Beguiling ... Its epistolary structure lending a confessional tone ... A nervy, episodic read, yet its pivots are sobering in their scale ... Khalid is such a gifted commentator that his methods bear close examination ... Brother Alive is neither a press bulletin nor a position paper. Khalid’s sentences abound with florid, poetic metaphors while maintaining the clipped, declarative tempo of Scripture.
A smooth interleaving of science-fiction with high-resolution realism and hallucinatory phantasmagoria. Now, firstly, it’s a good book—released this summer, it’s yet too early to say great or not; for me, at least, that type of judgement becomes possible only on second read. But I will say, even now, in the novel’s infancy, that it’s one of those books that appear only seldomly and bellow, from the first page, from the first line, that they require, beyond the valence-judgements expected of a review, earnest, laborious exploration.
... feels like the first since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic that captures the mood of New York right now, describing a wounded city where, rather than holding on to what’s gone, residents are eager to rid themselves of the recent past ... a book of ideas, a book of fathers and sons, a magical-realist mystery, and a revenge story ... Earth’s mightiest heroes often make their homes in New York, and the brothers, with their preternatural talents, leap off the book’s pages. With the gift of gab in multiple languages, Dayo embodies the city’s quest for wealth ... isn’t all darkness. Its cynicism is countered by the incredible warmth with which Khalid writes about his city ... Its contradictions make it glow. It’s thick with ideas, imagination, wordplay, name-dropping, notable NYC cameos (Argosy! The 13th Step!), and casual acts of writerly daring, which occasionally go overboard. Read it with a pen and you’ll expend more ink than a zealous NSA redactor ... Would that the rest of Brother Alive were as strong as its first act. When the book leaves the city, it tumbles off its axis. The street scenes, the density, the atmospheric reality undergirding Khalid’s fantasy disappears...without the backdrop of New York, the abstractions pile up and the churning plot ceases to satisfy ... This book, so focused on the past, sometimes seems to have little optimism for the future. But some of Khalid’s best writing comes when he has Youssef wax eloquent about whatever’s on the horizon. Even though Brother Alive is far from hopeful, wrestling with intellectual and political energies that seem to have no appropriate outlet, Youssef, and his author, maintain a sense of delirious wonder throughout. It’s a very New York quality: Every so often, the cynicism falls away and the sentiment—the affection that keeps us in this worn-out city—shines through.
Riotous with erudition....Zain’s multilayered, nonlinear narrative turns unwieldy and ultimately disappointing as an exercise in sly cleverness rather than rewarding storytelling.
Genre-defying ... Khalid’s vision can be bleak, even cynical, but it’s also remarkably cogent and underscored with a profound tenderness. It’s a love story...wrapped inside a searing indictment, a rage against the many machines that would sacrifice people at the altar of capital. That Khalid executes a novel this intricate, elegant, and compassionate with such masterly prose all but guarantees that this will be one of the finest works of literature this year ... Blisteringly intelligent, bursting with profound feeling, and host to some of the most complex, necessary characters in recent memory.
Auspicious ... Khalid brilliantly reveals new shades of truth from each character’s point of view, and perfectly integrates the many ideas about capitalism and religious extremism into an enthralling narrative. It’s a tour de force.
Bulky, ambitious ... Khalid has plenty to say about art, relationships, religion, and family, and he gives Youssef an appealingly wry and questioning voice. But the novel creaks from its overabundance of ambition ... Whatever power Brother might have as a symbol for hidden lives and alternate existences is sapped by the busy plotting. Khalid has an admirably encyclopedist instinct, but he’s set an almost impossibly high bar for storytelling ... A big-picture saga about faith that gets lost in the details.
