The narrative crackles with satire, even before Boyet innocently lands himself at Guantánamo as the first detainee captured on United States soil and decides to bring the place a little flair by removing the sleeves from his orange jumpsuit ... You’ll also be twisting a lip upward at the Bellowesque brio of Gilvarry’s language ... The real purpose of the comedic bravura is not to amuse you. It’s to soften you up for the horror that comes raining down in the final 50 pages, when Boyet, so lately the toast of the runway, is interrogated, humiliated and given a close-up view of state-sponsored brutality ... Comedy, we’re reminded, often has an ulterior motive. Here the intention could hardly be more serious — to scare the smirk off our mugs as we enter Year 10 of Guantánamo’s use as a prison, with no end to the suffering in sight.
...Boy’s story draws some striking parallels between the way we mythologize stars and the way we look at terrorists ... Both are often outsiders, and both require pathological amounts of attention to fully achieve their status in the public sphere. From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant slices through these tropes, using Boy’s pure improbability as the skewering blade ... Gilvarry is a better dialogue spinner than a narrative writer. The conversations here are so hilarious and quotable it’s a bit odd that Gilvarry never gets complete control over Boy’s voice ... The female characters here are also desperately thin, and not just because so many of them are models ... In order to squeeze in the whole arc of Boy’s rise and fall, the book needs to keep moving. And yet it also seems to want to move us. It can’t do both, and so in the book’s slightly baggy middle section it does neither ... The last hundred pages of this book are very difficult to stop reading.
It’s a clash of universes—one hopeful but ultimately shallow, another uncertain and unspeakably harsh. Gilvarry navigates the contrast with ease; in some places, you’ll want to leaf back and reread just how he moved you from one environment to the next so seamlessly ... Researched fiction often grows clumsy with excessive fact, but Gilvarry knows how to immerse his readers without harping on the trivial. Described in Boyet’s voice, both fashion and political imprisonment become acutely vivid ... Gilvarry plants potent seeds of doubt as he moves from the tragic to the ridiculous and back. The moral, one could say, is that there is no final truth in Boyet’s situation ... Intricately researched and expertly crafted, Memoirs is a poignant reminder of what contemporary fiction ought to be.
In Alex Gilvarry’s debut novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-enemy Combatant, satire reigns and worlds collide ... Gilvarry possesses an excellent ear for the Orwellian language of our post- 9/11 world ... Satires needn’t end happily. Still, Gilvarry lightens the long dark night of our likeable Fashion Terrorist in his final chapters.
Gilvarry has created a character whose infectious drive and flawless palate make for a rendition (well, maybe rendition is not the right word here) of the twentysomething in the big city that is fresh, somehow noble, and starkly original ... The cell is not enough for Boy because he is simply not a writer: he’s a designer. While he is a joy to read, he does it out of utility and despair. One can only transmit from a cell, not shine. There’s dignity in a memoir, but no fame.
Gilvarry’s debut novel aspires to be an allegory about how immigrant ambition has become stifled in the wake of post-9/11 paranoia ... Gilvarry keeps the tone of the story lightly satirical without diminishing the seriousness of Boy’s predicament, and he skillfully captures the frenetic world of striving designers and Brooklyn hipsters. The novel’s chief flaws have more to do with structure than tone ... Characters in the story besides Boy rarely become more than strictly functional...and shifting between Boy’s incarceration and Manhattan memories grows repetitive and undramatic until the closing pages ... Gilvarry is a talented writer and observer, but the satirical elements could have been better tailored.
Gilvarry’s debut gracefully tackles politically charged subject matter, acknowledging the validity of the terrorist threat as well as the danger of stereotyping and fear-mongering ... An engaging victim of uncertain times, he’s a protagonist who will appeal to readers of all political persuasions.
