A medley of tangled nonfiction and some very intriguing fiction, linked by mentions of prairies ... A richer, wilder book lurks in the wings; perhaps the novel Dutton didn’t have time to write? Her efforts seem less startling in the nonfiction sections, which read like revamped lectures or magazine articles ... As any good teacher might, Dutton confronts us with wide-ranging allusions, thoughts and imagery, daring us to be flexible enough to relate to just about anything. But we’re not her students. We want more than hints of what stirs her. We want the real deal.
Swerving into non-fiction risks breaking the book’s momentum, yet the authority of Dutton’s essay balances out the dreaminess of her stories ... You’re never sure whether Dutton is still on the outside, or getting at the narrator’s anxiety within. But that uncertainty feels part of this project, which gives us not just a cycle of stylishly observed stories but also, midway through, the tools to read them.
[Dutton] creates on the page the disorienting and surreal feeling of being alive today, with our crushing end-of-the-world barkers in our pockets ... Dutton’s greatest powers are her immense skill with language; her exacting attention to image, sound, phrase; her commitment to creating strangeness and newness. Every sentence rewrites a million lesser sentences before it.
One might assume that such indebted writing would feel impersonal by the nature of it not being at any point entirely [Dutton's] own, yet her work gains power from this knack for collage. She is a magpie of feminist literature ... The stories she tells are profoundly intimate yet universal, with themes of self-doubt, irredeemable nostalgia, and uneasy nuclear families.
Representing an erudite palette of influences, the ranging, observational essay collection Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other reveals a mind honed by literature and the arts.
Finely tempered ... The author not only introduces big ideas; she shows her readers how to grapple with her lofty questions. An unassuming work of literary theory that will dazzle hungry scholars.
The eclectic entries make for exciting reading, adding up to a surprisingly cohesive whole that testifies to art’s ability to inspire new ways of seeing the world. Relentlessly surprising and thoroughly original, this dazzles.
