The reader’s impulse to grapple with the text, to wrestle it down and to raise objections or to attempt to identify her own place in the context of the story, is a sign not of weakness, but of Grushin’s genius. This is a text that rewards rereading and demands engagement. There is no redemption story to relax into here, and no easy answers.
...at her best, Grushin beautifully renders a riddle of our time — do we have to be famous? — leading a critic to ask the reverse. What if happiness lies in the banal — love; work; a few spare principles to guide us — and in being able to let the train of remarkability pass us by?
This is a flawed book. The novel’s structure, in moving from one moment and room to another without connective tissue, makes several decisions seem unmotivated. Grushin’s dialogue also often falls flat ... But this novel isn’t after perfection, either of life or work. Rather, it shows how life is built out of adjustment — dreams tempered and poetry transformed into prose.
Full of original and quoted poems, this heartbreaking novel is an invitation to contemplate whether the richness and ambition of one's life has to correspond to the proportions of one's landscape. The corners of even the smallest rooms needn't be confining, but places where 'forces of the universe [run] deeper," if one only knows how to look, how to feel.'
At some point, the novel opens up to consider whether being an artist is something one does or something one is. In moments like this, Grushin’s honesty about the dilemmas of artistic life shines through the predictability of her character, drawing the story toward an unexpectedly moving end.
