Kemp’s Dada picaresque Paradise Logic dissolves form at the molecular level and builds an extraordinary story out of the residual goop ... Unbearable tragedy lurks in these pages...all chopped to pieces and stuffed between winningly insane layers of syntactical bizzaria and presentational devices galore ... This book swings big.
Revolves around a refreshingly human conceit ... But Reality...is not fleshy or funny enough to sustain Kemp’s 240-odd pages. Hampered by aesthetic flourishes like smiley and sad faces punctuating paragraphs and an omniscient voice’s urges to 'Read on, man,' Kemp’s prose is less provocative than cloying ... If Reality is the last hetero-optimist, then Kemp never joins her in her enthusiasm, maintaining an ironic distance and, crucially, some plausible deniability.
Absurd ... It’s a bleak assessment of the landscape for heterosexual women, and one that seems to match Kemp’s own ... The problem with this is that it creates a satire with missing teeth, a hilarious romp that points out the precarity, ridiculousness, and violence of patriarchy without a glint of a way out. I’ll grant that it’s not the task of this novel—or any, for that matter—to deliver an ideologically consistent praxis. But mourn with me, for a moment, the absence of hope, the death of agency ... The joke becomes tiresome when it drones on for too long ... Paradise Logic is also a puzzle—a Dream Life–style game about the trap of patriarchy, and the absolute torture and rapture of being a young woman at 23. Nabokovian? Not quite. But enough to send the e-girl in a more interesting direction.
Surreal ... The style is George Saunders meets Ottessa Moshfegh, filtered through – at a rough guess – 4chan, mumblecore and 18th-century marriage manuals ... Every few pages, a sucker-punch line like that bares the teeth behind the book’s smile, and to even call it a comedy ends up feeling a kind of weird category error that doesn’t get near Kemp’s full-spectrum effect. How she follows this is anyone’s guess.
Nearly every page in Sophie Kemp’s debut is smart, jarring and wickedly funny ... Wild, absurdist ... Kemp’s language is profane and outrageously camp, blending punk-infused chutzpah, feminist irony, meme-worthy disclosures and mic drops with sick, unsettling humour ... If there’s anything that Kemp seems to ask of the reader, it is to loosen up and have fun. I did, and I adored this novel: it’s a clever and wholly original skewering of the modern dating landscape, our obsession with true love, and the outlandish lengths we’ll go to in its pursuit.
There are troubles...but it is finally a triumph ... Comical ... The novel is vivid, and it is definitely someone else’s life, so its picture of what’s real is different from ours, though just as convincing.
Paradise Logic’s project tends to come into focus only when Reality is actively having sex with Ariel ... Any will to truth Paradise Logic might have possessed dissipates into nihilist absurdity that is unconvincingly tethered to the rest of the novel ... The book outright refuses to stick the landing, collapsing its insights into a dated and unfunny millennialism. ... A superficial exercise in aesthetic infelicity that refuses narrative accountability, inundating readers with doodles and the plodding narration of a singularly unlikeable protagonist to no real end ... If it invited more serious contemplation, I would wonder whether saddling a low-IQ protagonist like Reality with the Truth of Gender Experience, reducing it to a hazy thesis about the existential impossibility of fulfilling straight relationships, and then abandoning the entire project so lazily was outright hostile to female readers like myself, if not womankind writ large.
Very aware of itself and its core audience who likely are all in on the joke ... Many have described the novel as funny, but I guess it depends on how much madness you can take or how old you are ... The story becomes increasingly detached from reality but that seems to be the point. Whether you’ll accept the joke enough to read 240 pages, is up to you to decide. You know who you are, girlfriend.
The novel has some genuinely funny moments, but even fans of social satire may find Reality’s shtick tiresome, and for some readers, being expected to care about the fate of a charmless and irredeemably self-absorbed character may be a Brooklyn Bridge too far. Bawdy, occasionally hilarious, and an acquired taste for sure.
Energetic ... The plot is a bit thin, but the inventive conceit yields plenty of humor and incisive commentary. This funhouse portrait of the Brooklyn dating scene feels all too real.
