MixedThe New York Times Book Review... translated into English with unobtrusive flair ... Readers of Louis, who is 29 — he has published five best-selling novels in France, this his fourth — know his mix of tenderness and rage, sentiment and intellection, and above all formal ingenuity: Each of his books is different from the last in how it makes its narrative way ... exhibit[s] a less appealing feature of Louis’s novelistic practice, one that has been present all along, a kind of 40-watt intellectual bombast ... The passive voice, Louis’s abstract \'I’ve been told,\' tells us very little: Anyone can tell anyone anything, but that doesn’t make it meaningful. Louis is setting up straw men to mow down, with those sharpened sentences — a metaphor that comes off as self-parody, not provocation. In so short a book, the frequency of the interjections and their specious banality stomps on the tenderness that Louis is documenting. It is as if the novel has been made to digest its own readers’ guide...it is a mode that has come to feel more like a tic ... How does one evolve, as a man, as a writer, when the struggle has become not with one’s past but with one’s present? One changes everything. One grows up.
Jamil Jan Kochai
RaveThe New York Review of BooksKochai’s fiction has a spoken flair, and part of the beauty of his vision of Afghanistan is the essentiality of its language. Scores of words from Pashto and other languages—unmolested by italics—populate the collection, and their accumulation deepens one’s sense of the strangeness, and beauty, of the real: pakol, suhoor, patus, toshak, Fajr adhan, chinar, attan, patki, khala, zina, deen, fard, sunna, nafl, Qari, dhikr, janaza, istinja, wudhu…. These words in no way impede the movement of the stories, which unfold with terrific momentum. Kochai has a gift for knowing what makes the engine of a story turn over and go, what formal choices might deliver a narrative in such a way as to coax a reader to endure a set of experiences that, whatever their frequent delights—and the stories are uncommonly full of them—are rooted in sorrow, loss, and rage ... Kochai’s collection is without sanctimony. It is also without any sort of soft-focus cuteness or exoticism.
Jamil Jan Kochai
RaveThe New York Review of BooksKochai’s fiction has a spoken flair, and part of the beauty of his vision of Afghanistan is the essentiality of its language. Scores of words from Pashto and other languages—unmolested by italics—populate the collection, and their accumulation deepens one’s sense of the strangeness, and beauty, of the real ... These words in no way impede the movement of the stories, which unfold with terrific momentum. Kochai has a gift for knowing what makes the engine of a story turn over and go, what formal choices might deliver a narrative in such a way as to coax a reader to endure a set of experiences that, whatever their frequent delights—and the stories are uncommonly full of them—are rooted in sorrow, loss, and rage ... Kochai’s collection is without sanctimony. It is also without any sort of soft-focus cuteness or exoticism.
Jonathan Franzen
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... just as Mr. Franzen gives Russ, made furious by his humiliation, a real Plymouth Fury to drive, and therefore an irony that feels like life, Mr. Franzen presents the pastoral urge with a plainness made ridiculous only by those who don’t believe that someone could, so baldly, believe ... As has always been the case with Mr. Franzen’s novels, their form forces us to imagine the particular ways that people suffer ... Mr. Franzen shuttles us through sections devoted to the point of view of each essential character, writing in the third person but in the style of thinking of each. This method could describe that of a hundred contemporary novelists, but it has been Mr. Franzen’s particular gift that his confecting of these rival testimonies, secular gospels of bad news, are so immersive and distinctly his own that one begins not so much to want to hear from another implicated member but mystically to need to ... Mr. Franzen’s interest in exploiting novel form to explore the effect of Christian belief on belief in family—that other, sacred institution which too easily skews profane—feels new ... A Christian narrative, or a narrative about Christians, in which carnal sin or Christian passion goes unseen becomes a carnival of virtue. It is a purer virtue of Mr. Franzen’s that he has never been too squeamish to reveal our, not so much impurity as failedness. It is virtue that yields not admiration from readers but, in readers, belief ... Here, as with so many of Mr. Franzen’s sentences, one feels those beats with one’s body, powered, as they are, as all great prose is, by the lessons of poetry ... If I insist on Mr. Franzen’s excellence as a maker of sentences that serve story and transmogrify characters into a substance as palpable as a missing person’s ghost, it’s in part a response to a consistent critical denial of that part of his power through time ... Mr. Franzen’s sentences will ensure that his Hildebrandts, troubledly embedded in God’s America and America’s idea of God, will be worth waiting to hear more from. Their bad news is good news for the novel as a form, a form which allows us to sit as we should with those who suffer: our sacred hearts rent open, naked and afraid.
Rivka Galchen
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... what has been most distinctive about Ms. Galchen’s project is how consistently weird it is. I mean this as highest praise. There’s something uncanny about Ms. Galchen writing. Her mind refuses to work like other minds ... Drawing on contemporary accounts, depositions by Katharina’s accusers preserved in records of her trial, and protest letters by Johannes to his aristocratic circle, Ms. Galchen constructs a historical armature on which she frees herself to build.
Jon Fosse
RaveHarpers... a very strange novel, beautifully and movingly strange ... The book sounds, in summary, terrible: pretentious, self-serious, unendurable. This makes it all the more remarkable how wonderful it is. The book evades all those pitfalls to become something quite different from what it might seem, something that, like all great novels, somehow exceeds our prior idea of what a novel is ... With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and—it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century—different from what has been written before. Septology feels new ... While reading Septology, it’s as if it ceases to be a novel at all. I do not mean this in the sense of it being a reaction to received ideas of the novel. There is no whiff of an author making self-important statements about \'the death of character\' or \'the hunger for reality.\' It’s just that it becomes hard, wonderfully hard, when reading Septology, to think that a novel could be written any other way.
Jon Fosse, Trans. by Damion Searls
RaveHarpers... a very strange novel, beautifully and movingly strange ... The book sounds, in summary, terrible: pretentious, self-serious, unendurable. This makes it all the more remarkable how wonderful it is. The book evades all those pitfalls to become something quite different from what it might seem, something that, like all great novels, somehow exceeds our prior idea of what a novel is. Naturally, the pleasures of plot and character, subject and setting, draw us to novels broadly, but a great novel draws us to a shadow tale at its heart: the story of its style. With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and—it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century—different from what has been written before. Septology feels new. The first-person voice of Septology—a brain voice, not a written record ... While reading Septology, it’s as if it ceases to be a novel at all. I do not mean this in the sense of it being a reaction to received ideas of the novel. There is no whiff of an author making self-important statements ... It’s just that it becomes hard, wonderfully hard, when reading Septology, to think that a novel could be written any other way.
Garth Greenwell
RaveBook PostCleanness, which can be read as either a collection of nine discrete stories, a group of linked stories, or a novel tout court...is a very different and differently satisfying enterprise. ... formal restlessness can now be understood as a signal trait of Greenwell’s fiction, a mix of daring and doubt over the shapes a novel might take, a daring and doubt that embodies the subject that he has, no less daringly, been making his own ... For Greenwell has been seeking, along with a form and through a subject, a style in which the physical and emotional complications of sexual need, in his case between young men, might be set down ... What I have been moved to see, in Greenwell’s new book, is how that struggle with style has itself been subordinated into the wrestle with his subject, serving it newly and more richly than before. His sentences have leaned out, and have made room for a clearer, and truly revelatory, presentation of physical and psychosexual interplay ... In the most moving section of Cleanness, \'The Little Saint,\' the narrator meets a man online and allows himself to assume the dominant role in their encounter ... It is intensely moving, the most sophisticated fiction Greenwell has produced. And it also reads as an allegory for the path his fiction has pursued: one that asserted a power that was performance, the mask now fallen away to reveal a face that is open, and afraid.
David Foster Wallace
PositiveThe London Review of BooksHis new collection, Oblivion, contains eight stories of uncompromising difficulty, with certain superficial similarities ... These novellas are densely packed with sentences that are not infrequently more than a page long. The typical mode of their narration is digressive; the digressions, in keeping with Wallace’s reputation as a humorist of the first rank, are not infrequently very funny. The stories also tend to feature an abundance of neologisms, arcane vocabulary and foreign terms ... Perhaps more than anything, the defining quality of these fictions is the degree to which they leave the reader unsure about very basic narrative issues: who is telling this story? ... The trouble one faces, the trouble I face – having read the eight stories in Oblivion; having found some hard to read and, because they were hard and the hardness made me miss things, reread them; having reread them and seen how they work, how well they work, how tightly they withhold their working...is the concern that these stories, the most interesting and serious and accomplished shorter fiction published in the past decade, exhibit a fundamental rhetorical failure.
Janet Malcolm
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"Seeing things differently is the essence of what sets Malcolm apart. Few writers pay attention with the precision, acuity and patience she has exhibited during her career ... These 18 pieces are organized into three unnamed parts, but they conspire to form a meaningful whole ... Taking no particular issue with the work of her colleagues, I wish nonetheless to say that Malcolm, line to line, is a more revealing writer, one whose presence in her pieces isn’t meant to advertise the self so much as complicate the subject. And also, line to line, she is a better writer ... [The final section of the book is] devoted to Malcolm’s superb literary criticism... we are fortunate to have Malcolm’s kind of authority, one founded as much on her failures as on her successes at seeing.\
Jonathan Safran Foer
MixedThe London Review of BooksIt’s fair to say that Oskar’s brain is unusually sharp for a nine-year-old, but, as he says, he started inventing things to ‘dull’ it to take his mind off what he otherwise can’t stop thinking about: ‘I thought about the falling body’ … Once you get past some sloppy stage-setting and the unlikeliness of Oskar’s quest (which, it turns out, was less a matter of improbability than, in a storytelling miscue, Foer’s withholding too much for too long) the novel earns your trust. Whereas Everything Is Illuminated grows more ponderous and preposterous, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close improves and deepens. The imaginative terrain it rests on, and to which Foer is staking a maturing claim, is a place where fact can make room for fiction, and fiction accommodate fact.
Adam Johnson
MixedThe New YorkerIntention, significance, purpose: the design of the powerful first part of the novel is full of such qualities, confining the reader within the narrow channel of Jun Do’s consciousness as he is moved like a chess piece by the hidden hand of the state … Whereas the Candide-like picaresque of the first half—with its absurd but fully plausible turns of the screw—persuasively evokes life under brutal totalitarianism, the identity-switching and intrigue of the second part seem to originate in little more than the need to spin a yarn … One could justify the turn that Johnson’s plot takes as magical realism if, in the earlier part, Johnson didn’t insist on realism so consistently and to such devastating effect.
Chad Harbach
RaveThe New YorkerPerhaps the most unusual feature of this unusually charming début is the easy, unpretentious way it has of joining a love of baseball with a love of literature … The central drama of becoming arises from a wildly errant throw by Henry, which injures a teammate and seems to dissolve Henry’s confidence. He is suddenly incapable of throwing accurately, undermined by paralytic self-consciousness, or, Harbach seems to be arguing, by the onset of adulthood itself … The main order of business here is to entertain, and in this Harbach succeeds. His prose, furthermore, is uncommonly resourceful … The dream of perfection deferred allows Harbach to tell a story about our national pastime that manages, as well, to be about our historical present—in other words, a story about fallibility.
