... [a] breathtaking new novel, Isadora. It's a stunning meditation on art and grief by one of America's most exciting young writers ... The novel concludes with an ending so mind-bogglingly sad, it would have seemed unnecessary and unreal if it hadn't actually happened. But Gray handles it beautifully — she doesn't insulate her readers from the cruelties of grief, but she's never exploitative and she never uses cheap pathos ... Gray is a gutsy, utterly original writer, and this is the finest work she's done so far. Isadora is a masterful portrait of one of America's greatest artists, and it's also a beautiful reflection on what it means to be suffocated by grief, but not quite willing to give up.
...a great novel of character: the story of a real woman’s real grief and survival ... Gray’s characters devour the world through their senses, a voracious, bodily quality that's a gift in writing the story of a woman for whom meaning began in the body — who hoped to awaken the world through her own body, no less ... In this era of history commandeered by toxic masculinity with delusions of superhumanity, there’s a lot to be said for remembering the truth of the body, particularly the female and otherwise marginalized bodies that are so likely to be written out of the story...Isadora is a heavenly celebration of women in charge of their bodies.
Gray makes them and their suffering tremendously compelling and allows each of them moments of great sympathy ... A few of the lines in the book feel as if they could be embroidered on pillows or posted as social media memes...but the bulk of Gray’s language is fresh and forceful and full of surprise. She brings Isadora’s world to lush, vibrant life ... There is one aspect of Isadora’s life that doesn’t come through as vividly as I had hoped in this novel — her dance ... It is a brutal novel in many ways, completely unrelenting in its depiction of pain, yet that makes it exhilarating, too. Gray is a fearless writer, a writer willing to look into the most profound darkness and find strange, compelling music there.
Isadora is so confounded by her fame and grief that she’s in the dark about her own emotions, even as her expressive dances capture the world’s attention. Gray portrays that great irony in heartbreaking detail and psychological acuity, her language hinging lyrical flight with wry directness. It can be difficult, at times, to sit through Isadora’s sections. She’s selfish, rogue, headlong, unavailable. But the novel’s greatest test is also its greatest strength. You might not like me, it says, but what do you know of extraordinary grief?
Historical novels about artists abound, but few attain the psychological intricacy, fluency of imagination, lacerating wit, or intoxicating beauty of Gray’s tale of Isadora Duncan ... As Isadora plunges into near madness, then slowly reclaims her artistic powers, Gray, performing her own extraordinary artistic leap, explores the nexus between body and mind, loss and creativity, love and ambition, and birth and death. The spellbinding result is a mythic, fiercely insightful, mordantly funny, and profoundly revelatory portrait of an intrepid and indelible artist.
Much like Isadora’s performances, one gets the sense that the novel itself is deliberately structured, despite the entrancing associative quality to many of the passages ... Isadora is a portrait of a revolutionary artist who endures extreme misfortune and the flow of history, a novel whose depiction of a world on the brink of horror and atrocity feels utterly contemporary, but it is also a novel about writing, about the creation of literary art ... This suggests repetition until logic and thinking are gone, until the act of movement appears effortless. This is what is known as 'making it look easy,' which Amelia Gray has accomplished to the utmost.
...while at first the character reads remotely and rather flatly on the page, through an accumulation of glimpses into her psyche, a sensitive portrait of a woman at her wit’s end begins to emerge ... Gray is a writer best known for work with an absurd bent to it, and Isadora is very much in line with this, even as it addresses Isadora’s ostentatious self-presentation; her occasionally childish, often capricious behavior; and her terrifying, all-consuming pain. Like its subject, it’s full of contrasts and contradictions, a story wrought with complexity and understated humor that lives comfortably in the nuanced, darkened corners of experience.
At first, the feverish, practically Gothic voice that Gray invents for her protagonist seems an odd fit for a woman inspired by the simple lines and unadorned grace of classical art and architecture, but, as the reader goes deeper into Isadora’s world, Gray’s choice begins to make perfect sense ... Gray’s prose is over-the-top but utterly apt. Isadora’s words are gorgeous even when they are grisly, and Gray does a terrific job of depicting not just the bereavement of a mother, but also the bereavement of a mother for whom life is a source of fuel for art. Gray also makes the canny choice to include other narrators, observers whose cooler viewpoints are expressed in the third person ... A novel equal to its larger-than-life protagonist.
Gray’s striking, sensual language is perfectly suited to her visionary protagonist, and the novel shimmers with memorable prose. But a surfeit of mundane moments narrated in the perspectives of secondary characters blunts its emotional power ... Isadora spreads its attention too thin to fully capitalize on any of its narrative’s—or its author’s—rich possibilities.
