A muscular narrative with scrupulous technique. It’s his finest work yet ... Stuart’s prose is gorgeous and his plotting strategic; nothing is lost. A throwaway item in an early chapter loops back like a boomerang hundreds of pages later ... [A] nuanced tapestry ... [A] generational talent.
Moving, suspenseful, completely-worth-your-time ... John of John is a stick of dynamite waiting to go off in your hand ... One of the biggest surprises in a novel full of them is that Stuart is not particularly interested in telling either a coming-home or a coming-of-age story...he uses that architecture to build something different, stranger and far more original ... Stuart is not just a very good writer but an immensely skilled storyteller who is more than up to the extraordinarily challenging task he sets himself.
Stuart’s protagonists are growing up, and his writing — particularly his depiction of the vicissitudes of queer life — is maturing right alongside them ... Changes tack dramatically toward a sprawling, emotionally rich saga that extends Stuart’s investigation into masculinity while sketching a world in which his gay characters come fully, finally alive. It’s his best yet ... Stuart finds a fantastic canvas for continuing his exploration of masculinity. Men are John’s central characters, but the women (Cal’s mother and grandmother) are as lovingly drawn.
Douglas Stuart, author of the Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain, is becoming a problem. With the publication of his third novel, John of John, we’re running out of superlatives ... Everyone says it’s harder to write a great tragedy, too, but it’s actually much harder to write a great story of happiness, of people learning at last how to love one another honestly, which, somehow, is what Stuart has done.
The reasons for John’s ferocious emotional repression are not fully explored, but they seem intrinsic to his grimly sustaining notion of island heritage. To accept his nature would be to abandon a sense of identity as traditional as the man-powered loom. As John of John unspools the lies and fights in the torturous father-son relationship, it captures the stark, workaday rhythms of the island ... Relief is found in the moments of fellowship and natural splendor that are threaded into the story like strands of bright yarn ... Even so, the feeling of captivity is onerous in John of John ... The author wields his powers of compassion to enlarge the characters of John and Cal, but these are grown men who merely behave like children—John is a bully, Cal is a brat—and it is harder to submit to their struggles.
Intimate yet epic in scale, it contains equal parts pastoral drama, tale of familial fracture, love story and inquiry into various forms of loneliness: the loneliness that can reside between fathers and sons, between lovers, between man and God, and between a small place and the big world ... Outstandingly canny and wrenching on self-contempt, on the toilsome art of deceit, and on the contradictions we all contain, as well as the friction that can exist between the personal and the collective ... Certainly enthralling, but the ambient Weltschmerz and the characters’ frequent self-pity can be draining ... Leans heavily on melodrama and sensationalism as a shortcut to tragedy. Towards the end, the novel is eventful to a fault and surfeited with pathos ... While this book will not appeal to those with a low tolerance for excess, diehard romantics will find much to love.
Superb ... Intriguing in its particularities but timeless in wisdom, John of John offers hope that relinquishing shame creates freedom to be true to oneself. It's irresistible and an instant classic.
Ruminative ... In the contemplative, reverberating novel John of John, the outwardly simple family dynamics of a religious Scottish family are questioned and reevaluated.
Slowly but seamlessly, relationships are revealed, secrets divulged. As always, Stuart’s prose is a joy to read and get lost in. He conveys both the beauty and the isolation of the Hebridean setting while illuminating the lies we tell ourselves in order to cope.
Vivid ... Alongside its well-fashioned plot, the immediacy and freshness of its carefully carved sentences—which brim with acute observations and occasional sharp humor—make John of John a joy to read ... Many pleasures.
