PositiveThe Irish Times\"Whitehead has always hopped from genre to genre...and it’s easy to see why he has chosen to spend more time in the crime fiction mode. The genre’s traits and preoccupations dovetail neatly with his own: the ironic and detached style, the obsession with institutions and hidden power relations, and the subtle gradations of social class. Whitehead is fascinated by the restless movements of capital and the frenetic competition it generates – his nonfiction book about poker is titled The Noble Hustle – and the novel expertly portrays what it describes as \'churn\' as the ever-changing face of Carney’s furniture showroom parallels the constant upheaval of the city outside ... His best novels make a point of subverting (or in his own words, \'deforming\') genre conventions; here, it sometimes feels as if Whitehead is more straightforwardly \'doing\' crime fiction. No bad thing, but the level of ambition in his best work – the bold strokes of formal invention in genre and plot – sometimes seems absent. There is a counterpoint, though. The expanded canvas of two novels allows for a more extended portrait of a neighbourhood whose growth pains come to stand for broader postwar political currents.\
Atticus Lish
RaveThe Irish Times (UK)...as well as being a raw, sharply rendered love story, this is also a stark portrayal of immigration in modern-day New York, an unsparing autopsy of the degradations of the Bush years, and as ambitious and impressive a first novel as you could hope to find ... two misfits meet and forge an unlikely relationship – powerfully and unsentimentally rendered ... Preparation’s story, then, is essentially one of lovers battling against the odds. The novel’s success lies in the way that, within this slow-burning, fairytale narrative structure, it relentlessly depicts the scale of those odds and intently examines the lives of those outside the US’s social safety net ... part of what makes Lish’s novel work is the creation of a vividly-drawn, offbeat female heroine...she, like Skinner, becomes far more than the stock character she could have been ... The prose is confident, rhythmic, and obsessive in its accumulation of detail and the narrative eye stays at street level for long stretches, vividly conveying the gritty textures of deprivation ... Lish avoids sentimentality by limiting access to his characters’ thoughts and focusing instead on their raw and often painful experiences, and the resulting tale is sympathetic, disturbing and unusually powerful.
