Mendelson is a master at family drama and plots don’t get much more dramatic than this ... There is a lot going on; almost, at times, too much ... She writes from multiple perspectives, switching viewpoints more and more frequently as the weekend reaches its fiery climax until she is skipping between consciousnesses in a single paragraph. The effect is exhilarating.
Her new novel is so devoid of secondhand sentences that it’s quite possible she spent all nine years since its predecessor polishing her jokes and turning phrases round until they shine ... Throughout the book her gift is in succinct specificity of detail, which is perfectly deployed ... The book... keeps secrets, with many chapters ending on an unresolved cliffhanger or a rhetorical question. That might be one weak spot: the exquisite prose can cushion the emotions, and blot out the plot at least until the final stretch. But we don’t complain about this with other prose stylists.
Both a roiling family drama and a chilling portrait of enmeshment, coercive control and enabled addiction. Mendelson’s heady present-tense narration mingles eroticism, absurdity and pathos, capturing the intensity of illicit love, the corrosiveness of bullying, the bottomlessness of narcissism. Her similes a volley of bullseyes, her tonal chiaroscuro sharp, she darts rapidly between perspectives, ratcheting up the tension as we hurtle to the finale.
You may wonder how, in a 21st-century milieu of liberated women, such self-abnegation is possible, a question The Exhibitionist doesn’t satisfactorily answer. Ray is a well-colored cartoon villain ... But at depicting a certain kind of anti-materialist squalor the novel is tops, starting with the basic condition of the Hanrahan house ... All these points of view run a little amok like rivulets of paint, even as The Exhibitionist minutely and often brilliantly sketches the foibles of a certain creative class, and much is left unresolved ... The author seems more interested in digging around the grubbiness of human relations than in tidying the plot.
Mendelson avoids asking too many questions as to why Ray is as he is, the better to focus upon the havoc he wreaks ... Mendelson is skilled at rendering the grotesque fascinating. This book would be disturbing, is disturbing, especially on the subject of masculine control, but it is also funny; so funny. Mendelson can turn a phrase and then some.
A glorious ride. Mendelson observes the minutiae of human behaviour like a comic anthropologist, skewering pomp and sulking faux victimhood ... My only cavil is with the passivity of the family: the lack of insight and self-saving action of intelligent individuals ... But then again, self-delusion affects both tyrants and their brainwashed prey and Mendelson’s astute perception demonstrates this with aplomb.
The Exhibitionist stands or falls on the plausibility of Ray’s family’s enslavement to his delusions of grandeur, and for some readers it will fall. But partly because we see him through the eyes of his lifelong victims and partly because Mendelson is unfailingly excellent at the level of the sentence, Ray is horribly convincing ... This novel is a portrait of the artist as a monster, and for readers undeterred by the grand tradition of middle-class domestic realism, it’s a fine and haunting book.
The women’s relationship is one of the best strands of the story, and not just because Mendelson writes about sex and desire so very well ... The prose is so chock-a-block with similes and metaphors that on occasion it feels like overload ... But when Mendelson gets it right, they’re little short of genius ... Rather smartly, despite what we might initially assume, this really isn’t Ray’s story. Mendelson circles him, but she never wastes time in trying to explore or explain what makes him tick. And that, perhaps, is where the true originality of the tale lies.
There are too many competing voices, and the author struggles to keep them all in play ... Mendelson’s fully formed characters and their singular motivations have routinely been delights, but the figure who dominates everyone, and everything, in The Exhibitionist fails to convince ... Ray is entirely detestable – and yet entirely, mysteriously, doted on by all ... This matters because his gravitas is the catalyst for much of the novel’s drama ... But the exhibitionist himself fails to catch our attention.
An eviscerating portrayal of an unhappy family in London. With scalpel-sharp prose, the author dissects each of the Hanrahans ... Mendelson shines especially when depicting the inner life of Lucia, who must reconcile a passionate vocation with the rigors of domestic responsibility. This crackles with female fury, insecurity, and desire.
