RaveHarper\'sOne is constantly confronted, in Portis’s work, with the glories and horrors of the Old South ... The old ways are always being contrasted with present-day American banality, with the encroachment of chintzy commercial culture even into the hinterlands ... Of course, all of his narrators and protagonists are unreliable... this is the source of much of their humor. And humor isn’t only a byproduct in his novels, it is their universal joint, their clutch assembly.
Alexander Maksik
RaveThe New York TimesThe novel is more concerned with storytelling than with \'bodily experience\' as such, and the story it tells orbits around questions of creativity, grief and the Trump era’s demolition of platitudes and ever-escalating implausibility and absurdism...Maksik fortunately sidesteps the polemical fable one worries he might be writing in favor of a much more compelling project...\'You must never fall for the myth of the absolute villain,\' Fields’s grandmother warns him...And even as the colony’s shadowy visionary, Sebastian Light (who at times reminds one of Marlon Brando’s Dr. Moreau), takes on certain Trumpian qualities — his resentment of \'elites,\' his allegiance to kitsch, his willingness to burn it all down to control the narrative — Maksik never allows the novel to seem overly programmatic...It is finally an argument for the necessity of irony, risk and integrity in the production of art as in life.
