinating implications, less patent but pervasive, is how this alternative model of perception does and doesn’t undermine traditional notions of literary consciousness ... As we follow the pebbles and crumbs Egan so cannily lays out, readers may feel at times as disoriented or wonderstruck as children making their way through a dark forest, at others electrifyingly clear-sighted, ecstatically certain of the novel’s wisdom, capacious philosophical range, truth and beauty. Charged with \'a potency of ideas simmering,\' The Candy House is a marvel of a novel that testifies to the surpassing power of fiction to \'roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.\'

Ann Patchett

Rave The Boston Globe ... a cornucopia of treats. Witty and warm, the essays succeed because of Patchett’s inimitable, endearing voice. Sincere but never simplistic, generous without being cloying, and accessible rather than anodyne, These Precious Days feels at once bracing and comforting ... Aspiring and experienced writers alike will find many nuggets of wisdom, helpful advice, and fascinating backstage stories here ... She brings us inside her admittedly charmed life and makes it feel, almost, normal. She also uncovers the alignments between her creative work and her real life and the crucial role of surprise in both ... It is her somber awareness of life’s precariousness and her ardent appreciation of its preciousness that makes Patchett an at once sobering and authentically uplifting writer. She looks unflinchingly at the things that thwart or cripple us, she resists easy explanations, she insists on the randomness of much \'good fortune\' ... She punctures feel-good bromides with both brisk efficiency and moral passion.

Lily King

Rave The Boston Globe 10 fierce, funny, tender stories that demonstrate both range and emotional heft. Five of them are brand-new; all of them are stunners ... Creatureliness, embodiment, the body’s strength, and vulnerability haunt these stories ... The book’s title story is King at her distinctive best, combining whimsy, wistfulness, and warmth in a hilarious and romantic story ... King gives us those words in stories that compress marvelous polarities: They hum with intense feeling even as they are dense with allusion; their literary sophistication never obscures their accessibility to our need to be transported.

Ruth Ozeki

Rave The Boston Globe ... [an] ambitious and ingenious novel that presents a stinging exploration of grief, a reflection on our relationship to objects, a potent testament to the importance of reading, writing, and books ... The most endearing aspect of Ozeki’s novel is its unabashed celebration of words, writing, and reading. A library is one of the novel’s most enchanted settings, at once a refuge from the cacophony of objects that overwhelms Benny at home and in school and a magical portal to a world of self-discovery and unexpected connections ... The Book of Form and Emptiness is charming and warm, dynamic and filled with love, but over-full and a bit undisciplined. It meanders and digresses ... But its heart, its ardent, beating heart, is huge. Ozeki’s playfulness and zaniness, her compassion and boundless curiosity, prevent the novel from ever feeling stiff or pretentious. Clever without being arch, metafictional without being arcane, dark without being nihilistic, The Book of Form and Emptiness is an exuberant delight.

Joan Silber

Positive The Boston Globe Ethan’s ability to see his father in the round, to recognize the difficulty of his experience, to forgive a flawed human being in a radical act of sympathy, epitomizes Silber’s stance throughout the book. As she gives us narrators ranging from one of Nok’s sons to the spurned lover of a married man, from the radical, questing son of arch-conservative parents to a documentary filmmaker raised in Nepal and Berkeley, she explores the difficult act of self-fashioning in the face of financial obstacles, racism, illness, mortality, familial pressures, and obligations. Her characters steal, cheat, and lie, they fall into addiction and give in to destructive anger, but they are never reduced to cartoons or stereotypes ... Charles Dickens, whose novels are mentioned several times by narrators, hovers as a kind of tutelary spirit over the book. Wealth, class, inheritance—the main Dickensian themes are Silber’s too ... These are recognizable people, stepping out from the ruins of their lives, who have been bent and broken, but perhaps into a better shape.

Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel

Rave The Boston Globe ... a blazing and brilliant return to form ... a taut and tight, suspenseful and spellbinding, witty and wonderful group of eight stories ... there isn’t a weak one in the bunch. The stories echo with Murakami’s preoccupations. Nostalgia and longing for the charged, evocative moments of young adulthood. Memory’s power and fragility; how identity forms from random decisions, \'minor incidents,\' and chance encounters; the at once intransigent and fragile nature of the \'self.\' Guilt, shame, and regret for mistakes made and people damaged by foolish or heartless choices. The power and potency of young love and the residual weight of fleeting erotic entanglements. Music’s power to make indelible impressions, elicit buried memories, connect otherwise very different people, and capture what words cannot. The themes become a kind of meter against which all the stories make their particular, chiming rhythms ... The reading experience is unsettled by a pervasive blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality, dream and waking ... Most of the narrators foreground the act of telling and ruminate on the intention behind and effects of disclosing secrets, putting inchoate impulses, fears, or yearnings into clear, logical prose ... This mesmerizing collection would make a superb introduction to Murakami for anyone who hasn’t yet fallen under his spell; his legion of devoted fans will gobble it up and beg for more.

Nicole Krauss

Rave The Boston Globe ... a sustained shot of brilliance. By turns tight and exuberant, disciplined and expansive, the collection shimmers with insight and moments of perfectly realized beauty. It provokes unabashed laughter, it inspires profound thinking, it delights and disturbs in equal measure. The stories are wildly varied in place (Japan, Israel, New York, California), tone (comic,somber, manic, restrained), and voice (male, female, young, old, first person, third person, and a blend of the two) ... The range of topics and styles reflects Krauss\' multifaceted talent. She is equally adept at Malamud-esque fabulism and tragi-comedy, dystopian darkness and light-filled wit, mythic resonance and contemporary detail, breathless narrative that digresses, bubbles over, or hurtles forward at a breakneck pace and stark, measured reflections in the vein of Rachel Cusk ... Throughout, Krauss exquisitely depicts and inspires what one of her characters calls \'the peculiar ache of being alive.\' Joy and woe are woven fine in this extraordinary book.

Marilynne Robinson

Mixed The Boston Globe Jack is suffused with the virtues that make Robinson one of our greatest thinkers on matters of spirituality, love, and family. Thoughtful, subtle, probing, it glows with wit and wisdom. But, against its siblings in the series, it casts a cloudier light, with fewer flashes to bring tears to the eyes or an exclamation to the lips. That is in part due to the fact that Jack relies much more heavily on dialogue, which hurries Robinson’s prose from its typical patient unfolding. But it’s mostly due to its titular character ... By granting us access to Jack’s thoughts, regrets, pangs, and longings, Robinson casts a warm glow of forgiveness and mercy over a man whom others would disparage or deride. There is something beautiful and worthy in her giving him his own novel, his own opportunity to win our sympathy, our admiration, our tender regard ... But Robinson was also right to be apprehensive about the approach. Jack’s head is a place of excoriation, self-loathing, and intermittent inebriation—abiding there is fascinating but ultimately taxing ... the reader can’t help but feel that a novel called \'Jack and Della\'...would have made for a better, more capacious and moving book. Though Della is a vivid presence and has some of the book’s most arresting lines, her motivation for loving Jack is never entirely clear ... Only if we see them as figures in a strenuous Christian parable—she the embodiment of charity, patience, and mercy, he the struggling sinner yearning for love’s transfiguration—does their love feel right.

J. Courtney Sullivan

Mixed The Boston Globe ... worthy but flawed ... Sam is a wonderful authorial creation, endearing and flawed and complicated in recognizably human and compelling ways. Sullivan exquisitely captures the intoxication of young love, the way that romantic relationships offer a sense of expansive promise even as they threaten to constrict us, the liminal state between childhood and adulthood inhabited by college students. She deftly depicts Sam\'s friendships with her wealthy, spoiled, but funny and smart roommate, Isabella, and her fellow dining hall workers ... giving half the book to Elizabeth was a mistake ... Spending time in her head can be irritating, tedious, and frustrating. She isn’t a compellingly unlikable person—her ethical and moral deficiencies aren’t especially interesting—and many of her missteps and misdeeds feel motivated by the demands of plot rather than character ... Sullivan’s style is unfussy and straightforward; no fashionable metafiction, no authorial flourishes or showy allusions for her. Sincere, earnest, and well-meaning, intermittently funny and always smart, Friends and Strangers is ultimately a bit disappointing.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Positive The Boston Globe The novel is a relatively minor yet nonetheless striking and original contribution to Moshfegh’s remarkable oeuvre ... Like Moshfegh’s other heroines, Vesta is prickly, judgmental, and difficult to love ... But what makes her endearing are her bracing honesty, her yearning for a larger life, and her resistance to scripts and conventions ... what initially seems to be a novel about grief becomes instead a novel about trauma and survival ... To dismiss Vesta as merely insane or paranoid would be to miss the point ... Vesta’s interpretations and creations are crucial to her personal growth, pursued on her own terms and not via the self-help books \'that offered… banal instructions on how to improve oneself.\'

Louise Erdrich

Rave The Boston Globe Erdrich’s reverence for her heroic grandfather and her moral passion about the mistreatment of her people irradiate the magisterial, beautiful, important fiction she creates here ... Thomas is our literal night watchman, and Patrice must also watch out for her father’s lurking presence, but Erdrich beautifully evokes and explores the many figurative implications and resonances of both words ... Some readers may find the novel’s kaleidoscope of perspectives confusing or its ambling pace too slow. But those who can surrender to Erdrich’s intricate tapestry of a vision, who appreciate her remarkable ability to veer from humor to pathos in a pithy phrase and, as one character says of another, to \'make life’s bitterness into comedy,\' who admire her luminous empathy, will place The Night Watchman alongside the best of her remarkable fiction.

Jenny Offill

Rave The Boston Globe ... tiny in size and immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible ... A narrator and a novel that hum with anxiety and pulse with dread are nonetheless hilarious, warm, and lovable. Both ruefully mordant and strangely consoling, Weather is at once brutal in its unsparing honesty and utterly exhilarating in its wit and intelligence. It radiates with the beleaguered yet buoyant optimism, the luminous integrity, of a supple and fearless writer.

Mary Gaitskill

Rave The Boston Globe ... its slimness belies its incendiary content ... Gaitskill uncannily captures Quin’s intoxicating mixture of brashness and tenderness, performative wit and flair and haunting vulnerability ... That the story is narrated by a \'perpetrator\' (Quin) and an \'apologist\' (Margot) makes This Is Pleasure a very risky endeavorto reduce an enigmatic and ambiguous story to a castigatory epithet is to miss the point of Gaitskill’s fiction ... one of our greatest living writers brings to the most inflammatory of topics nuance, subtlety, and a capacious humanity that grants mercy even as it never excuses.

Elizabeth Strout

Positive The Boston Globe ... bleaker, sadder, more achingly beautiful than its predecessor, and a magnificent achievement on its own terms ... Improbable and sustaining connections between the most unlikely of kindred spirits is one of Strout’s big themes here, and for the most part she does it beautifully ... \'Cleaning,\' about an eighth-grade girl who touches her breasts for a voyeuristic old man (the husband of her teacher/employer) and is rewarded with envelopes stuffed with cash, is a rare misfire; it feels ostentatiously provocative and psychologically implausible ... Strout evokes the \'gaping bright universe of loneliness\' and the terror of aging and dying so well that reading Olive, Again is at times a viscerally painful, even frightening experience. But she also gives us moments of startling poetic beauty and reminds us of the sustenance all around us.

Ann Patchett

Rave The Boston Globe ... intricate and alluring ... The Dutch House is more than a house, of course. Like Bronte’s Thornfield or Wuthering Heights, Du Maurier’s Manderley, Jay Gatsby’s mansion, Darcy’s Pemberley, and Miss Havisham’s Satis House, it is a compelling character in its own right, one which plays a central role in courtships, marriages, and the trajectory of its inhabitants’ lives ... jumps around in time. This is both a strength and a weakness of the novel, sometimes evacuating it of suspense and propulsive urgency, but just as often enabling interesting juxtapositions and deeper reflections on perspective and memory — though as Patchett reminds us, it’s impossible \'to ever see the past as it actually was\' ... The precision and subtlety of Patchett’s observations about family, her deft absorption and redeployment of a host of literary modes and models, and her narrator’s unsparing honesty are all deserving of high praise. And despite a final plot twist that feels a bit pat, The Dutch House has the richness, allusiveness, and emotional heft of the best fiction.

Amy Hempel

Rave The Boston Globe \"In 15 audacious stories, Hempel creates an uncanny and mesmerizing universe ... Throughout, Hempel asks: When is singing a form of denial, an act of occlusion, a whistling in the wind, and when is it a genuinely healing, redemptive, liberating act? Her own song is at once stark and resonant, witty and plaintive, buoyant and wistful, and this collection one of the most original and beautiful in recent memory.\

Elizabeth McCracken

Positive The Boston Globe \"Elizabeth McCracken’s first novel in 18 years, Bowlaway, is that most improbable of literary phenomena: a buoyant, joyful, rollicking yarn of sadness and loss ... McCracken’s gloriously vibrant and boisterously surprising narrative voice is one of the great triumphs of Bowlaway. Over and over, similes and metaphors pop up to form odd and original, yet precise and perfect shapes ... These are linguistic gems, little flashes of preciousness lighting up the text. And they give the book a slightly maniacal momentum, as though anything could be reconfigured into material for a funny comparison. Here the style is in keeping with its increasingly runaway plot ... With all of this skill and charm, however, Bowlaway somehow doesn’t move profoundly in the way McCracken’s earlier work does ... But if Bowlaway is never thoroughly engrossing or wrenchingly emotional, it is a tour de force of magnificent sentences, arrestingly strange images, and penetrative observations. Swerving madly in all directions, with a sparkly surface trying to light up its darkness, Bowlaway is like a train off the tracks: breathtaking as a flash-bulb, breaking new ground, but not reaching any destination.\

Anuradha Roy

Mixed The Boston Globe \"Anuradha Roy’s new novel, All the Lives We Never Lived, is replete with the author’s characteristic virtues: an unerring eye for meaningful detail, vividly sensual descriptions of place, the ability to dwell in uncertainty, a luminous empathy for outsiders, misfits, and anyone struggling with limitation, constraint, and oppression ... The letters [from Myshkin\'s mother]... feel like a narrative misfire. The epistolary form — faithfully reproduced in the text — necessarily leads to laborious repetition ... As the redundancies pile up, the novel’s mystery and magic get crowded out ... Even more problematic are numerous and lengthy excerpts from a novel by the real-life Bengali poet Maitreyi Devi about the life of a woman much like Gayatri (Roy herself translated it). Roy was clearly taken by the striking parallels to her own work, but we don’t need them; they distract rather than sonorously chime ... Despite its structural flaws and its gradual loss of emotional power, All The Lives We Never Lived’ is admirable, impressive, intelligent.\

Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen

Mixed The Boston Globe A chilling and creepy prologue...establishes a hallucinatory mood. Harbingers of disaster mount. The tone is detached, wry, a blend of whimsy and profundity, matter-of-fact reporting and dreamy meditation. And many of the familiar Murakami preoccupations are present: a middle-aged male protagonist adrift and haunted by trauma and lost love, vinyl records, lonely men yearning for connection and transcendence, existential musings, talking creatures ... These delicate, amorphous, even insubstantial materials of identity provide a richly tenuous ground for Murakami’s obsessive inversions ... In this book, however, Murakami seems to have lost a bit of his conjuror’s dexterity. Those ineffable effects, relying on sophisticated and probably instinctual balances of one invisible force against another, fail when things become unsteady, when the conductor falls a fraction behind the beat. At times the book reads like a literature graduate student’s fever dream. Other sections feel like a history textbook. The counterpoise of humor and poignancy so crucial to Murakami’s other works feels awkward. Halfway through, the plot runs out of steam and invention ... Killing Commendatore’ seems a hanging curveball, among the many darting sliders and knuckleballs of Murakami’s previous works.

Gary Shteyngart

Positive The Boston Globe ...a rollicking, uproariously funny, bitingly satiric yet also warm and big-hearted novel ... But Barry is no simple caricature ... A few of the comic subplots, especially the one involving a crack rock, strain the limits of credulity, even for Shteyngart’s absurd universe, and homoerotic elements to Barry’s relationships with several men feel distracting ... Lake Success feels both linguistically fecund and emotionally robust. Zingers abound, but so do genuinely touching moments.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Rave The Boston Globe Determined to narcotize her pain and drug herself into oblivion, the narrator finds a psychiatrist in the phone book. Dr. Tuttle, a brilliant comic creation, dispenses unhinged bromides and a raft of prescriptions with shocking yet welcome alacrity ... Like Thoreau at Walden Pond or Bartleby preferring \'not to,\' Moshfegh’s narrator is in flight from a world that has been too much with her. She mercilessly exposes the falseness of our representations, where identity is curated ... With her disastrously bad decisions, her lack of any conventional ambition, her misanthropy, our \'somnophile\' narrator will be off-putting for many readers. But her bracing self-awareness, mordant humor, and flashes of vulnerability endear her to us. She’s appalling, hilarious, and, finally, wise. A profoundly idiosyncratic heroine becomes a universal figure of alienation, an archetypal quester in search of \'a great transformation.\'

Rachel Cusk

Positive The Boston Globe \"Of the three novels, Kudos is the most insular and self-referential, in large part a meditation on the nature of publishing and publicity, literary fame, and the value and worth of literature itself ... one of the most brilliant aspects of this novel is the way it uncovers the analogies between imaginative productions and \'real\' life and the way the two can mix and merge. Filled with reflections on authenticity and falseness, Kudos lays bare the theatricality of ordinary actions and the difficulty of distinguishing real from pretend ... The novel, and trilogy, end rather disappointingly, with a final scene whose black comedy isn’t as resonant or funny as one might have wished. But the one flat note emphasizes how unerring the rest has been. These are deeply intelligent works that cast a hypnotic spell.\

Ann Hulbert

Mixed The Boston Globe Ann Hulbert shares the intriguing but cautionary tales of 15 exceptionally gifted children. The cast includes many types: virtuoso musicians, math whizzes, chess champion Bobby Fischer, movie star Shirley Temple, celebrated child writers of the 1920s, computer programmers of the ’60s and ’70s, autistic savants, and offspring of ‘Tiger’ parents … Off the Charts contains both biographical sketches of these figures and Hulbert’s analysis of their meanings, but it separates the two kinds of work rather abruptly. Biography fills the main chapters, interpretation the book’s prologue and epilogue. The effect is notably disjointed … She resolves to tell the stories ‘as unsentimentally, and unsensationally, as possible,’ but that restraint comes at the cost of emotional vividness and poignancy. But if the prose is aloof, it’s nonetheless clear that an ethical passion animates Hulbert’s work.

Samantha Hunt

Rave The Boston Globe These are stories about fear, what engenders it, how it is magnified, mitigated, or aggrandized into something at once annihilating and sublime. Insight is partial, transport ephemeral but resonantly strange. Uncanny moments of honesty or 'bright rawness' stud the experiences of Hunt’s characters like flashing gems. Hunt is by turns hilarious, wry, wrenching, and lyrical. Her ability to make a deft turn from the comic to the poignant is remarkable, her humaneness sometimes incongruous but never in doubt. For all their eeriness, their unwavering, unrelenting confrontation with defeat, disappointment, and despair, the ultimate effect of the stories in The Dark Dark is inspiriting, nourishing, and finally comforting ... Hunt’s subtlety of vision, her embrace of her panoply of oddballs and misfits, her willingness to make leaps of logic and association in order to link diverse phenomena — these virtues of empathy make her darkness, against every grain, a place of original and truly radical connectedness.

Dani Shapiro

Rave The Boston Globe Dani Shapiro has written several courageous and searing memoirs...She has never written anything as raw, dark, or brave as Hourglass ... Hourglass is not an unflawed work...But for the most part she gives us a gorgeous, poetic stay against loss and confusion ... Hourglass is a stalwart witness to the erosions of time’s tides that, in being stalwart, it also wishes to stand against.

James Lasdun

Rave The Boston Globe ...a twisty, chilly, exquisitely written, and tautly suspenseful exploration of big ideas in the guise of a psychological thriller ... no one — neither callow one-percenters nor those who protest their excesses — is immune from Lasdun’s witheringly satiric gaze ... Lasdun’s prose is both lapidary and hypnotic.

Decca Aitkenhead

Rave The Boston Globe The opening chapter is a tour-de-force, as Aitkenhead narrates in present tense, slowly, devastatingly how Tony died ... no one who reads her brave and eloquent book will ever forget endearing Tony or their incandescent love story.

Mary Gaitskill

Rave The Boston Globe That Gaitskill has given not only herself a voice but also the husband, the child, and the child’s mother, in equal measure, speaks to her extraordinary artistic achievement here...Bracing in its rigorous truth-seeking, subtle and capacious in its moral vision, Gaitskill’s work feels more real than real life and reading her leads to a place that feels like a sacred space.

Samantha Hunt

Positive The Boston Globe ...an intriguing mystery with clues, suspense, enigmas galore, and an exhilarating, witty, poignant paean to the unexplainable, the unsolvable, the irreducibly mysterious.

Garth Risk Hallberg

Mixed The Boston Globe “I was right there with Risk Hallberg for about the first 150 pages but interest began to wane soon after. When the second Book flashes back 15 years to fill in gaps and provide strangely belabored back stories, any narrative momentum is stopped dead in its tracks. And while the writing is often good, it’s very rarely great.”

Lily Tuck

Mixed The Boston Globe Tuck simultaneously creates a layered portrait of a family and the historical eras it lived through and questions the possibility of definitively capturing or summing up human lives. It’s a high-wire act that she doesn’t always manage successfully, but is nonetheless exciting in its sweep, ambition, and conceptual intricacy.

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November 22, 2024