... while the plot is wholly involving and had me eagerly turning pages ... I think what I loved about the novel is the kitchen-sink quality of its ideas and obsessions ... There were periods while reading the book when I knew I was only understanding a portion of the references to art, to philosophy, to politics, but I did not care; all of those references created a kind of tapestry in which the individual threads didn't matter because I was captivated by the whole ... I fell in love with the book because it is one of a handful of books I will read in a given year that remind me of the potential of literature to mine our obsessions and share them with others. It is a novel that could only be written by one person, at one particular time. It gives the lie to the notion that literature could ever be considered product ... the most 'alive' book I've read this year.

...[a] gorgeous debut novel ... It’s an ambitious book, one filled with Greek myths and art-world jargon, the type of stylistic siren song that could lure a writer into dangerous waters, turning a great story into a pretentious bore. Chancellor never lets that happen; he shows great poise and command with this elegant and highly enjoyable first novel, which suggests that he has even more greatness to offer us.

...a spirited sendup of the frauds found in art, academia and their ""liminal"" intersections ... Chancellor writes in the established tradition of the American absurd, from Pynchon and Gaddis...to DeLillo and Foster Wallace ... Chancellor may be swinging for the former pair, but lands firmly, and thereby accessibly, in the latter. His language is often bracing and his references to 'late Heidegger' et al. will please aspiring or ashamed philosophy students. But he is rarely esoteric for esoterica's sake, eschewing the obfuscating 'cult of the difficult' he otherwise lampoons. But is it art? Or Art? Marcel Duchamp suggested that art is whatever appears in a gallery. So is this a novel or something in a 'novel'? Liminalism suggests it may be somewhere in between.

... not always quite as clever as the author intends, but it has plenty of energy to atone for its predictable satiric targets and some real emotional heft to counter the whiffs of pretentiousness ... very familiar stuff, and it’s not entirely persuasive that Owen agrees to a collaboration with Kurt that he knows is exploitative ... This brand of wit largely depends on readers patting themselves on the back for getting the references. If they don’t get it, or don’t care, then meant-to-be-hilarious set pieces fall flat ... It comes awfully late in the novel, but Professor Burr’s painful concern for his son finally provides a ballast of recognizable feeling to anchor the airy intellectualizing. A lot of plot is required to get father and son separately to Iceland, but it’s worth it for their moving reunion ... Wonderful passages of vivid prose and pungent dialogue occur throughout, although they too often make overly obvious points. Chancellor’s knowing catalogue of the market-driven imperatives of the art world and the academy isn’t as fresh as his way with words. He still has some thematic growing-up to do. The marvelous Iceland chapters — earthy and ruefully funny, warm yet coolly aware of absurdity — suggest that he’s already on his way.

A triumphant literary debut with notes of both The Art of Fielding and The Flamethrowers ... A compulsively readable novel of ideas, action, and intrigue,A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall offers a persuasive vision of personal agency, art, family and the narratives we build for ourselves.

Will Chancellor’s debut novel is a wild ride ... Although Owen’s adventures in Berlin, Amsterdam and Iceland are so zany they’re nearly fabulist, the settings are credible and fascinating ... The journey is so fast-paced and suspenseful that lapses into implausibility didn’t matter to me most of the time. And even the passages that stretched my believability were so entertaining I had no choice but to turn the page. It helps that Chancellor has a highly original voice, and his use of language can be quite beautiful ... I did find it difficult to get through some of the dense early passages that dealt purely with scholarship ... I concede...that without these passages, it would be impossible to see how one can become so deeply mired in the life of the mind that he forsakes the life of the heart ... But sometimes these sections felt exclusionary rather than inviting, and occasionally they struck a gratuitous tone. I found myself getting impatient and alternately wanting to skip pages or close the book ... Ultimately I was rewarded for my patience, and I found the end of the book poignant, charming and just as eccentric as the rest of the story.

Chancellor’s debut is a twisting, globe-trotting affair that unfortunately suffers from poor pacing and frequently dwells on the mundane. The result is a mixed bag, unsure of its own identity, like many of the book’s characters

A father searches for his vanished son in this edgily comic first novel, which has fun with the worlds of art and academia ... the author maintains an almost thrillerlike pace while taking well-aimed shots at academic and art-market fads and helping two lost souls through essential transformations. It’s a bracingly rich mélange of a novel in which scholarship spotlights Al Pacino’s Scarface and plain exposition suddenly turns into prose that might be noirish or downright strange ... Some readers may stumble over the Latin, argot and allusions, but these are minor challenges in Chancellor’s polymorphous entertainment.