The template is a classic: Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy loses girl. But the delivery — a series of intimate, offbeat, often hilarious musings on a relationship, from first blush to post-breakup drinks — is a highly entertaining surprise. At first glance, the text looks like prose poetry: well-spaced, economical paragraphs of two or three lines. But the format belies the potency of the writing. This is not an airy ode; the hard truths of love and loss are boiled down here. If the novel were a sauce, it would be a reduction ... Hourglass suffers for its sometimes mawkish language, places where Goddard reaches for earnestness but sounds insincere, or just immature ... Still, the charms of Hourglass, like those of the narrator himself, are insidious. This is a sad book that is somehow wickedly fun to read.
Keiran Goddard has written something like the universal love story ... No pain is unique, and all pain is unique. This is the paradox that powers Hourglass. I have rarely read a book that captures so succinctly the way that all lovers must (at least a little bit) believe they are the only people to ever feel this feeling, and the way that that is (at least a little bit) true ... The world of Goddard’s novel exists vividly on the page and yet to the narrator he is the only real person in it ... Hourglass sits somewhere between prose and poetry.
Exquisite ... The voice of the narrator is unique – here is a man who articulates his experience of the world with imaginative flair and a dark wit. He skates close to the danger zone of sentimentality before, each time, subverting the romance with stark reality ... It is the poet’s eye for observation, and precise prose, that elevates this stream of consciousness to something very particular, intimate and purposeful ... It is remarkable to read a love story so universal that still articulates something illuminating about love itself. Goddard has found new ways to express the achingly familiar without ever recycling cliched representations ... Goddard has hit a nerve with this devastatingly funny, intimate portrait of a modern man in a contemporary love story. If ever a book could be read as a pilgrimage to discover what the heart finds sacred, this is it.
Even readers who don't know that the British writer Keiran Goddard is a poet will suspect as much from the lyricism of Hourglass, his debut novel ... In these more poetic moments, the novel echoes the rhythm and sentiments of Pablo Neruda's love poems. Goddard's narrator writes movingly of his emotionally fragile mother, his complicated relationship with faith and other factors that define his life.
Goddard’s use of the 'you' address as a device throughout the book, as if the narrator is writing an extended letter to his beloved, works until it doesn’t ... It wears thin when he narrates events for the sake of the reader that the beloved would have been aware of as a participant ... It does, however, offer readers the immediacy of a voyeuristic gaze. As a result, the story moves swiftly and elliptically in and out of reverie. Eventually the narrator slips into a malaise that reads as both idiosyncratic and relatable and touches on everything from the nature of labor and class to the role of media in our lives to living in an aging body. A funny and smart, insightful and strange story about time, memory, and grief ... This is a lyrical meditation on love as well as storytelling itself.
Bracing and intimate ... At times, the weight given to small details blunts the overall impact, but their precision mostly makes up for it. In addition to poetry, Goddard’s project brings to mind the atomized tweet-inspired novels of writers like Patricia Lockwood.
