A surprising number of novelists are very good; few are extraordinary. Like his compatriot J. M. Coetzee, the South African writer Damon Galgut is of this rare company; like Coetzee, he is stringent, pure. He has, however, and mercifully, a sense of humor, even an occasional playfulness, which leavens that stringency ... Indeed, the novel carries within it the literary spirits of Woolf and Joyce, including, from the former, an almost rushing fluidity of narrative consciousness, and from the latter, a direct allusion to The Dead in its final pages, when a torrential rain is unleashed upon the veld ... To praise the novel in its particulars—for its seriousness; for its balance of formal freedom and elegance; for its humor, its precision, its human truth—seems inadequate and partial. Simply: you must read it. Like other remarkable novels, it is uniquely itself, and greater than the sum of its parts. The Promise evokes, when you reach the final page, a profound interior shift that is all but physical. This, as an experience of art, happens only rarely, and is to be prized.
Damon Galgut’s remarkable new novel, The Promise, suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge. As a white South African writer, Galgut inherits a subject that must feel, at different times, liberating in its dimensions and imprisoning in its inescapability ... The Promise is drenched in South African history, a tide that can be seen, in the end, to poison all 'promise' ... Galgut’s novel most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner in the way it redeploys a number of modernist techniques, chiefly the use of a free-floating narrator. Galgut is at once very close to his troubled characters and somewhat ironically distant, as if the novel were written in two time signatures, fast and slower. And, miraculously, this narrative distance does not alienate our intimacy but emerges as a different form of knowing ... His new novel exercises new freedoms. One is struck, amid the sombre events, by the joyous, puckish restlessness of the storytelling, which seems to stick to a character’s point of view only to veer away, mid-sentence ... Galgut uses his narrator playfully, assisted by nicely wayward run-on sentences ... Galgut outsources his storytelling, handing off a phrase or an insight to an indistinct community of what seem to be wise elders, who then produce an ironically platitudinous or proverbial commentary ... Galgut’s narrator skims across his spaces, alighting, stinging, moving on to the next subject. As the novel proceeds, his narrator seems to grow in adventurous authority.
The Promise adopts a protean tone, now menacing, now darkly mirthful ... the novel registers seismic rumbles of a changing South Africa ... The Promise offers all the virtues of realist fiction, plus some extras. Galgut keeps the surface of his prose choppy, roiling it with diverse narrative tools: points of view that shift within paragraphs, or even sentences; cryptic rhetorical moves, including addressing the reader directly [...]; scenes that blur together with no transition; and an intermittent metafictional patter [...] A reader can shrug it all off and focus on the family’s story, or take pleasure in a brash writer’s narrative norm-breaking ... The novel’s cinematic present tense and kaleidoscopic point of view create a mosaic of what everyone in the room is thinking at a given moment. The picture is anything but pretty, a veneer of civility barely hiding the barbed sibling resentments that surface following parental deaths. Don’t look for much hope in this novel ... Galgut in The Promise is a gleeful satirist, mordantly skewering his characters’ fecklessness and hypocrisy.
Time and again in Mr. Galgut’s fiction, South Africa materializes, vast, astonishing, resonant. And on this vastness, he stages intimate dramas that have the force of ancient myth ... In such moments The Promise acquires a perilous grandeur that veers toward melodrama, but Mr. Galgut deploys these climactic scenes sparingly and to great effect, all the while keeping our anxious gaze fixed on characters linked by blood and chance whose final inheritance is a shared, contested land.
... stunning ... Galgut’s varying tone wrongfoots us almost right away when we’re told, of someone whose barbed comment fails to land, that their disappointment is 'palpable, like a secret fart'. His third-person narration darts between characters, mid-paragraph or even mid-sentence, swooping over the action to itemise someone’s secret fears, or how many times (and what) a household’s toilets flush over a two-hour period. Lines of dialogue can appear next to each other, separated by slashes, as if there are more pressing matters ... Galgut deploys every trick in the book; he’s heart-swellingly attentive to emotional complexity, but isn’t above cheap shots ... Yet for all its satirical tendencies, this isn’t a book that leaves you comfortable in your certainties, not least because Manie’s bad faith isn’t the only thing undermining his promise ... The final pages dizzyingly highlight the whiff of wish-fulfilment in Amor’s dogged quest for restitution: the cathartic climax unfolds with the caveat that none of it can actually be happening, but the mark of the novel’s narrative magic is that the admission doesn’t cancel the effect, but doubles it.
... it’s a complex, ambitious and brilliant work—one that provides Galgut’s fullest exploration yet of the poisonous legacy of apartheid ... Galgut describes his characters with rare assurance and skill, conjuring them to life in a narrative voice that moves restlessly from character to character, inhabiting each consciousness for just a few lines before moving on to the next person. This all-seeing voice is not a neutral presence, as it would be in a conventional realist novel; instead, it possesses its own personality and outlook, making it more like a chorus in a Greek drama ... The intriguing effect of this technique—a kind of hyper-omniscience—is to create an almost physical sense of immediacy. Rarely have I had such a strong sense, while reading a novel, that I myself was there, in the room with the characters. And the up-close narrative has an additional advantage, which is to distract from—or at least delay awareness of—the larger symbolic points being made.
... electrifying ... free, indirect style...lends itself to irony, which Galgut further punctuates with moralising narrative interventions. The sly asides add levity, but also implicate the reader as a co-conspirator in the family’s failings ... The Promise has a decisively Joycean Dead end, with diluvian rain washing over the veld. Galgut refuses redemption, however, by likening the storm to 'some cheap redemptive symbol in a story, falling from a turbulent sky on to rich and poor, happy and unhappy alike.'
What saves The Promise from earnest, grave-digging melodrama and post-apartheid political correctness is Galgut’s combining the tragic downfall of The Sound and the Fury with the antic comedy of As I Lay Dying, where another dysfunctional family has very different motives before and after the burial of the mother ... Galgut’s characterization of the individual Swarts could have been heavy-handed had he not turbo-charged the constantly and quickly shifting narration of As I Lay Dying to create an immersive style that might be called Group Gossip ... Of this year’s six Booker finalists, I have read three besides The Promise and on the basis of this partial sample believe Galgut’s novel is probably a wise choice ... With his swart [sic] comedy and gossipy style, Galgut sneaks under taboos and around fixed ideas.
... one of Galgut’s most directly political novels. It is also one of his most formally inventive, borrowing many of the narrative techniques he developed so effectively in In a Strange Room. If the results are mixed, this might be because the novel sometimes strives too hard to present a balanced collective perspective, or because it fails to reconcile aesthetic with moral questions. It’s not that it’s at all crude, or simplistic; more that the injustices it wants to examine are rendered slightly inert by the intrusion of something like a conscience—a narrator—in moments which might have been more effective if left unresolved ... In its themes The Promise aspires to a Joycean universalism, and stylistically too, this is a neo-modernist novel. The narrator occupies an indistinct space, halfway between first and third person, drifting from tight focus on a single character to a more piercing, detached view, often within a single paragraph. There’s plenty of free indirect discourse, and sections written in something approaching Joycean stream of consciousness. Galgut is too good a writer to really mess any of this up, but the gears do grind occasionally when the focus shifts between characters ... The Promise is a fascinating, if inevitably partial, achievement. But while reading it I sometimes wished Galgut would return to the smaller frame of In a Strange Room, and remember that it’s not an abnegation of one’s artistic responsibilities to paint with a small brush, and attend to personal rather than historic dramas.
With this combination of abrupt acts of God, childish misapprehensions, and subtly layered thefts, The Promise thrums with the nonsensical aspect of apartheid, when white families like the Swarts experienced the historically freakish circumstance of true minority rule over a subjugated majority of nonwhite compatriots. By focusing on a small piece of land and the acrimonious, drawn-out disputes over its ownership, and keeping the narrative voice loose and roving, flitting among the Swarts’ minds, Galgut punctures their sense of their own importance with sharp doses of reality, eventually finding a nasty kind of hilarity in an era of history whose traumatic remnants still bear useful scrutiny ... just as good as all the rapturous reviews suggest, but it contributes to an already bristling quiver of fiction about white existence under apartheid.
Galgut's...compelling new novel blends characters and history and intricate themes to reveal the devastating impacts of white privilege and institutional racism ... Lyrical, brimming with situational irony and character contrast, The Promise is timely, relevant, and thematically significant.
Three decades of South African sociopolitical history are woven into a saga of loss and missed opportunity that upends a dysfunctional Afrikaner family living outside Pretoria ... Galgut moves fluidly among accounts of every single major and minor character, his prose unbroken by quotation marks or italics, as though narrated from the perspective of a ghost who briefly possesses every person. The language is peppered with regional geography, terminology, and slang, with sentences ranging from clipped to lyrical ... Galgut’s multifarious writing style is bold and unusual, providing an initial barrier to entry yet achieving an intuitive logic over time ... Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief.
the keenly observant Galgut offers a deeply affecting family saga spanning decades of upheaval in South Africa ... He’s an expert at voices, stealthily examining the world from the inside out and engaging the reader with inventive triangulation, such as the omniscient narrator’s sudden mocking of Anton’s habit of repeating himself ... This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing.
