Michaels is a Canadian poet, essayist and fiction writer, and her radiant novel harnesses this doubleness, finding points of contact between the physical world of mortality and the abstract realm of remembrance ... Her imagery shimmers with metaphoric significance ... Strange, lovely.
Her alchemical abilities are undimmed. It is really a novel-in-stories, delivering a series of pivotal junctures in the lives of a string of characters — some obviously linked, others more tenuously. Spanning the 20th century and reaching into the near future, this series of decisive moments presents love, both romantic and familial, as a temporary balm to inevitable loss ... The elliptical delivery makes it difficult to gain purchase on the book’s overall structure ... Yet these flaws do not undermine the power of the family story at the book’s heart. There is a truth to the humanity she depicts, and the idea that in the harshest moments just the simple presence of another person can provide relief. That is the touching embrace of the title.
A considerable drop in imaginative energy. It also has markedly less interest in bedrock elements of character, and an even more determinedly elliptical approach to narrative, than its predecessors ... A daunting start, and in the pages that immediately follow it is a relief to find Michaels taking some of the same measures to shape and sharpen things that have benefited her writing in the past ... In Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels found a way to embed individual acts of witness in a story that was always prone to cliché, but mostly sufficiently robust to solidify its lyric impulses. In Held the story fails to do a similar job. As a result its speculations cannot help but seem too precious for their own good.
The characters in Held remain hazy. Michaels draws accolades for her incantatory prose — an image-rich style that has led to comparisons to her fellow Toronto resident the poet-novelist Michael Ondaatje. But the enchantment in Held is, alas, uneven ... Tails to form a solid enough container to hold the reader.
Michaels works in short, dazzling snapshot scenes, collage-like and even hallucinatory. Each paragraph is as carefully shaped as a poetic stanza ... While the fluid structure of this work may be challenging for some readers, it’s clear that Michaels’s writing continues to stand head and shoulders above most other fiction.
Sublime, meditative, and gracefully episodic ... Michaels brings her poet’s finesse and soulfulness to this exquisite, deeply moving paean to love and life’s insistence and beauty.
