... bright, perspicacious, and elegant ... Most notable for its sterling point-of-view and the literary ancestry it invokes, White on White primarily, although not exclusively, trails along these technical lines, namely in its clear evolution from Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy ... a discursive, intimate first-person narrator to, via dropping authorial flags and bleeding syntax and diction into each other, thrust a secondary character into immediacy with the reader. When done properly, as it frequently is in White on White, this method is a subtle and effective one ... hile Savaş perhaps does not possess the same electric prose, razor-sharp precision, or mechanically flawless use of, as this reviewer has termed it, first-person free-indirect (something that can be said of all Cusk’s contemporaries), she is nonetheless a more than legitimate literary descendant and engaging practitioner of the craft ... Propelled by a rich voice and sharp eye, and ultimately offering an insightful study of the decay wrought by time on relationships and identity, White on White stands as both a well-defined and well-executed work in its own right and a prime example of the evolutionary process of the novel as an art form, the employment of an extant technical-mechanical route to reach a new and enlightening destination.
Savaş’ prose is unobtrusive in a way that lets these ideas surface without announcing them; it’s a brisk book that moves patiently ... Savaş, impressively, has at once deposited her readers in the literary equivalent of a clean room — the prose is unaffected, straightforward, easily graceful — and dumped us into a fog ... Much of the power of White on White comes from Savas’ excellent command of the slowly darkening mood, the way she titrates details about Agnes’ demanding, sometimes cruel character and the narrator’s naivete, about how each reveals something about the other. The ending is delivered as a kind of shock, but it is clear how every detail in the novel was calibrated to lead up to it.
... the entire world of White on White is selectively outlined. What of it exists exists in crisp, clean prose ... the line between Agnes’s monologues, as reported by the narrator, and the narrator’s own speech and thoughts grows increasingly thin. Over time, the narrator is drawn into Agnes’s mental world, in all of its turmoil, yet, with a strange coolness, resists providing the compassion and reassurance Agnes seems to so desperately seek. The results of this thwarted intimacy move the story inexorably toward a finale that, for a book so invested in visual art, feels surprisingly most like an act of literary revenge.
Their conversations are rendered in Savaş’s restrained and spare prose, which perfectly explores the relationship between the blank narrator and self-portrait painting Agnes. And the writing’s steady sparsity echoes thematically throughout the novel. The most compelling is the narrator’s study of medieval nudity ... goes deep into human experience, beautiful and fraught, delivering a renewed perception of what it means to be a person among other people.
Although White on White can suffer from too much control at times, Savaş’ restrained style is a statement in itself, minimalist on the surface but more textured than what first meets the eye. Through it, the author questions the validity of the self, whether fully clothed or supposedly exposed. No matter how much one keeps hidden or shares with the world, there’s no controlling what another person will do with that. Humans will likely use the information to their own advantage, in the service of their own twisted judgments. Who knows that better than an artist?
Savas' luxuriantly meditative new novel, White on White, again zeroes in on...elemental interpersonal themes ... The narrator's research into the historic ties between touch and narrative is almost unwittingly fueled by Agnes' compulsion to bare herself metaphorically. While we see the 'physical aspect' of nakedness the same as it has been for centuries, our current 'perception of being unclothed might hold entirely different meanings, like a thin film obscuring the subject from view' ... The many correlations between that 'thin film' and the 'pleasingly thin' Agnes, so desperate to have someone slip inside her skin and understand her, make Savas' lyrically spare gem shimmer with richly complex insights on communication, family, love and friendship.
... lacks the momentum and merciless intelligence of Cusk’s trilogy. (And the style, too. Cusk would never use the words 'sparsely,' 'sparse' and 'sparsity' within the first 10 pages of a book ... The student is less a character than an apparatus of observation; she is Emerson’s transparent eyeball, only trained on a single human subject rather than the entirety of the world. The question then becomes: Is Agnes worthy of sustained contemplation? And is the narrator a worthy observer? White on white is an ambitious palette, but it can be a very unforgiving one.
For a novel in which, for the most part, very little happens, Savaş maintains suspense impressively via, say, ominously blank descriptions of sunlight playing on the flat’s fixtures and fittings. Rare lapses come when she seems to fret that the action, or lack of it, can’t hold our attention ... It helps that Savaş is happy to acknowledge the in-built contrivance of the book’s delivery mechanism, or what the faceless protagonist calls 'the monologue unravelling daily, without cease' ... At one point, Agnes explains that she set herself 'the challenge of painting only in white'. By telling its story at a deliberately chilly remove, White on White rises to a similar task, even if its stylish austerity can’t fully shake the sense that it also represents a canny dodge of novel-writing’s more basic grunt work.
From a lesser writer, this storytelling technique would be fraught with peril, but in her follow-up to Walking on the Ceiling Savas offers a novel as smooth and compact as an alabaster egg, its prose filled with thoughtful sentences and psychological insights. An engaging yet calming read, as soothing as a talk with a sympathetic therapist.
... alluring if elusive ... Some of these fleeting anecdotes feel expendable, but the account of the perfect Agnes’s slow crumbling builds to an unsettling conclusion. Fans of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy will appreciate this striking portrait.
