RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewMason’s historical fiction...brilliantly combine the granularity of realism with the timeless, shimmering allure of myth. His new novel, North Woods, promises — and delivers — more of the same ... A hodgepodge narrative, brazenly disjointed in time, perspective and form. Letters, poems and song lyrics, diary entries, medical case notes, real-estate listings, vintage botanical illustrations, pages of an almanac ... That North Woods proves captivating despite its piecemeal structure is testament to Mason’s powers as a writer, his stylish and supple narrative voice ... The secret of North Woods, its blending of the comic and the sublime, lies in the way Mason, deftly toggling between the macro and micro, manages to do both. He not only acknowledges cosmic indifference but celebrates it, even as he pauses to recognize the humans who experience jubilation and heartbreak as they wend their way toward oblivion. This is fiction that deals in minutes and in centuries, that captures the glory and the triviality of human lives. The forest and the trees: Mason keeps both in clear view in his eccentric and exhilarating novel.
Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, tr. Michele Hutchison
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewOne can’t help being impressed by how many narrative balls Pfeijffer keeps in the air. The novel combines a comedy of manners with travel journalism, political and cultural commentary, and reflections on European identity. Oh, plus an art-heist mystery (centering on the final days and paintings of Caravaggio). And that love story. Pfeijffer’s prose, bravely translated by Michele Hutchison, is as multifarious as the novel itself — now elegant and baroque, now blandly reportorial, now bawdy (some readers may cringe at his lusty descriptions of sexual encounters). What to make of a style that calls to mind Nabokov, Tom Wolfe, Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Wes Anderson and a UNESCO position paper? The novel wantonly mingles the erotic and the esoteric, the hilarious and the hectoring, the antic and the academic ... Pfeijffer’s characters tend to spout lectures ... There is a higgledy-piggledy quality to the novel that suggests a writer taking all the oddments on his desk and sewing them together with metafictional and autofictional threads. Not everything works, but in the end, Grand Hotel Europa is like its garrulous narrator, whose flaws and excesses you readily forgive because you enjoy his company. Not even the book’s caustic and at times dismal take on contemporary European realities can dampen its incorrigible high spirits.
Damon Galgut
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Promise adopts a protean tone, now menacing, now darkly mirthful ... the novel registers seismic rumbles of a changing South Africa ... The Promise offers all the virtues of realist fiction, plus some extras. Galgut keeps the surface of his prose choppy, roiling it with diverse narrative tools: points of view that shift within paragraphs, or even sentences; cryptic rhetorical moves, including addressing the reader directly [...]; scenes that blur together with no transition; and an intermittent metafictional patter [...] A reader can shrug it all off and focus on the family’s story, or take pleasure in a brash writer’s narrative norm-breaking ... The novel’s cinematic present tense and kaleidoscopic point of view create a mosaic of what everyone in the room is thinking at a given moment. The picture is anything but pretty, a veneer of civility barely hiding the barbed sibling resentments that surface following parental deaths. Don’t look for much hope in this novel ... Galgut in The Promise is a gleeful satirist, mordantly skewering his characters’ fecklessness and hypocrisy.
Richard Ford
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThere’s a gamble in using ambivalence as the launching pad for fiction, and a couple of these stories drift and bog down ... as much existential as it is temperamental, reflecting protagonists grappling to relinquish the sense of an overarching narrative in their lives. These are stories about the death of stories ... Ford has a gift for nimble interior monologues and a superb ear for the varieties and vagaries of human speech. His prose can strike a Hemingwayesque cadence ... At 76, Ford is of the last generation of writers to have grown up directly under the Papa-and-Scott dispensation, and it’s gratifying to hear his sentences pay homage ... Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked, complex protagonists brought toward difficult recognitions: There’s a kind of narrative, often dismissed as the \'well-crafted, writing-class story,\' that deals in muted epiphanies and trains its gaze inward, to pangs and misgivings. Some readers may no longer admire this kind of story. But I still love it. What is craft, after all, but a good thing well made?
Benjamin Markovits
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewChristmas in Austin is a profoundly domestic novel. The plot is desultory; what occurs is talk, plus copious inner musings about family relationships. The Essingers argue about anything — whether dinner is being cooked properly; whether it’s too cold to let the children sleep in the playhouse; whether to go out for doughnuts. Markovits specializes in innocuous little moments of daily marital abrasion ... Can routine family life, can tedium itself, be made interesting and sympathetic if you pay close enough attention to it? The answer, on the basis of this fine novel, is a resounding yes. Markovits delivers an engrossing inquiry into the nature of familiarity: family stories and code words, special places in the old neighborhood, cherished holiday rituals. Though the Essinger siblings are anything but quiet, a quiet sadness pervades this account of holiday homecoming, and of their entry into early middle age. The novel forms a post-mortem of the happy childhood and the faint sense of anticlimax that millennials carry in its aftermath. With attentive and intelligent sympathy, Markovits digs beneath Tolstoy’s dictum about happy families to raise the question, What is family happiness? ... Right down to its random-seeming ending, Christmas in Austin is aggressively inconclusive ... For what is family, after all, but a conversation that never ends?
J. M. Coetzee
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...admirers can now turn to Coetzee\'s terse, gritty memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life, which chronicles his childhood in a small city 90 miles from Cape Town in the 1940\'s and 50\'s ... Written in a third-person, present-tense voice that effaces adult perspective and lends harsh immediacy to the inner agonies of the child, the memoir explores a profound ambivalence about what in most respects looks like a routine middle-class boyhood.
John Le Carré
MixedThe New York TimesThe Constant Gardener inhabits a moral universe far less murky than the precincts of ambiguity where le Carré made his name … Le Carré is a superb moralist of the quotidian, a master at showing how our humdrum daily dealings with spouses and colleagues reveal us … The Constant Gardener makes some ungainly narrative moves, using whole chapters of police interrogation to establish basic plot points, and dishing out boatloads of documents for us to sort through. The effort hints at another kind of book altogether — namely, investigative journalism — and as we follow Justin's search for the truth, The Constant Gardener feels ever more like an exposé, an angry diatribe against corporate malfeasance.
Scott Spencer
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewHow to write freshly about characters whose lives have lost all freshness? It’s the same challenge [Richard] Yates faced, and Spencer struggles with it. Halfway through the novel, with Thaddeus exhibiting gloomy regret about the choices he’s made and his marriage skidding hard into what feels like middle-aged disaffection, it’s startling to recall that he and Grace are not even 30. Young Fogies, they’re caught up in a tedium so premature as to seem imposed. Covering a period from 1976 to 1990, River Under the Road contains cultural scene-setting, reminiscent of Updike’s Rabbit novels, that captures the social and political mood of 'me-decade' self-indulgence morphing into Reagan-era conservatism. And Spencer doles out apt metaphors for difficult moments ... But elsewhere Spencer’s prose drifts from the enthusiastic into the maudlin and stilted ... River Under the Road takes us down an all-too-well-worn path.
