Outstanding ... A very funny, very contemporary fable plays out as the novel entertains the absurdities of a world in which politics skews every aspect of daily life, from conversation to cuisine ... Comic.
Not daunting ... A comic tale ... Taranto also mines character names for humor and their aptronymic qualities, letting his inner Charles Dickens loose ... Taranto sometimes teeters on a polemic tightrope, but he avoids losing his balance as he keeps his eye on the prize.
The ending of Taranto’s novel, though, is more upbeat and hopeful than Shriver’s perennial bleakness. It feels like a bit of a cop-out when everything leading up to it has been so deliciously dark, but this is nonetheless a debut of great skill and admirable complexity.
A gleefully irreverent satire of so-called cancel culture, virtue signaling, and early-21st-century hypocrisy ... One suspects that Taranto is still grieving the loss of Roth’s ferocious wit and sense of moral outrage and wishes the author were alive to pillory Millennials and Gen Z.
It’s Taranto’s humor, especially his sentence-level wordplay, that keeps this book from collapsing under the weight of its high-concept, highstakes premise. And if absurdist flourishes, centrist moral sensibilities, and superconductor tech-jargon anchor the book’s aesthetics in the late 1990s, the love story at its core feels raw and tech-laden in a uniquely contemporary way.
Smart and funny ... Taranto’s climax is over-the-top. But it’s a fine study of the idea that, for all the complaints about the culture wars, nobody can pretend they’re not implicated in them. A bright, well-turned satirical debut.
