RaveThe Women\'s Review of BooksThe language of this novel is by turns conversational, comically essayistic and lyrical. The first half of the book, in which Jake constructs a vivid, detailed portrait of Charlie’s life of short-circuited careers and failed marriages, achieves a rollicking momentum. The latter half creates more exquisite pressure with sly subversions and reversals that reveal, in the end, an object our metafictionally erstwhile narrator must teach himself to recognize: an abandoned kid’s broken heart ... To list everything in play in this novel, including societal drift, ideological cleavage, the nature of truth and fiction, the alienation of families, the ravages of capitalism visited even on those who feel they have some agency in the system, might make A Calling for Charlie Barnes sound cluttered. It’s not. Ferris is in shrewd command of his thematic and syntactic trajectories. This novel is a passionate, well-constructed, often hilarious and, at times, profound plunge into grief, both civic and intimate, as well as a culmination (so far) of the literary explorations Ferris has been undertaking since he arrived.
Don DeLillo
RaveBookforumZero K deserves to win old and new readers alike. It’s a marvelous blend of DeLillo’s enormous gifts. His bleak humor and edged insight, the alertness and vitality of his prose, the vast, poetic extrapolations are all evident. So is the visceral quickness and wit in the sentences...Zero K is filled with wonderful side characters, scientists and philosophers and linguists from across the world, many armed with forceful, funny riffs. This is one of the constant pleasures of a DeLillo novel, the talk, the shop talk, the comic talk, the cosmic talk, the way the characters feel language, its sonics, the moral and emotional pressures.
