... quietly wonderful ... Like her unforgettable main character, Ms. Savage addresses these moral dilemmas with no judgment whatsoever, but rather a kind of awe at her own temerity in even thinking about them ... will likely make you cry, as well, but this is a rare novel in which such responses feel clean and ennobling, free from manipulation. It is a book written for the better angels of our nature.
... poetic yet prosaic ... Savage follows the opposite arcs of these women with such kindness (that’s the only word for it), even the most difficult moments of the story feel buffered by grace. Savage was a professional caregiver for 10 years before she became a writer. Reading this slim, elegant book, one has the sense that she has carried the most important skills from that job into her new line of work.
What Savage has created is extremely rare in the pages of contemporary fiction: a millennial woman narrator whose mind is not broken ... Page after page, we simply sit with Ella as she sits with Jill. And yet the book is never dull, because Savage continually draws and redraws her heroine’s emotional attachments like an ever-evolving diagram ... surgically well-expressed ... In writing the character of Ella, Savage offers us a political argument: that women who labor in the home and principally care for others can grow in intellectual value because of, not in spite of, their occupations ... Savage creates new configurations of women’s self-love, based on human connection. One of those women may be damaged by brain injury and unable to speak, but there is still enough care to keep the flame alive.
... deeply felt but unsentimental ... Savage herself spent almost a decade working as a caregiver, and her insight into this fraught and intimate profession comes through on every page in incisive and beautiful language. The third-person narration is intensely reflective and psychologically revelatory ... in this deceptively simple book, the reader, too, receives an honest and empathetic opportunity to consider loneliness and the people whose labor gets bought to alleviate it.
... Say, Say, Say is a painful book to read. But while it certainly focuses on painful matters, it is intellectually and emotionally gripping because it exposes new facets of the experience to the light. It is also inspiring because it takes readers to a place where they can empathize with Jill ... [Savage's] novel is driven by her characterization of this meditative central character. Jill, too, is beautifully drawn ... The novel is full of incidents, too ... These incidents aren’t shaped into a conventional unfolding plot but form a kind of river of episodes and commentary that carries readers forward on a flow of vivid and entrancing prose. Say, Say, Say is a truly memorable novel: Unusual in its topic, perceptive in its commentary and edifying in its humanity.
Since not a great deal happens in Say Say Say the narrator has ample space to explore her thoughts and to experiment with turning them into words. The novel’s great achievement in this process is its honesty. Before becoming a writer, Savage worked for nearly a decade as a carer, so her portrayal of the role feels valuable and real; and despite the obviously autobiographical basis for her fiction, Savage never sanitises Ella’s thinking ... Savage’s willingness to delve into such earnest self-examination has already earned some glittering reviews in the US ... But this exercise comes at a cost to characterisation and prose. The small cast around Ella is shown only through the lens of her introspection: Bryn barely exists except as an object of Ella’s interest, and Jill’s inner life — remarkably, for a story told by her caregiver — is effectively ignored. Instead, Savage focuses her efforts on the pursuit of verbal flair. The writing is heavy with adjectives, and its favoured mode is the compound sentence, with phrases stacked on top of each other in the hope of adding layers of meaning or of creating more lyrical prose. All too often these flourishes bring little but rhythm to the sentence ... So the title is an unfortunate reflection of the style: prose that always wants to say, say, say, in triplicate, without sometimes saying very much at all.
... wise and understated ... This is an intensely serious and careful book, which grapples with an unfashionable subject, the drive to be a good person, while wittily weighing up human fallibility ... beautifully conjures the bounds of the self and the mind’s efforts to overcome them, the way our ambitions and limitations are in constant dialogue. Throughout Jill’s deterioration – predictable, inevitable, unbearable – it cherishes the rhythms of everyday life and the slow comforts of shared endurance, even in the midst of chaos and extremity ... The novel is particularly interesting about sexual politics and the romantic self ... asks difficult questions, of society and of the self. There are no easy answers, but in the novel’s quietly radical choice of subject matter and its open-eyed, open-hearted curiosity, it illuminates both the intimate dramas usually hidden behind closed doors and the shifting mysteries of personality and relationship.
Savage, who has worked as a carer, knows the world of which she speaks.
However, her novel is overwritten, despite containing almost no plot and even less dialogue. Instead, she tells us a lot about how Ella feels, but without ever giving her a persuasive inner life. Savage strains to explore what it means to be kind, an admirable gesture in a novel — but the whole thing feels effortful, dutiful and, I’m afraid, dull.
Savage’s debut unfolds in dense, descriptive paragraphs that are mostly transcriptions of first-person narrator Ella’s thoughts. This level of intimacy can get bogged-down in the details; action and conversation occur largely off-page, and tensions are as much obscured as revealed. Still, Savage explores interesting territory, in particular, commitment, aging and caretaking, and gender’s influence on all of it.
This is potentially fruitful territory, but whether or not this novel works depends very much upon how one feels about its protagonist ... here isn't a lot of dialogue in this novel, nor is there much in the way of action. What there are, mostly, are third-person descriptions of what’s going on inside Ella’s head as she cares for Jill, gets to know Bryn, and watches the pair interact. Ella has a number of revelations about love and life. Mostly, she thinks about herself. This is true of most people, probably, but it doesn’t make for much of a story unless you find Ella as fascinating as her author does. The most interesting aspect of this novel is the weird relationship between the protagonist and the narrator ... A tedious first novel that might have been a rich short story.
