RaveThe GuardianMost of the stories are about old age; Updike here, as in the Rabbit novels, looks at the interplay between one's youth and one's final years, and in particular at the hold that the former maintains on the latter. This collection is filled with divorcees hankering for former spouses, with married people longing for past paramours and with successful, rounded people returning to the childhood towns and friends they have outgrown but still yearn for … When Updike gets it right — when the wonder of his prose, the energy of his narrative, the keenness of his eye and the rehabilitating warmth of his artistic mind are all firing — the reader is left with the sense of having encountered modern American fiction in its near-perfect state.
Uzodinma Iweala
RaveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewIweala...gives his hero a voice that is unliterary yet poetic, sometimes sliding into the present tense when describing the past … After only a few pages, this idiosyncratic style, at first so awkward, comes to seem quite natural; the story is unimaginable without it. Iweala, although still in his early 20's, knows instinctively to avoid bolstering an uneducated narrator's tale with pointedly skilled phrases of his own. Instead, he allows Agu to speak in a simple, authentic way, which can produce startlingly original expressions … The acute characterization, the adroit mixture of color and restraint, and the horrific emotional force of the narrative are impressive. Still more impressive is Iweala's ability to maintain not only our sympathy but our affection for his central character.
