... another McGregor novel that, beneath its serene surface, takes huge risks. There is, for example, the wilful front-loading of the action, with that stirring storm sequence giving way to Doc’s agonisingly slow recovery. McGregor has also chosen to have a main character unable to express himself for most of the book. Fortunately, it’s also another McGregor novel that triumphantly gets away with it ... McGregor commits himself so wholeheartedly to the project of honouring minutiae (and has the literary talent to match) that the scene when post-stroke Doc first learns to touch his nose feels almost as dramatic as an Antarctic blizzard. For another, there’s the bracing awareness that the interconnectedness of human lives has its drawbacks as well as its much-trumpeted benefits ... the novel’s final scenes — poised beautifully between sadness and hope—remind us that the three verbs of the title aren’t a simple progression. Rather, they’re a constantly repeated cycle as life sticks doggedly to the process of going on.

... a jumpier, less cohesive story, with different styles and texture on offer [than in McGregor's previous books], and a reconfigured cast in each of its three main sections ... In the closing section, Robert can take charge of his identity again thanks only to the communal endeavors of the female therapists and caregivers. This would seem to offer Anna a somewhat restrictive model of female heroism, so McGregor is careful to make her a complex character, ambiguous in her responses, withdrawn, and as bad as Robert is at reading social cues ... Robert, however, is a simpler character. Until aphasia makes his thoughts a mystery, he comes across as the sort of person who’s chillingly exposed in early John le Carré novels: an emotionally evasive Englishman who has given all his loyalties to the Institute and to a dream of adventure. In the last third of the novel, McGregor constructs a moving, well-observed drama of rehabilitation around him. There are some astonishing technical feats ... Throughout the book, McGregor returns to language’s incommensurability to experience. It’s iterated obsessively in many different ways ... It’s easy to imagine how McGregor might have arrived at this theme as a means of connecting the Antarctica material to the aphasia material. Whether or not it completely works, and whether or not you can sustain momentum while going from ice floes and leopard seals to a support group in Cambridge, the eerie withholding of moral judgment makes Robert’s failure of character difficult to forget. Robert feels an ecstatic, almost pantheistic sense of oneness with the land ... It’s a sign of McGregor’s skill, and his unforced sense of the mystery at the heart of things, that the novel leaves the reader feeling much the same way.

McGregor’s carefully composed dialogue, filled with the repetition of so few words, had an eerie effect on me: for several days my own inner dialogue was often composed of the same words, as though I, too, was discovering how they could express drastically different emotions yet remain unreadable to the world. I wanted to put the right words into Robert’s mouth, to speak for him, to expedite his thinking process, and I was conscious that in those moments I was in the same predicament as Anna ... Readers impatient with the slowness of the group’s progress won’t be alone: Anna and other caretakers in the room feel the same. By not creating a shortcut either for the characters or for readers, McGregor makes us experience their confusion, frustration, and shifting moods between despair and hope ... In the end it is the other aphasia patients, with the help of the supporters, who begin to gain access to Robert’s mind. Together they put on a theatrical production—limited by their physical and linguistic capacities—recounting how Robert’s last day in Antarctica went wrong. It is a different kind of storytelling, imagined from the center of the storm, with Robert and the other patients all trying to achieve the near impossible in the aftermath of near-fatal events. Inside their damaged brains and hampered bodies they can sense, as a memory so vividly relived, their healthy and eloquent selves. The beauty of their minds, like that of the girl waving at the bus at a street corner without being seen, is preserved.

The first 80 pages of this novel are as gripping as anything you’ll read this year ... Less dramatic than the opening section, the middle of the novel powerfully conveys the toll of caregiving ... With its punctuationless title, Lean Fall Stand is a book about the slipperiness of language, that flexible and fallible vehicle for consciousness and communication on which we are so dependent ... The third section of the book, which is about therapy and rehabilitation, addresses these shortcomings. And here, briefly, the novel loses its way ... After that brief detour, however, McGregor returns to Robert and Anna. The final scenes, while not as exciting as the opening, offer a quiet exhilaration of their own as well as the tempered hope that, even after a major setback, we might all learn to stand again.

McGregor renders this drama and its fallout, which occupies the majority of the novel, in his habitually spare prose. He is one of the few great living minimalists, able to mix deep pathos with wry comedy in a sentence too short to need a single comma. His work bears a certain resemblance to the laconically off-kilter Joy Williams, but seems more deeply influenced by the stutter-step repetitions and evasions common to everyday speech. Often in Lean Fall Stand, his sentences seem less to follow in sequence than to be shingled atop each other, either sharing or hiding meaning ... Lean Fall Stand is at its weakest, though by no means weak, in Anna's section, which never quite rises out of ambivalent-wife tropes. Her hesitant loyalty to her husband becomes too much the book's guiding spirit — and it is an affecting one, but not necessarily urgent. McGregor raises no real question of what Anna will do ... Every sentence in Lean Fall Stand serves, in its style, as a quiet reminder of how difficult it can be to represent ourselves to others ... Lean Fall Stand is more optimistic about communication than one might expect. McGregor's characters may rarely have a clue 'what to say, or how to say it,' but, fumblingly, they try.

Robert’s painstaking recuperation from the stroke occupies the rest of the book, which pays special attention to his diminished capacity to speak. Long, grueling passages depict these struggles, and Mr. McGregor presents them with much the same obsessive stylistic mastery as displayed in the storm scene. There is something a little bit punishing about this single-minded demonstration of skill. The meanings of the actual story seem curiously unexplored and the redemptive ending almost an afterthought. Memorable writing, yes, but I still don’t really get what happened out there in Antarctica.

His latest employs a similar drift in its focus from section to section, and demonstrates similar unshowy accomplishment [to his novel Reservoir 13] ... During Doc’s stroke, conventional narrative deteriorates into a confused but controlled stream of consciousness ... Equally well-handled is the final act—though it seems diffuse with new narrators at first—in which he and Anna attend a support group for people with aphasia. Robert’s attempt to tell his own story, and take part in the stories of other sufferers, is rendered with warmth, precision and humour. McGregor has a reputation for being a writer’s writer, and I found myself frequently stunned at how eloquent he could make ineloquence. Moments of less pronounced virtuosity go the furthest, however.

The novels of British author Jon McGregor are distinguished by their enlightening perceptions of both human nature and Mother Nature, and by their restrained prose, as potent as it is subtle. His latest, Lean Fall Stand, employs these talents to tell the profoundly affecting story of a man who has lost his ability with language ... It's a story that would be worthwhile even if delivered by a less skilled writer, but McGregor's facility with language gives a power and a poignancy to this tale about language's loss that make it unmissable.

Jon McGregor has a quietly and brilliantly transformative way of mixing up genres ... McGregor pivots from one kind of story to another with profound effect ... You might think you were in a Gertrude Stein novel, or James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and for good reason. Many modernist writers were deeply interested in language loss, the creative rhymes and substitutions that patients employ, and what they might reveal about our processes of communication ... Lean Fall Stand doesn’t have the lyric force and structural patterning that gave Reservoir 13 such extraordinary rhythmic momentum. Nonetheless, it’s a novel of complex feeling and beautiful restraint from one of the finest writers around.

... the slow, agonising return journey from a stroke ... McGregor impeccably captures the thankless, sisyphean nature of a carer’s life ... [a] bravura chorus of She Hads runs for two unbroken pages and exquisitely captures the endless torture of it. But soon the doggedly performative nature of his prose, ascetically choosing to reduce his remit to Anna’s actions, starts to fall short. Yes, he effortlessly evokes the unstinting grind, with each step forward often followed by two backwards, but a reader craves to be more than a GoPro clipped to a protagonist’s lapel. Quite simply, I wanted to know what it actually feels like for Anna—emails from her colleagues back-seating her at the big conference are not enough. There are sporadic glimpses of her frustrated despair ... Is it heartless to say that a little aphasia goes a long way? Or is it that, without any countervailing scenes where anger or despair or guilt explode and take centre stage, the mere daily slog becomes a slog?

Jon McGregor has an extraordinary ability to articulate the unspoken through ethereal prose that observes ordinary lives from above without judging. While he is also skilful at depicting the particular, it is his overview of different lives running in parallel that is so bewitching, as if he is looking down on ants running around with their own urgent purposes, but each one minuscule in the scheme of the world. All his books have been treasures, capturing both the scramble of individual lives and the stillness of the universe and nature, impassive and immutable ... McGregor’s subtle depiction of personal foibles doesn’t mean we lack sympathy ... McGregor’s intuitive grasp of semantics, from sounds to structure, and his knowledge that less is so often more, has always balanced his writing midway between prose and poetry. Rhythm is ever present ... When disaster strikes, McGregor shows rather than tells ... This generally works well, though when it shifted from Doc’s wife to two therapists I felt the momentum was briefly broken. But this and a couple of medical points...can’t detract from the immersive magic.

The description of the storm is terrific, utterly dreadful ... McGregor’s writing is on a par with Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of the quest in search of the eggs of the Emperor Penguins, a classic of polar literature ... This first section is as gripping as anything you could wish for ... Though he is...very good at portraying Anna’s state of mind divided between her sense of responsibility, surviving love for Robert and impatience with, indeed resentment of, his condition and the way this has subverted her life, one comes to see that McGregor’s chief interest is in the use and often inadequacy of language. If the description of that frightful day in the Antarctic storm is a magnificent piece of bravura writing, the second half of the novel is a brave experiment in articulating the inarticulate ... The first two sections of the novel, each utterly distinct from the other, are excellent. They show McGregor to be a writer with a quite remarkable range. Unfortunately the last section which deals with a therapy class for a stroke support group directed by a former actress who tries through performances by a group of dancers to demonstrate the range of possible non-verbal communication, is disappointing. Given McGregor’s linguistic dexterity and the marvellous vitality of the first—Polar—part of the book, it falls sadly flat. Even so, one must admire the author’s often ingenious and persuasive renderings of the attempts of the sufferers to recover the use of meaningful speech. The first two parts of the novel are so good, and display such a range of imagination and sympathetic understanding, that one can easily forgive the banality of the last part and recognise that McGregor is a novelist of rare quality and accomplishment.

... there is no relief for Anna, no climactic arguments or realizations, no release of tension. It is the same day repeated, with minor progress noticed only by her, their children complaining that Robert remains unchanged. This, too, is the reality of a life shared with illness and injury ... In the final act, McGregor’s body-writing shines and the research he put into Lean Fall Stand comes to life as dancers help support group members learn to use their bodies to connect in new ways ... reads like a meditation on the questions we all must someday face: Who am I? What can I stand? Who will be there when I fall?

The sheer beauty of this story, the reality of the characters and their situations, and McGregor's powerful, elegant, and flawless writing are testament to the amount of work—research, patience, writing—required to write this story. The reader can open the book randomly, read a piece of dialogue, and know, without question, which character is speaking—every word, staggered syllable, and fractured blurb of speech perfectly matched to its owner like a game of concentration ... McGregor's skill of unearthing the courage and patience required for recovery shines, seen through broken sentences, familiar repetitive phrases, and frustrated gestures ... McGregor brings this experience home to us all, wrapped up as he brilliantly does without fancy ribbons, but in brown paper, reality, and magnificent writing. Lean Fall Stand is a narrative about hope, surrender, and possibilities. Jon McGregor is an extraordinary writer, a shepherd of perfect prose.

[McGregor's] clean, sparse prose is on full display in Lean Fall Stand ... While the repetitive and exhausting grind is well and unsentimentally described, perhaps it didn’t need to be laid out in quite so much detail ... The surfeit of humdrum details and the dearth of emotional connection leaves an otherwise well-crafted book rather more sterile than it needed to be.

As if to pay his generic respects, McGregor opens with the thrill of calamity ... The next eighty pages describe, in gripping detail, what happens when Doc and his two latest charges—Thomas and Luke—lose each other out on the glacier ... McGregor is a master of free indirect style ... Here there is a risk to the technique, as he tries to transmit the flow of Doc’s disordered thoughts. But while the narrative occasionally stutters, he largely pulls it off. McGregor is wise not to overdo the forays into Doc’s perspective, and allows the portrait of an estranged...marriage to unfold primarily through the gaze of Anna. He is also moving and convincing on aphasia itself. In the novel’s final section, Doc joins a self-help group for people with his condition, and we quickly come to understand each member’s peculiarities and elisions, their tics and workarounds, the incredible challenges they face to rebuild the language they have lost. The novel, which started off rooted in those 'ideas of heroism and self-sufficiency and male delusion', becomes something quieter, more subtle and tender, in a minor key ... But it retains a splinter of ice.

As it turns out, few of the characters in Lean Fall Stand are brought to life through dialogue. Even those without brain injuries fluff their lines ... Compared to its predecessors, Lean Fall Stand—written in a conventional close third person—is technically unassuming. There are points when the subject matter calls for something more inventive, however, as in the series of diminishing paragraphs that depict Doc’s stroke: the first runs for six and a half pages, the last consists of a single word ... It’s difficult to know if this is an accurate account of what it feels like to have a stroke, but McGregor has worked to make it seem plausible ... What started out as an adventure story ends up, in classic McGregor fashion, as a portrait of a community. The third act is much quieter than the second, which itself unfolds at a slower pace than the first. Doc settles into the kingdom of the sick and end[s] up less isolated than he was in Antarctica.

Whatever doubts Doc may have about Thomas’s visual record, the reader will have none about McGregor’s verbal one. After a luminous description of the glacial terrain, both cinematic and poetic, he offers a harrowing account of men at the mercy of the elements. This section has an almost Conradian power ... McGregor’s supreme achievement in the novel is his intimate portrait of aphasia ... This final section of the novel is the least successful ... McGregor has shown himself a master of multi-viewpoint narrative, but his touch here is less controlled. The shift in focus between the various group members is clumsy, and his depiction of Amira’s methods and concerns somewhat flat. Far more impressive is his recreation of the individual stroke victims’ speech patterns. McGregor’s great skill is to reveal the internal logic behind their apparent incoherence ... McGregor’s precise, well-judged prose attests both to the power of language and to the havoc created by its loss.

Jon McGregor’s latest has the most thrilling beginning I’ve read in a novel for some time ... Then boom! We are in a hospital ward in Santiago and finally back home in England ... It’s a deft sleight of hand—to seduce readers with a spectacular action narrative before giving them an entirely different novel about how we communicate—but regular readers of McGregor will know that it’s the unsensational drama contained within the ordinary that interests him as a writer. And yet ... As McGregor animates the shadow lives of carers and stroke sufferers with his characteristic compassionate precision, I found myself reading increasingly dutifully, half of me back in Antarctica, gripped by just what exactly happened during that storm.

McGregor...artfully and subtly shifts registers in each of the three titular sections, moving from languorous and ominous to a staccato, adrenaline-fueled frenzy in 'Lean,' while 'Fall' fills in the background of Robert’s life and marriage. Finally, 'Stand' is a tour de force of observational writing, masterfully capturing the struggle, frustration, and determination of Robert’s healing process and recovery. Whether describing the majestic beauty of the natural world or the heartbreaking nuances of neurological deficit, McGregor’s luminous prose brings the world brilliantly to life.

... stunning ... McGregor portrays the tribulations of speech therapy with as much drama and depth as the depictions of men fighting for their lives on an Antarctic ice floe. Readers will be drawn into Robert and Anna’s heartbreaking struggle, all rendered in McGregor’s crystalline language. This gorgeous work leaves an indelible mark.

Though its ending is only moderately successful (for some readers it may feel a bit too neat), this is nonetheless a quiet, beautiful novel that’s at once deeply sad and wryly funny. Lyrical and terse, funny and tragic—a marvelous addition to the McGregor canon.