Putting Rand in the title of one’s satirical novel feels like a dare, or at least — in a hyper-polarized time — a provocation. The good news is Freiman has written one of the funniest and unruliest novels in ages. It shakes you by the shoulders until you laugh, vomit or both ... Freiman scratches at the difference between knowing and knowingness, and how our blind spots can subsume our personality ... Rife with dissatisfactions — to its credit — and with self-aware jokes and serious questions about self-awareness. Also: serious questions about jokes ... Ultimately, though, the author torques her contrarianism past trolling, past knee-jerk philosophizing and past satire, alchemizing a critique of literary culture in all its ideological waywardness.
Angular, careening ... Freiman’s singularly funny 2018 debut, Inappropriation, dealt in similar ideas: our humorless century, the allure of cult logic, the quest for a credo. Fans of that book will miss its strange, particular tenderness — here instead is a furious, jagged and radiant reckoning with the dangers of the manifesto, the mortifications of aging, the mercies and limitations of the comic posture, the job of the novelist and the indiscriminate desecration it demands.
Freiman has the qualities of a great comic writer: She’s deeply skeptical, sparing no one, including herself; she doesn’t ruminate at the expense of good timing; and most of all, she understands that the spirit of comedy, like the spirit of art, is risk, that a joke is a leap and that an uncertain landing is what makes it pleasurable, rousing, even deep ... Unlike Rand, Freiman’s novel, especially its second half, is interested in psychology; in the sometimes fun, sometimes frightening negotiation of power that can play out in subtle ways between strangers; and in the ways an individual is shaped by her context. In the end, her jokes land — because she takes these risks.
The novel is smart enough to know where the line is. Anna’s lacerating sense of humor is in no small part an evasive maneuver against abyssal despair. She is achingly lonely and—her skepticism of trauma discourse notwithstanding—her whole life has been defined by grief ... A story about downward class mobility. Beneath its comic surface, and for all its gleeful sleaze, it’s about the shrinking of horizons and the foreclosure of dreams, the endemic tragedies of failing democracies and middle age ... If you want to hear the case against this novel, against this whole mode of satiric writing, here it goes: The Book of Ayn can get aggressively glib. It’s quick to settle for the sleazy and/or scatological laugh.
Ha[s] a...subversive intent: to trouble the distinction between Randians and everyone else ... Mock their characters, but they also argue that egoism can be nourishing and even generative ... Maybe Rand is just a set of training wheels, or a trellis on which characters can temporarily support their unfurling selves.
Rollicking satire ... Not a novel that satirizes the Annas and Ayns of the world in order to sketch out a more compelling left-wing vision ... Freiman smartly sidesteps politics and polemics ... Both more and less transgressive than its title makes it seem; Anna’s provocative posturing serves as armor against pain.
Freiman’s satirical novel explores the existential search for meaning with hilarity and absurdity. At the heart of the book is a tender empathy for Anna and others like her who are so focused on finding a greater purpose that they miss where they are in the present.
Acerbic and affecting ... There’s also depth to Anne, who wants to be a serious writer. Freiman’s portrait of a hapless artist is provocative and surprisingly moving.
