Rave4Columns\"The kink comes off kindly. Imagine a droll grandfather-type, afghan blanket across his lap, embarrassing his children ... All of these vignettes move along like a sushi train, melodic enough but with no particular narrative structure. Sometimes White rambles, or wobbles off into poetry. Characters from previous books reappear, looking much as they did the first time around. Nonetheless, he remains an astonishingly elegant stylist, with a genius for similes. His witty details are always buffed to high polish. It’s a briny pleasure to read about outré sex in sentences as baroque as peonies, as smooth as eggnog. Gossamer prose and ramrod honesty are White’s dual credos, and each is made peculiar and fresh by the presence of the other ... This self-deprecation oils the gears of White’s wit, but it also works as an invitation, gathering beneath its ribs everyone who feels inadequate to some concocted mirage of what sex should be. Look how pathetic I am, and yet how horny! I’ll take my pleasure, and you should too.\
Francine Prose
Mixed4ColumnsIt’s an odd preoccupation for an author with a career-long interest in transformation. Prose’s novels are generally about the glitchy process of growing a conscience, though they’re also rollicking, flinty, teasing, fabulist yarns ... Perhaps the problem with 1974 is that it’s stuck in 1974. My sympathy warms to a diffident woman writer in her twenties, but now that woman is all grown up. Why does Prose cede her personal history to an ex-boyfriend? ... Maybe Prose intuited that she belonged in the driver’s seat, not sitting shotgun to a dried-up activist in the throes of a nervous breakdown.
