Handler, adored by younger readers for his Lemony Snicket titles, is a prolific jack-of-all-trades who also pens quirky, postmodern love stories mostly set in present-day San Francisco. His seventh novel for adults reaches deep into those modes for a drunkenly humorous blend of alcohol, entrepreneurial ambitions, and a dash of cheating ... Handler’s clever, highly stylized prose demands alertness in his readers, who may feel tipsy trying to follow the knotted story line. Nonetheless, his quick-witted, timely characters and offbeat but perceptive one-liners make for an intoxicating delight.
Nothing is believably conjured to life in Bottle Grove. No spell is cast, no character takes root in the reader’s heart. Captive to Handler’s cleverness, to his allusive play and lack of rigor, the reader tries to make sense of the proceedings, to no avail. Even as Handler stacks elision upon lacuna to paper over his plot holes and sudden narrative swerves, the whole house of cards grows more absurd, irrelevant, cloying and rickety. What’s worse, many developments follow an old sad sexist script. Padgett is a pawn. She is, among a company of literal 'call girls,' pimped out to the titan. That she doesn’t appear to mind is inexplicable. Handler even suggests that this makes her love Martin all the more ... What on earth is a man justly celebrated for the books he writes under the name Lemony Snicket doing playing at rape? I couldn’t determine. One thing is clear: Throughout Bottle Grove, he is not in control of his larks and allusions. He’s simply having fun at his characters’ expense, and at the reader’s, too.
Who doesn’t enjoy a good sendup of the very people who addicted us to the Internet and all of its devices? Yet Handler seems devoted to making readers put his book down. Scenes and moments feel mashed together and all too often I found myself pausing, rereading pages or paragraphs, confused about how we jumped so instantaneously from one place or person to the next. His narrator, who shapeshifts from omniscient outsider to quasi-first-person raconteur, only made my disorientation worse ... Handler tries to be witty, but fails repeatedly. So many times, Handler writes sentences or pairs of sentences that re-use the same word in an attempt at cleverness ... Handler tries to grapple with some big ideas...But he keeps stymieing momentum, especially with his treatment of sensitive issues ... In the end, I had little hold to on to. The characters were neither sympathetic nor evil enough to make their downfall worthwhile. The plot seemed wafer-thin, and I never felt like the narrator could fully make me believe in the fantasy about a fox’s spirit possessing Reynard.
If the novel is not exactly cynical about either, it’s certainly a look askance at it all — marriage, San Francisco and perhaps what it feels like to live in 2019 ... The wealth disparity is starkly illustrated in the nature of the schemes everyone is hatching — the desperation of those straining to survive and the uninhibited greed of those at the top ... neither a shining endorsement nor an indictment, but simply an acknowledgment of what Handler refers to as the bewildering nature of life. But, like the book’s early inspirations, it’s hard not to feel like it can also be extrapolated to a perpetually shape-shifting city.
... hilarious ... Handler cleverly exposes the sinister sides of his protagonists as they clamor for what they think they deserve. Readers expecting Handler’s trademark humor and bite won’t be disappointed.
Instead of giving readers new ways to think about marriage or cruelty, these literary allusions only muddy the waters in a novel overly interested in solipsistic caricature and jagged, cynical pronouncements ... Characters quip endlessly, repeating the same tiresome steps in Handler's wordplay shuffles ... While the brutal inhumanities of startup culture are ripe for satire and criticism, this novel fails to deliver even a glancing blow ... A clunky, garbled novel about marriage, greed, and deception in Silicon Valley at the height of the tech boom.
