RaveThe Guardian (UK)There’s room to feel sympathy with the flamboyant, roguish Q, and some readers will; it’s an astonishingly humane characterization, articulated within mutable social dynamics. But more urgently, we are primed to penetrate Q’s defenses and misogyny, primed for penitence. Here, Gaitskill nails one of the most disempowering and frustrating aspects of the recent sexual offences shakedown: the frequently unrewarded desire for enlightenment and apology, and genuine reformation of perpetrators ... There are no easy answers or safe moral stations within the book. The two narratives converse, diverge, agree and disagree, brilliantly covering this hotly debated terrain. In fewer than 100 pages, Gaitskill achieves a superb feat. She distils the suffering, anger, reactivity, danger and social recalibration of the #MeToo movement into an extremely potent, intelligent and nuanced account ... This is Pleasure sensitively and confidently holds its fury, momentum, contrary forces and imperfect humanity within a perfect frame.
Daniel Woodrell
RaveThe GuardianDaniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality – a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling – of late rather an unfashionable mode ... the invocation of...muscular, expert voices, with their idiomatic tongues, has an enthralling effect, both exhilarating and terrifying. You don\'t want to sit on their knees, necessarily, but you do want to pull up a chair and partake of the experience ... the narrative tenor of The Maid\'s Version is mightily unsentimental ... an exploration of the psychology of trauma, the roles and labels given to individuals in societies, as well as the relationship of poverty to impotence, of wealth to immunity, of sex to power ... The reader does eventually find out what happened...but that\'s not really the point. Woodrell\'s fiction has been described as \'southern noir\', and his latest work does contain elements of crime, horror, femmes fatales, feuds and villains. But under the grisly, seductive, colloquial tone is a very unusual thing – a communitarian novel: a novel concerned with how we live – and sometimes die – together, how we share experiences through the rituals of speaking and writing, because that is the fundamental spirit and purpose of language.
