Ten pages in, I was emailing everyone I could about the book. It felt electric and urgent, as if Bessette should have long been in my canon, with Ingeborg Bachmann or Elizabeth Hardwick, Lynne Tillman and Annie Ernaux ... Darkly funny .... Beautiful, brutal ... Stark ... Shocking ... Bessette defies novelistic time ... Lili’s simultaneity feels to me closer to the truth, or closer to the world we inhabit now ... Writing cannot contain the pain of life, so Bessette breaks the sentence, shatters it, and finds a new language ... In [Basette], I find the form to fit our ongoing present.
Scintillating ... Surprising and dramatic, though what keeps this novel running is not the plot but Bessette’s remarkable prose....propelling the action without losing sight of the characters’ intense emotions. Briggs’s ear is highly trained to Bessette’s singular register, making this rediscovery all the more noteworthy.
