Magnificent ... Row has no end of material ... The reading experience never flags, though I could’ve done with a bit less background ... The traumas of The New Earth repeatedly prompt intrusions concerning long prose narratives themselves: bold forays into metafiction. Such writing has become unfashionable, regarded as a withered branch of Postmodernism, but when Row brings up his art form, he enhances the drama ... The Wilcoxes suffer as many contemporary crises as the Lamberts of Jonathan Franzen, but they prove both more engaged and more moving. The panorama that comes to life around them feels like a masterpiece for our fractured time.
A rich, rollicking novel about a dysfunctional Jewish clan from the Upper West Side and the 2003 West Bank tragedy that derailed them. He has long been drawn to the subject of identity in his work — his earlier fiction and essays interrogate race and ethnicity in often pious, almost hectoring terms — but here he gracefully balances multiple registers to craft a reader’s delight ... Follows the template of Jonathan Franzen’s social-novels-cum-family-sagas...sprinkled (it must be said) with Woody Allen’s twitchy comedy. Row’s up to splendid mischief ... The New Earth isn’t mere satire; Row retains a deep affection for his cast, arguably more than they deserve. He breathes wondrous life into them. Their neuroses — so many neuroses — click into place ... Row runs the risk of piling up too many teetering Big Themes, but the narrative’s assured flow mostly buoys him (and us). He boldly targets intractable issues.
It's a stunning book, a high-wire balancing act that tries to do a lot — and succeeds ... There are many moving parts in The New Earth, and it's to Row's immense credit that it's not difficult to keep up with him. He does, helpfully, provide a timeline at the end of the novel, which switches from the past to the present fitfully ... In the hands of a less skilled writer, this could be a recipe for disaster. But Row weaves all the threads together masterfully; sections flow into one another in a way that's seamless. The switches in perspective and prose style are never jarring except when they need to be, and Row's use of language is surprising, at times, and unfailingly beautiful ... The New Earth isn't an easy book to write about — it's elusive by design. What is this novel, that talks to and about itself, that asks unanswerable questions? The closest answer might be: It's a modern epic that takes an unsparing look at family and national dynamics that nobody really wants to confront. It's ambitious and magnificent, the rare swing for the fences that actually connects.
Even the staunchest Russian novelist might be hard pressed to match the particular gift for dysfunction that the Wilcoxes, subjects of Jess Row’s sprawling metafiction The New Earth, display with such impressive esprit de corps across nearly 600 dense and often wildly discursive pages ... It’s all richly imagined, reflexively neurotic and frequently quite dazzling. It’s also more than a single book, even one guided by a keen and careful hand, can adequately contain ... Row seems to go almost subcutaneous in his examination of the damage that the nuclear unit of spouses and siblings, parents and offspring can do ... The New Earth quickly becomes a sort of panopticon of interconnected story lines, hopscotching through time and geography ... The music here is very much turned up, a symphonic chorus that can be undeniably stimulating but also wearing ... This is a book of warty, messy things, intractable and strange — but stumbling, maybe, toward a state of grace.
The novel weaves between these events, a reconstruction of Bering’s story, and the family’s deeper history. Along the way there is much talk, hyperliterate in its references but often bluntly cruel in its motivations, performing the language of self-awareness without displaying much of it ... This is the novel’s central political and philosophical dilemma: It’s the story of the well-to-do who possess enough of a conscience (or enough neurosis, depending on one’s perspective) to doubt their right to their own suffering ... The most powerful section of the novel comes midway, when these stories are paused as a range of characters recount the events leading to and directly after Bering’s death.
Stupendously good ... Each character’s story is a fascinating portal into contemporary life, adding up to a deeply moving, wonderfully engaging, and truly remarkable novel of the times.
To reel off...plot details, however, is to give a poor impression of Row’s deeply ambitious, genre-defying work, which hops back and forth in time, shifts between various points of view, and incorporates a massive amount of politics and theory on race, Zen Buddhism, climate change, the history of Israel and Palestine, and, among other things, the novel itself as a literary form. This is not a novel to be devoured in one gulp ... If the books seems overstuffed to the point of being overdetermined—one storyline involves the Zapatista uprising, for example—it’s a testament to Row’s talent to say that, somehow, he manages to tie it all together. A deeply ambitious saga that takes on many of the thorniest questions of 21st-century American life.
