The Lesser Bohemians is every bit as stylistically resourceful as Girl, every bit as urgent and authentic. It is also more well-rounded, better ... As for the content, it is equally harrowing, but the pain is leavened by headiness and hope ... The Lesser Bohemians is a full-on sensory experience—and another superlative achievement.

What is most remarkable is McBride’s sensitivity to moment-to-moment shifts in feeling ... It is notoriously difficult to write about sex, and McBride does it better than almost any other contemporary novelist I’ve read ... the novel becomes a little baggy at this point [the second half] ... The Lesser Bohemians confirms McBride’s status as one of our major novelists.

For better or worse, this new novel is a more predictable beast, and occasionally we fall into a pop-song summary of events that lacks all the intensity and strange specificity that raised her first novel so far above ordinariness ... Balanced against such passages, however, are images that remind us of the fact McBride is one of the most exciting literary talents to emerge in the last few years ... McBride proves expert at capturing the headlong sense of power and powerlessness that a person experiences when falling in love for the first time ... This may not be Eimear McBride’s strongest book, but moments of highly specific, deeply felt experience remind us what she can do.

I like these early parts best, before the love story begins, when we get our moonish unpunctuated lady with an 'unflat stomach and vociferous wants' to ourselves. Her inner self, here inviolable and quiet and whole as a pebble, somehow loses its contours when she falls in love ... I'm being horrible and unfair — Stephen grows into a compelling character — probably for the same reasons I'm mean to my friends' new boyfriends: They take something private and whole away. In this case, I miss Eily's solitary eye, her solid self ... The Lesser Bohemians is a love story, yes, but it is really an electric and beautiful account of how the walls of self shift and buckle and are rebuilt.

One of McBride’s strengths as a writer is that she doesn’t fill in just for the sake of it. The Twitter-style brevity of her sentences — with none of the Twitter-style banality — ensures that it’s the reader who’s filling in the gaps, not of story or intent but of language ... there’s an openness, an inclusivity, a distinct lack of God-almightyness, that makes reading her such a pleasure ... The run-ons of speech characteristic of her style can be overused. Not breaking up the conversational dialogue leaves the reader with pages of dense text and no coming up for air ... It was begun before Girl was published and together they make a soundscape. Reading them back to back is an encounter with a writer for whom language is an end not a means, a beginning not an end.

Happily, her stunning second novel shows that [McBride] has not only acquired fresh surfaces to work on, she has also developed exciting new brush strokes ... McBride’s prose sings, whether describing the erotic ('I halfly dress'), or the alcoholic ('enslithered by pints,' 'drinks and draggeldy home') ... The Lesser Bohemians recalls Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller. Ultimately, though, it is a fiercely original work, an extraordinary novel crafted by a fearless modern writer.

Not often does a novel so expertly seduce its readers into an alternate state of consciousness that it mimics an actual dream state ... The Lesser Bohemians, in short, doesn’t ease readers in. Instead, it teaches us to understand and bend to its unusual cadences and the unpredictable rules of its tiny universe. It’s not a book you’ll want to repeatedly take up and put down, because the most satisfying moments spent with it come after you’re dozens of pages in, when you realize that instead of struggling against the current you’ve been caught up irresistibly in its powerful pull.

...the young woman and the older man is a trope if there ever was one, but Eimear McBride handles these people atypically, gracefully, and she addresses each and every possible cliché within the characters’ thoughts and talks ... The emotional resonance that is in the act of identifying unnamed characters cannot be understated ... the way Eimear McBride writes makes what is a relatively simple story feel as weighty, important, and visceral as love stories are to us in life. Much like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which also has a simple plot when laid out as a sequence of events, McBride makes beauty and importance in everyday reality.

...the dialogue that dominates the prose of this book is sharp and entertaining ... About halfway through, the man begins a monologue that lasts for nearly a third of the book. This cathartic confession propels the relationship but derails the novel. Our narrator turns into his audience ... Unlike McBride’s first book, in which familiar subject matter was interpreted anew through the stuttering, circular form of the language, here McBride can’t quite escape the cliche. Her lyricism still scatters light across the page, and her fragmented style hammers you with immediacy, but the story falls prey to nostalgia and wishful thinking.

McBride's descriptions of sex, from Eily's perspective, are among the most remarkable passages in the novel ... So arresting is the language McBride gives to her female protagonists, it would be possible to feel aggrieved that so much of The Lesser Bohemians is dominated by a conventional narrative voice and prose ... If The Lesser Bohemians is the more affirming twin of McBride's first novel, its ultimate calm seems only to half-drown a disquieting past, or eruptive future.

The Lesser Bohemians not only follows in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing's footsteps, but in many ways takes up where it left off. Questions of consent and familial abuse, of female promiscuity and sexual identity are yet again unflinchingly interrogated ... there are countless traces of trauma to be found in The Lesser Bohemians — from parental death to psychological and physical abuse. However, unlike its predecessor, there is also plenty of joy, plenty of adventure and fun ... for the most part, the sex is very very good. There is sober sex and inebriated sex; there is tender sex and vicious sex; there is consensual sex and problematic sex and sex that treads a fine, blurred line. McBride’s skill in depicting each union and the underlying politics and machinations thereof is unparalleled, and for that alone, the novel can be deemed a triumph ... Undoubtedly, it is a novel that will divide readers, that will provoke a plethora of tenuous academic theories, that will raise more questions than it can possibly answer. But for its sheer vitality and dazzling linguistic flair, it is another significant achievement. And for all its flaws, inconsistencies, and puzzling difficulties, it is, in many ways, a perfect portrait of love.