Sometimes surreal satires can be inaccessible, too clinically strange to connect with, but Waidner anchors the reader with familiar emotion ... Waidner’s humor is similarly accessible — playful and unpretentious; and their prose, despite being peppered with foreign phrases and grammatical oddities, is disarmingly smooth ... The novel is an allegory that argues, effectively, that admission is not the same thing as access ... Poignant.
Surreal and splendid ... The story’s upbeat ending⎯heartening in ways you’d never expect, just right for a pair of novels disruptive in the best sense, a one-two punch like nothing in recent memory⎯allows our hero to multiply their good luck.
The narrative twists and sprouts in unexpected ways, and it can feel as if multiple plots are mushrooming on the page. Suffice to say, Waidner has absolute command.
A daring, uncompromising, bonkers serious-scape of the kind that rarely gets the limelight in the UK’s contemporary literary field. Why? Because it’s subversive, off the wall and, frankly, challenging to the status quo of what literature is and does. For all these reasons, I’m glad of it ... Isn’t just another bright, shiny, unorthodox thing for the sake of bright, shiny unorthodoxy, not least because it engages with themes that matter – inequality, injustice, social and cultural deprivation – and it does it with a wit that’s acerbic and playful at the same time ... This is a radical, rebellious novel and it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. There were moments when I tired of the flamboyant hypercrazy – even if that was the point – but at the same time, I loved being taken out of my readerly comfort zone.
Particularly superb in its portrayal of the personal connection many feel with celebrities, this is a short, delightful, and singular novel from one of the most profoundly different writers around, a worthy follow-up to Waidner’s prize-winning Sterling Karat Gold.
The novel is filled with wickedly sharp commentary and well-aimed digs at hypocrisy and injustice...but Isabel Waidner never lets the characters become simple devices ... Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is, perhaps surprisingly, both sentimental and optimistic in its depiction of love (for ourselves and those around us) as a radical act.
The plot toes the line of ridiculousness in a truly masterful way, never ceasing to surprise, and Waidner’s ultramodern language, a mix of the Queen’s English and Tumblr-speak, results in some strangely beautiful sentences. All the while, the characters are developed in subtle, touching ways. For example, in a socially awkward, quintessentially millennial moment of tenderness, Corey expresses that they would be utterly lost without Drew, who has stood by them throughout their flailing career as a writer. Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is a flashy, punchy whirlwind: Waidner has caught lightning in a bottle.