... a raucously inventive tale of loss and erasure told with an authorial assurance uncommon in a first novel. While Hazel begins with a carnival of interconnected characters rattling around in the Apelles, her story ultimately flies out in all directions, spanning generations and continents as it explores the challenge of understanding one’s place in what might be called real life, while schlepping around others’ painful pasts as well as one’s own ... Along the way, there are some trippy excursions involving auditory time travel and the earth’s crust, where not all readers will care to follow. But Livings is a nimble wordsmith. And if his novel can be discursive and the language overwrought — metaphors begetting metaphors like the successively smaller cats popping out of the Cat in the Hat’s striped headgear — the overall effect is thought-provoking, and this rollickingly bleak rendering of 1970s New York is well worth a visit.

The Blizzard Party feels like a life’s work, as if the author managed to include every keen observation, poetic rumination and theory of humanity he’s ever had. This is a good thing because Livings’ observations, ruminations and theories manage to be both satisfyingly recognizable and thrillingly original ... an expansive, discursive novel that allows us into the minds of dozens of bit players at seemingly minor moments. That the author somehow manages to fit it all together, puzzle-like, by the end is a feat of acrobatic storytelling. But this is not a book that exists for the sake of the story. This is a book that exists for the sake of getting at the truth of being alive. It explores the minutiae to get to the big questions ... There is something both exhilarating and a tad tiresome in the author’s desire to get every detail into the book. Livings’ sentences loop and meander. Sometimes, it is observant and funny ... Other times, the writing can verge on navel-gazing and self-indulgence, pulling the reader away from whatever story line she is trying to keep track of. Forgive the tired trope, but The Blizzard Party could be the love child of Jonathan Franzen’s merciless eye for human behavior and James Joyce’s elaborate wordsmithing. It has the feel of a 'big, important' American novel, and it’s a reminder that sometimes fiction is the only possible way to get to the truth of a thing.

Though the book is written in the first person, it freely enters the thoughts of a roving cast of characters ... But even with the steady disclosure of secrets—some of them quite moving—I found it difficult to gain a foothold on this book. The wide spread of characters has a whiteout effect, and a snowdrift of newsy period details—the gas crisis, looming problems in Iran—are blandly generalizing. Mr. Livings tends to use skill and suaveness as placeholders for style. Personal memory, I couldn’t help but feel, should be more idiosyncratic.

While at times bombastic and bewildering, the novel also features moments of brilliance, especially in the dialogue and the surprising connections. A literary feast for a patient reader.

... a brilliant debut novel ... Livings’s genius resides in his ability to weave these disparate threads together through banal events (a Christmas tree jammed into an apartment’s garbage chute; the selling of a painting; a brawl in a diner), illuminating an intricate pattern that, for Hazel, predestines a dénouement that is startling to the reader. Livings calls to mind the work of Michael Chabon as he brings insight into the way events and circumstances shape his characters’ lives. This is one to savor.

... a first novel that might be called a detour de force: sprawling, discursive, loose-limbed (and impressive) ... The book ranges with supreme confidence from its titular setting to World War II Europe, 9/11, and beyond. Livings' nearest model may be the doorstop-sized novels of Tom Wolfe...and this book is similarly digressive, maximalist, and prone to old-fashioned manipulations of sentiment. Livings may not quite have Wolfe's journalistic chops, but he's a far more skillful and empathetic novelist, and what seems moralistic and preening in Wolfe's books reads here mostly as playful and nimble, if mildly self-indulgent. One may wonder why a first-time novelist in 2020 would follow the Wolfe/Balzac template for the Novel of Everything...but the fact is that Livings, amazingly, pulls it off. An exuberant, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink pleasure.