White Flights is a faultlessly argued collection of essays about how whiteness dominates the American literary imagination ... If you are white and reading this review, and you are already interested in how racial issues intersect with contemporary literature, then buy this book, underline passages in it, assign it to your classes, use it as part of the continuing process of decolonizing your mind. But it’s also an ideal book, if a difficult pill, for those who do not believe decolonization is necessary ... Row is writing from and to whiteness, cajoling white readers and writers to understand whiteness as subjective. Not universal, or invisible, but loaded with meaning and harmful assumptions ... seven dense essays, each...builds to its purpose gradually, with dizzying complexity ... He writes with great specificity and fervor about how writing teachers at the MFA level perpetuate this dishonesty to generation after generation of literary writers.

Utilizing a stunning range—one paragraph moves effortlessly from Nas to Jacques Derrida—Row exposes how many writers use space, time, and style to enact these flights ... Perhaps most interesting is the assertion that shame is a key component of these texts, particularly visible in the works of David Foster Wallace. But Row does not only issue blistering critiques, he also provides hope. Drawing on his personal experiences and the work of James Baldwin and other authors, he develops the idea that interracial art represents the possibility of 'reparative writing.' Full of brilliant readings and beautifully written, this mind-altering work of criticism establishes Row as one of the preeminent cultural critics of our age.

Row...works like a Freudian analyst in these searching, loosely structured essays. Armed with a bevy of sources, from Flannery O’Connor to Eve Sedgwick, he casts his eye upon a diverse swath of American culture in order to suss out what it has to tell us about race—even, or especially, when it doesn’t mean to tell us anything ... Row demonstrates ['literary white flight'] through astute close readings in which he analyzes postwar fiction with a loving sternness that avoids didacticism even as he pingpongs among cultural artifacts, decoding everything from Don DeLillo’s Underworld to emo music ... For all of these inventive and insightful readings, however, it’s unfortunate that Row does not suggest concrete strategies for intervening in the stalled conversation he picks apart. When he recommends specific texts...his glosses fail to identify what, on an aesthetic level, makes these titles worthy of admiration ... It doesn’t help that the book includes some fumbling gestures ... Despite, or perhaps because of, these flaws and the discomfort they inspire, we should accompany Row through this important inquiry.

... earnest and ranging ... At times, Row loses grasp of his focus, and flits into seemingly meandering reflections on religious and existential concerns, but when he anchors his thinking to how white writers have created white utopias in their work, and how that work showcases larger cultural issues of exclusion and a seeming disinterest in nuanced representation, he’s brilliant and insightful ... Row performs the same thoughtful exhumation of white writing again and again ... Row ultimately accomplishes his goal of raising 'the possibility of a new method.' Now it’s up to the larger writing community to translate his plea into action.

Throughout his book, there is an awkwardness uncharacteristic of the canon that, he acknowledges, formed him. In structure, syntax, and tone, Row’s writing appears atypically disjointed, jarring, and at times, broken—his sentences pivoting amid lists of adjectives, and trains of thought apparently abandoned in between paragraphs. As when Virginia Woolf forecasted that women writers would have to break everything to create their own literature, white writers too will have to struggle to unlearn the prejudices, and privileges, they’ve inherited from the canon. To do so will not just be difficult but awkward, like a teenager in a body she doesn’t yet know ... Row does not offer conclusions or tell the reader what to do. Instead he offers, simply, a different kind of writing, the product of a different kind of seeing, the process of a different kind of being. His writing appears almost naked, searching, and oddly hopeful ... few pages after that, he wonders about tenderness. In his last words, he offers his language like an extension of the hand, a gesture, I presume, of friendship[.]

Beyond literary scholars and writers of fiction, its audience will surely be rather limited, subject to a kind of enclosure Row could perhaps do more to question. Within the enclosure, the book’s impact seems likely to be great, spreading and deepening over time. I got the sense, however, that some readers will not feel acknowledged or addressed, and that some will not be able to distinguish Row’s valid message from the unsavory aura of 'virtue signaling.' Some may suspect that, in full view of a separate audience whose approval he seeks, he is essentially just urging other white writers to think more like him, write more like him, work harder to be as conscientious as he. This impression could be exacerbated by the general lack of examples of works of fiction by white writers ... His scruples are welcome, but ultimately they weigh his book down. You might be able to play, joke, or dance scrupulously, but it’s much harder to do so while insisting upon your own scrupulosity. Playful or pithy self-criticism, surely, even with the stakes so high, would ring truer than exhaustive, deadly-earnest self-criticism. He can’t quite shake the posture—characteristically white and male—of a self-seriousness that also feels like a desperate stab at maintaining control ... Row is better at diagnosing than at writing prescriptions, and others may have covered his most vital messages more succinctly, wittily, and cogently ... Still, Row’s dogged interrogation of whiteness from a position of whiteness, and his insistence that this work is uncomfortable but necessary, merit a broad and thoughtful readership.

Row's book is an ambitious attempt to investigate what is latent in those silences, and to create a theory of what Row, borrowing from the critic Eve Sedgwick, calls 'reparative writing' ... White Flights is both astute and painfully self-regarding, showcasing a fierce intelligence trained, too often, on its own belly button ... despite his great care and acute self-awareness, Row shows how very hard it can be for white writers not to make it about themselves ... Row likes ambiguity, and is fond of phrases like 'Which is to say, but also not to say...' ... But one of the requirements of nonfiction is that it needs to, at some level, mean what it says.

...[a] provocative, tentatively hopeful clutch of essays ... For anybody who comes to White Flights in the context of the current debate over appropriation, it’s important to know that Row isn’t delivering a craft talk about how to write about race, with explicit guidance on how not to screw it up. His main point is a trickier and more provocative one ... Row is raising a set of complicated but valuable points, and because his approach is more seeking and open-ended, it doesn’t have the force of a jeremiad or manifesto. Nor is it a marshaling of evidence. White Flights might best be described as a lament: Here we have a country with a rich ethnic and racial background, and our most acclaimed white writers seem to be strenuously laboring to avoid it ... Row’s book is a valuable starting point for a conversation that not enough writers — OK, white critics — are having. And its open-endedness, its refusal to simplify or be prescriptive, is to its credit, even if it’s frustrating.

Row and his sources paint a portrait of whiteness teetering on its axis, inherently unstable ... These might sound like hot takes, but in Row’s hands, they feel cool and contemplative. His essays read less like arguments than meditations on the themes of race. Row digresses; he teases out; he peppers his essays with almost-epiphanies that he promptly complicates. He poses questions and questions himself, hyper-aware of his own subjectivity. More than he generalizes, Row zooms in. His essays overflow with block quotes ... When Row doesn’t quote, he lists examples ... Sometimes, the density of Row’s secondary sources feels like a defense of his right to his subject ... In this collection, Row tries to tell the full story. Still, in passages of White Flights, he continues trying to control how he’s read ... It’s hard for Row—or for anyone—to completely abandon this pose of self-knowledge. But Row argues that white people need to abandon it, along with the attached myth that self-knowledge is a private pursuit.

This intelligent collection is often deeply engaged in realms of philosophy and literary theory; it approaches an academic writing style. Its subject matter may be discomfiting for white readers and writers, and readers less familiar with Wittgenstein, Derrida or Edward T. Hall's theory of proxemics will likely find this book challenging. There is something for every reader, however, in the message that fiction not only reflects but acts upon real life, and that each of us is obliged to act for justice, in reading and writing as in life

... a complex, personal meditation on whiteness ... Row subjects himself to interrogation, as well...This autoethnographic approach adds several dimensions to Row's concept of 'white flights' ... is, at times, a bit self-indulgent, particularly in the final entry, 'White Out', which is more of a collection of thoughts than a coherent essay. But ultimately, Row has produced a thoughtful and timely meditation that serves as a call to white writers to consider the questions: 'What's next? What can we do with the time we have?'

... a frantic loop full of strong analyses that are suddenly abandoned while Row takes off into a thicket of references and apologies. The slipperiness of the book may simply mirror the slipperiness of the subject. Using language to find expressions of race in language—which may only exist in language—is a recursive mission. But not an academic one—these terms are crucial to the dominant conversation in American life ... too often, [Row] gets close and then pulls back, distracting himself (and us) in a drifty flurry of name-drops ... How sadness and grieving work vis-à-vis whiteness as it is framed by blackness is an exciting idea, certainly a promising starting point for an essay or a book. But Row withdraws this framework just as he introduces it ... Ever self-aware, Row fights with himself more than he fights with any of the writers he mentions. Sometimes he undercuts his own ideas. More often, he sketches out a formulation and piles up citations like empty red cups, obviating the chance to settle in and talk. (It is common for a page here to name-check between five and ten artists ... Row does a good job of finding a white body and describing its avoidant orbit. But whiteness, the larger project, is based on invisibility, and at the end of White Flights, it’s still there, hiding in plain sight.

Row’s humbleness makes the book possible, as he writes about a place of reconciliation we have yet to reach. Over the seven essays, he sustains an ache for it, partly through examples of white writers whose work dares to be honest about race, including Lorrie Moore, Allan Gurganus, Dorothy Allison and Jonathan Lethem ... The strongest pieces in the book identify the mechanics behind the work of white writers who seem to ignore race or subjugate black and brown characters ... While Row’s reading of these writers is both generous and unforgiving, he is tougher on the minimalists who defined writing programs in the late 20th century ... When white writers don’t see their own race, they perpetuate a perceived difference between their work and that of writers of color, in which the former is believed to have the freedom to create and imagine with no bounds, while the latter is constrained by identity. Row’s work is a step toward undermining this binary classification, and an opportunity to decode all that has come before.

... Row's lucid explorations of writing by James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison, Toni Morrison, James Alan McPherson, and others venture beyond criticism, citing Albert Murray's counternarrative that '[t]he practice of improvisatory freedom in black culture is the essence of American culture itself' ... For readers fascinated by race and reparative writing, now and in American history, and the transformative potential of literature to change minds and emphasize our common humanity.

Wide-ranging, erudite, and impassioned essays examine whiteness and literature ... Row’s urgent desire to confront questions of race is compelled in part by his own background, which he shares in engrossing autobiographical vignettes ... Though the lit-crit language may turn off some readers, this is a significant contribution to the cultural landscape. A disquieting, deeply thoughtful cultural critique.