Superb, incendiary ... There are numerous ways to characterize this superb novel. It’s a bildungsroman that explores the dynamics of power, ambition, and sexuality with the pulse and complexity of an intricate thriller, in exquisite prose. Each sentence is diamond cut ... Buntin has outdone herself ... leases and provokes from every vantage point, but what is especially remarkable is Buntin’s audacity, her gutsy choices, and her clarity. She’s pumping her fist in the air, and we can hear her roar.
'What I’m trying to say is I understood what I was allowing to happen,' Wilhelmina Miles narrates in Julie Buntin’s second novel, Famous Men, moments before she follows the much older Nathaniel Fellow up to his apartment. In other words: It’s more complicated than it looks ... Is it ever, though? Reading Buntin’s magnificent, absorbing portrait of the ensuing, yearslong relationship between this 'great American writer' and his naïve, debt-laden employee feels like holding one of those lenticular 3-D baseball cards in your hand. From one angle the narrative invites murky, shades-of-gray interpretations of victimhood and consent, shame and ambition; but tilt the book a few degrees and the image of this age-chasm relationship is as black-and-white as they come ... The beauty in this novel is in how Buntin tells it ... This is a wickedly precise rendering of a young, self-destructive heroine worshiping at the altar of a false idol — and narrated in hindsight, from her later, more perspicacious vantage.
Is there a story writers love to tell more than the one about how we became ourselves? ... Julie Buntin’s sophomore novel, Famous Men, is an audacious entry into this canon ... It is a testament to Buntin’s skill that despite these familiar hallmarks, the dynamic between Will and Nathaniel feels original and consistently electric ... Famous Men sets up, and then subverts, our expectations of the artistic coming-of-age narrative.
