PositiveBookforum[An] arresting debut novel ... This is a portrait of the sort of acute discomfort with the world that is often taken as a sign of psychic fragility ... Here and in her previous nonfiction work, Manguso favors spare, staccato prose, divided into unindented and liberally spaced paragraphs ... But minimalism can suggest a willed resistance to tension, a drive for order; Very Cold People revels in danger, disarray, and the ugly mash of pride and resentment that invariably characterizes life on the outside. Certain descriptions have the disquieting hum of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights ... if Ruth’s blinkered state is realistic, it can also feel flat and oppressive. One craves some sense of contrast or relief, which the novel supplies only fleetingly ... Manguso’s achievement is to lead us into this role, which seems an act of delicate optimism in itself. To offer a witness is to disturb the barriers trauma raises around the self, and to prove that devastation need not be absolute.
Vivian Gornick
RaveCleveland Review of BooksGornick’s essays in Taking A Long Look still feel fresh ... they are rendered with a forcefulness and clarity that is absent from so much essayistic writing today. Many contemporary essays tend to fizzle or prevaricate; lacking a clear organizing principle, they loudly announce their own incoherence, or lay claim to an authority that feels unearned. By contrast, Gornick’s essays are slow burns—bristling with urgency, but careful to gather evidence before reaching for an insight. At the point of revelation, when the essays snap sharply into focus, the effect can be dazzling, almost incandescent ... If something chafes in her writing, it is her stiffness—the muscular, held posture of a constant pugilist, a writer who approaches her work as a matter of life and death. Her sentences are significant, not suggestive; the effect of all that concentrated power can be enervating. Still, there’s an appealing expansiveness to her thinking. Gornick’s roving, telescopic eye takes in aspects of the culture, considers them prismatically, then assimilates them into her own theory of the world. What is felt in Gornick’s essays is the joyful rhythm of a mind working out ideas on the page ... Taking A Long Look reminds us why, but more importantly, how, the essay—at its most taut and fully-formed—can be spectacular.
Benjamin Nugent
MixedThe RumpusNugent’s stories are paradoxical...alternately rough and sentimental, they boomerang between frat bro clichés...and moments of lyrical, existential reflection. The brutality of frat culture, Nugent suggests, is a veneer that hardly masks its devotees’ miseries and insecurities ... Nugent’s frat stars are seemingly well-meaning oddballs: more likable than the blustering, macho frat type ... One gets the sense that Nugent wants to resist the Animal House model, but the supposedly \'unproblematic\' bro is a type, too ... Nugent tries hard to work through current debates in his fictional scenarios. The results can be illuminating and complex, but some of Fraternity’s stories end up reading as pat social commentary ... The most compelling stories in Fraternity are those that tend satirical, riffing on the mock-militarism that defines fraternity rituals and provides a pretext for male bonding ... Nugent...doesn’t seem to think that the frat bro can change. I do, though, which is why Fraternity fell flat for me in places. It provides—but never goes beyond—a kind of canned criticism. Still, there’s much to admire about Nugent’s style ... Nugent’s stories seem to suffer from the same problem these men did. Like a one-armed hug or a fist bump, they express some emotion, but leave much unsaid ... its meditations on male adolescence—with all its grim paradoxes, its fears and confusions—also transcend the frat.
Mark O'Connell
PositiveThe RumpusO’Connell’s personal writing brings to mind Joan Didion’s introductory essay in The White Album, written amid the turmoil of the 1960s ... while Didion’s dread and paranoia lead her to confusion, O’Connell seeks clarity from chaos, and finds it in the very form of apocalypse ... O’Connell evaluates modern society’s ills and launches a sharp critique of middle-class thinking. Catastrophizing exposes a privileged subject who is alert to future dangers but impervious to present suffering; O’Connell understands this notion well because he, too, is complicit. A literary nonfiction writer with journalistic chops, O’Connell negotiates deftly between the personal and the global, but admits also that his frame of reference is constrained by privilege. The result is an acutely self-conscious narratorial voice ... his clear-eyed perspective on injustice and inequality prevents the book from becoming pure self-flagellation.
