...restrained but remarkably arresting ... Using the same flat, fragmentary style that proved so fruitful in her most recent novel, Sisters, Tuck constructs her narrator’s story from a series of short, clipped sections, sometimes a couple of paragraphs, others no more than a line or two per page. It’s a master class in digression as a narrative device ... Heathcliff Redux is a much more visibly knotty intertextual exercise ... Fittingly, Tuck’s novella eventually reveals itself to be more a tale of self-delusion and internal conflict than the grand romance we were initially led to believe ... a haunting if slightly unbalanced collection. There’s something endlessly fascinating in the way Tuck’s interest in literary relationships extends even to the works in her own oeuvre.
That the world can be unkind, particularly to women, isn't lost on Lily Tuck ... Tuck often writes about women whose prospects are limited by their historical era and choice of mate ... the women of the stellar Heathcliff Redux: A Novella and Stories are vulnerable in ways that the men around them are not ... The women of Heathcliff Redux aren't without agency: like their male counterparts, they take drugs, have affairs. But Tuck's stories' power imbalances, especially men's surpassing physical strength, keep the writer ever watchful, her sentences stark with circumspection and glistening with clarity ... superb.
[Tuck] probes the gulf between expectations and reality as well as between outward appearances and internal disquiet in this collection of four short stories and a novella ... Tuck’s measured prose contrasts its matter-of-factness with the passionate overtones of Brontë’s original. The accompanying stories also showcase the author’s mastery of shorter form fiction ... Tuck’s restrained and elegant stories deceptively carry a deep emotional heft.
The title novella and four short stories are all driven by an effectively uncomfortable sense of dissociation—people distanced from the workings of their own hearts. Yet Tuck misses her mark; the knockout punches of love or youth that hobble her characters call for stronger emotions to ground their stories than she gives them ... This short collection takes a respectable look at the ways we evade our own truths but doesn’t engage as deeply as its subjects merit.
...the human heart remains a mystery, which seems to be the point. This may disappoint readers who expect fiction to explore the reasons for characters' actions or the novella to shed new light on Brontë's novel (or vice versa). The final four stories are both stranger and more conventional ... Lean, intriguing, formally innovative prose that will satisfy some readers while leaving others hungry for meatier plots.
