MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe literary thriller can be reminiscent of the political candidate who tries to be all things to all voters, oscillating between radically disparate positions and never fully satisfying the target demographic of either pole. This is how I felt while reading The Liar. For the most part, the Israeli novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen writes sensitively of inner turmoil and loneliness, but she intermittently sabotages her own work with a made-for-Netflix plot ricochet or line of cheesy dialogue ... Gundar-Goshen handles her characters’ interior lives gracefully ... The prose can be evocative ... She’s also adept at family dynamics — enough so that I found myself wishing she had focused merely on relationships and hadn’t deployed a slew of contrivances (or else that she had written an unapologetic thriller that dispensed with any claims to plausibility ... Scenes related to the investigation and Nofar’s celebrity unspool formulaically. It doesn’t help that the characters sometimes think of TV shows as behavioral guides ... The dialogue can be tin-eared...Even less realistic are the teenagers’ slang and conduct ... Still, the writing here has enough psychological depth and lovely passages to sustain its misfires. And the ending, which suggests redemption for both the singer and Nofar, is surprisingly moving. I’ll watch the Netflix adaptation the day it streams.
Nathan Hill
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...[an] ambitiously panoramic and humane debut ... It sounds dizzying, but the multiple story lines are dexterously juggled and well paced, even if the joints between the novel’s 10 sections are a little creaky ... Hill has so much talent to burn that he can pull off just about any style, imagine himself into any person and convincingly portray any place or time. The Nix is hugely entertaining and unfailingly smart ...But the novel Hill has assembled is so diffuse in its tones, settings and cast that it never gives the reader a chance to plant himself in its emotional soil.
Padgett Powell
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThese stories are very much in the key of Donald Barthelme — one of the book’s two dedicatees; the other is Powell’s deceased pit bull — with touches of Nicholson Baker’s fascination with the microscopic and the nostalgic ... The effect of reading these stories consecutively is a bit like being buttonholed by the garrulous old-timer at the bar whose manifold enthusiasms may be the result of alcohol, mild insanity or academic tenure (or, as is often the case, all three), but whose digressions you keep listening to because, in the midst of their nonsensical grandstanding, they regularly embed a fragment of wisdom, a brilliantly turned phrase or a laugh-inducing one-liner.
