While it’s probably not essential to have read the older novel in order to understand this new one, it frankly would be foolish not to read everything that McBride has written ... The quicksilver slickness that characterizes McBride’s best prose is disrupted by the novel’s continuous time jumps, but The City still conclusively demonstrates why she is one of the most thrilling contemporary English-language writers ... By the stratospheric standards of her prior novels, however, The City does stumble in a few ways that feel entangled with the author’s recent foray into film.
Overwrought but arresting, the drama relies upon the immediacy of Ms. McBride’s prose, in which fractious, vibratory sentences communicate the shorthand of Eily’s agitated thoughts ... You submit to the soap opera of the story for the sensitivity of the style, which, like an emotional seismograph, registers every nuance of fondness and fear.
Extraordinary and exhilarating ... McBride’s genius is to create a work whose innovation allows the reader to experience the sensation of feeling and thinking, instead of observing thoughts and feelings described. The sentences do not show themselves off ... There is nobody alive writing sex like this. McBride is able to capture the often indistinguishable line between agony and pleasure, the way one can be known totally and known not at all from one moment to the next.
The novel’s drama lies ultimately in the dance of Eily’s thoughts as she decodes Stephen’s words ... The novel is most alive in that humanly messy tangle of almost unaccountable selfishness and anger ... You sense that in revisiting The Lesser Bohemians she’s continuing a project that’s far from done, and this reader, at least, would be glad if she decides the life of Eily is the place to be.
This felt like an indulgent novel for Eimear McBride to write. I don’t know that more needed to be said about these characters, but I relished in it all the same. I relished her language, and the way that London looms as a character of its own, seeming to serve as a reminder that many have weathered scars in its walls.
McBride is remarkable in her forensic ability to chart the infinitesimal shifts in mood and speech that capture the emotional confusion of her characters and their shaky, tentative moves towards provisional forms of understanding ... Ingenious ... The perfectly judged detailing of tiny, subterranean shifts in tone and perspective in the writing means that the reader’s focus is never allowed to slacken as she unpicks layer upon layer of emotion and recollection ... A singular achievement.
The whole movement of the book is pitched towards this confession, as if there were redemption in the truth. But there is something disturbingly one-sided about Eilis’s interrogation of Stephen, given how little she reveals of her own past or motivations ... These imbalances are part of the subtle tensions that make the book work, helping to move the needle of sympathy from Eilis towards Stephen. At the start their relationship seems doomed because of him; towards the end it seems doomed because of her ... It is, then, somewhat surprising when the novel ends on an upbeat note ... The risk to Eimear McBride as a novelist. How much repetition can a reader bear? One book’s worth, perhaps, but did we need a sequel?
McBride does extraordinary things with language ... It’s a complex structure, skilfully controlled ... An inventive framework, then, but McBride’s originality is most striking in the way she handles words ... McBride, ignoring linguistic convention to bring us up close to her character, allows us the illusion that that privacy can be breached.
Romantic and startling ... McBride’s incomparable writing style—rhythmic, muscular, spare, and altogether undefinable—makes discovering her prose at any time a gift, and readers could start here and go back, too.
